Seriously, why not? At least we will get a laugh out of it before dumping it into the trash.
Dave at ActionScript.com looks into the new Flash MX2004 EULA and points out what he thinks are chinks in the Product Activation/EULA armor. Not sure if I agree with it entirely, but some points are quite valid...
Over the last few weeks, heavy discussions on the interactionarchitects Yahoo! Group has culminated in the formation of this new group, which is currently just a Working Group or Steering Committee. Challis Hodge, Rick Cecil, Jim Jarret and David Heller are taking the lead, and here's what Challis Hodge has to say:
So if you're interested, head over to the InteractionArchitects group...
Robert Scoble at Microsoft points out that xbox.com is using Flash...
Alistair McLeod at iteration::two made a post on FlashCoders announcing the intention to release AS2Unit, a framework for unit testing ActionScript 2.0. Here's the complete post...
We are pleased to announce that the development team at iteration::two have
developed AS2Unit, a testing framework for Actionscript 2, which will be
released as an open-source project to the Flash community when Flash MX 2004
is released.
What is AS2Unit?
----------------
Based on the xUnit framework, AS2Unit allows Actionscript 2 developers to to
create and run repeatable tests. Developers can test their Actionscript 2
classes independently of their on-stage components.
AS2Unit promotes test-first design, improving the maintainability of your
Actionscript 2 classes. As tests and test suites are added to your system,
you will build up a set of regression tests for your application, allowing
you to remove the fear of refactoring your code. New features can be added
to your system in confidence that your tests will catch any changes that
conflict with your existing logic.
Your Actionscript 2 classes can be tested independently of your creative
design, allowing multiple concurrent threads of development. This results in
drastically reduced levels of problems arising during the integration of
your system components.
AS2Unit works in harmony with your source control software to allow
continuous integration of your codebase. Multiple developers can develop and
maintain the the same codebase, confident that the test suite will identify
any conflicts.
AS2Unit allows the creation of tests, test suites and provides setUp and
tearDown functionality to create and tidy up data for your tests. It also
provides a full framework, to allow developers to add their own additions to
the package.
The source of AS2Unit provides good examples of many of the new features
available in Actionscript 2, as it is a full Object Oriented implementation,
using class hierarchies and interfaces. It also uses other new features of
Actionscript 2 such as packages, strict typing and exception handling.
What AS2Unit Is Not
-------------------
AS2Unit does not help in the testing of any timeline Actionscript code, nor
in the testing of any on-stage features. AS2Unit is designed for testing
Actionscript 2 classes only.
What Next?
----------
A website will be created to allow you to download the framework, once
released. The site will also contains links to unit testing documentation
and articles. The URL will be www.as2unit.org. AS2Unit will be covered under
an open-source licence and we will create a project on SourceForge.
The team at iteration::two will be writing some columns detailing the
challenges that arose in the development of AS2Unit using Actionscript 2, as
well as articles on the use of AS2Unit, and Object Oriented development
using Actionscript 2.
The initial release is complete and ready to go live as soon as Flash MX
2004 hits the shelves, and we'll welcome contributions to the codebase from
the development community from that point onwards. If there are any features
your would particularly like to see added to AS2Unit prior to its release,
please feel to contact us.
Best regards,
Alistair McLeod
iteration::two
NY Times profiles Matt and Mike Chapman who run the site homestarrunner.com...
Quite a cool site that goes to show that Flash Animation pays...
;)
Finally the indiachi blog is up. For now there are 10 contributers, including Ananthraman Mani, Anshuman Singh, Apala Chavan, Bhavin Turakhia, Manu Sharma, Navin Pangti, Navneet Nair (me ;) ), Saurabh Wadhwa, Shilpa Suresh and Vikram Chauhan...
Keep an eye out for this one...
CHris MacGregor of Flazoom has an interesting analysis of the new menus on Macromedia.com.
I thought they were different, however Marc Canter seems to imply that they are the same...
I always knew this day was not far away. Mitch Kapor was contacted by a WELL KNOW TECH PR FIRM asking if a VP from a WELL KNOWN VALLEY FIRM could make a guest post on the blog...
Is it just a cheeky request or are PR companies taking blogging seriously? Getting noticed on a high-profile blog will not only bring you traffic and credibility, but it will also boost your Google PageRank.
And as of now, it costs next to nothing...
Actually it also goes to show how clueless most corporates are about the intricacies of blogging. The VP could actually start a company blog and trackback to Mitch's blog or simply post intelligent comments. Either way, the results might be the same, maybe not as effective initially as a guest post, but then again PR was never meant to be an easy job...
Alison J. Head has a very nice article on personas. If you're not familiar with using user personas in interface design, check here for some more links...
[via viswanath gondi]
MX 2004 has some real cool features for programmers the biggest one being of course ActionScript 2.0.
Moock is rejoicing that the evil 'prototype' is dead. And of course a lot of programmers are happy that ActionScript just got a wee bit more stricter...
I remember how Flash 4 was a big leap over Flash 3. Ditto Flash 5. And the MX. Now MX 2004. ActionScript and Flash Scripting has been becoming more and more sophisticated over a period of time. So does this mark the end of the road of people like me who started out early with Flash (I did with Flash 1) and then progressed as Flash moved on?
I can't yet call myself a programmer.
I learnt Flash 4 scripting by looking at Lingo. Then I learnt OOP by using Flash 5 and believe it or not I also learnt JavaScript because of Flash. Event based programming became part of my life thanks to Flash MX. But now?
Is it time for the non-programmer type to give up and adopt the simpler version? I think not. I'm going to buy MX 2004 Pro. I've been upgrading myself all these years, looks like I can do with another...
;)
Lots happening on Macromedia.com, there was a sneak peek presentation which I missed as I was in a meeting...
But the site is updated already and loads of goodies for you to check out, and even pre-order...
Freshmeat reviews seven spam filters and compares them for Precision, Recall, False Positives, False Negatives and Correct Classifications. The filters compared are:
It misses out on popfile though...
[via Slashdot]
...and more such interesting stuff is up on Raymond Chen's blog
[via Joel on software]
A very funny list of blogging terms, my favorites include:
I reckon there is more to come...
PS: I reckon, you really have to be a geek to get some of these...
IBM has a page that gives extensive guidelines for planning, designing, producing and maintaining websites. Very useful if you're developing websites, or web applications. I'm in the process of defining some guidelines for my firm too, so these would defintely be useful.
Also the IBM Ease of Use page is a good read for everybody interested in the topic...
Winsupersite has more screen shots of the next version of the windows operating system... The UI looks quite cool here... Similar to the Central Interface? I don't know...
[via Viswanath Gondi]
I mean the SoBig F. I lost count after deleting 20, I've been deleting one every 30 minutes or so...
Of course, that is what Central is all about, but one thing that make HTML attactive is the easy availability of OS controls (on Windows, Mac and Linux) this is really important for ease of development. Zeepe seems to do this on windows, wonder if it could be made cross-OS
SOA (service-oriented architecture) has become a buzzword of late. Although the concepts behind SOA have been around for over a decade now, SOA has gained extreme popularity of late due to web services. In this article Sayad Hashimi gets you started with SOA...
HP announced a new range of Digital Imaging Products and this scanner happens to be one of them:
The other notables include a 5 Mega Pixel Camera and a Photo Printer...
John Wehr of the XMLq and Full Browser Layout fame has some nice pictures of the New York Blackout on his site...
This one in particular seems like it's out of Life Magazine...
[via Boing Boing]
Claus has been working hard on Deng and his latest attempt looks amazing. It's the Googel homepage interface, with the search functioning. That is not Google BTW, it's Googel...
;)
Brajeshwar is stirring things up... Should a great way for Bombay based Flashers to exchange knowledge...
Scott Berkun look at the myth behind discoverability. According to him, a prioritization of how to think about the relative importance of tasks and features is based upon:
1. Things most people do, most often.
2. Things most people do, somewhat often.
3. Things some people do, most often.
4. Things some people do, somewhat often.
5. Things few people do, most often.
6. Things few people do, somewhat often.
Another thing that Scott misses out in this list is to find out how many users will perform the task. This is very important of your application supports multiple roles. In that case each of the above questions have to be factored by the number of users using the feature. And if the ultimate prioritization can be done when the feature is used by your primary persona or role...
[via Emergic]
Robert Cringely looks into the whole India thingy and suggests that IT departments should go with Apple servers instead to improve productivity...
I think you should seriously be considering the product we are building...
[via Slashdot]
It's I-day here in India. Wishing all Indians a safe and happy I-day...
Viswanath Gondi a recent graduate from MDes Digital Media program at Harvard Design School, has a neat blog. Talks a lot about UI, RIAs and Flash...
Sim D'Hertefelt, the site owner, just made a post on a mailing list:
InteractionArchitect.com was launched in 1999 and has become a well-known and respected website and brand name in the domain of usability and interaction design.
What you get:
- The domain name InteractionArchitect.com
- The design of the website, including source files that allow you to modify the site's design: Macromedia Dreamweaver template, Adobe Photoshop files
What you don't get:
- The content (e.g. articles)
What I (hope to) get:
- A year's salary that will pay for a long desired sabbatical to study and write
Any takers? Mail him at: sim.dhertefelt@soc.kuleuven.ac.be
Ever wanted a font, real bad, but did not know what it was called? WhatTheFont comes to the rescue. Just upload the image, and the font recognition system will identify the font for you. Automagically...
Cool!
Joey Lott, author of ActionScript Cookbook, has this nice tutorial up on the O'Reilly site...
At least, that's what I can tell from this post...
Excerpt:
[via Emergic]
I'm reading High Stakes, No Prisoners by Charles Ferguson which is the story of Frontpage, how the startup came up and then was finally acquired by big bad MS.
Ferguson stresses on the importance of getting patents and stressed that one of the reasons they made an attractive acquisition was because of the number of patents they held. Going through VentureBlog it sems VCs treat patents as a necessary evil. "Get them because everyone else is getting them, but hope you never have to use them..."
I'm not sure what effect such patents would have on Flash development. Imagine if Brandon had patented his ACK engine and such. I think having a certain amount of technology out in the open is necessary for innovation. Patenting just stiffles it...
Yahoo news mentions this and Slashdot recently picked this up.
One of reasons is that IBM is promoting Linux pre-install machines heavily here. And they are pushing Linux versions over Windows versions. And corporates seem to be going for it. Another interesting company doing stuff with Linux in India is Netcore. This is run by Rajesh Jain and are into affordable Linux clusters for SMEs...
Looks like Google's PageRank is acting unstable. I could have sworn that my site had been bumped up to 6/10 but now it looks like it is back to 5/10. That is in less than a few hours...
Scoble looks at the rate at which .NET user groups have been growing in India and is pretty certain that it is on it's way to becoming an IT superpower...
I'm not too sure if Flash groups are finding the same kind of response, though. I remember Brajeshwar asking me sometime back about starting one, but then I reckon the interest just died out (or maybe I was not kept in the loop...)
We do need to do something about that...
Splitpeasoup explains the meaning of the song "Brim Full of Asha" (by Cornershop) on Kuro5shin...
If you've heard the song and couldn't relate to the lyrics, you'll find this an interesting read...
Early this year I had a layover at Amsterdam and noticed these interesting urinals at the Amsterdam Airport. Maddog looks at the design rationale behind these urinals. Interesting...
Dan Gillmor just got a note from Mocrosoft's PR and here's what it says...
Some interesting thoughs on why WordML might come up as a web standard one of these days...
Quite valid, when you come to think of it, all you need it do develop an easy to use Macro for word and you even can easily use it to publish .doc files to you blog or website.
In fact MS has pretty much provided XML for almost all Office apps including MS Project. This is probably the first time that MS has been so open about their delivery format (sort of). Would be interesting to see how this develops.
Christina Wodtke at elegantHack takes a look at this Amazon Widget, which has a clumsy interaction design. Seems Amazon is still testing it. I don't know how expensive (or inexpensive) it is to actually test designs on a live site. Macromedia did it sometime back with their new site design and Amazon apparently uses quantitative techniques to do their testing. Is this the right way to go about it? Because it seems some of the mistakes in these designs could have been caught much more easily in a lab. Maybe usability labs actually cost more than putting the site on live and then getting feedback...
Tim Bray talks about his experience about building a Flash based application and then dumping it for a DHTML version...
Clearly Tim talks about Flash here as mostly 'Eye-Candy'. That certainly shouldn't be the primary reason for you to go for Flash as an option for your interface. The other reasons why they went for flash like animation and xml support were quite valid. Though I'm not a big fan of using animation and morphing in applications. People get tired of it very soon...
A search on Google for the term Interaction Architect used to bring about three Interaction Designers. First there was Sim D'Hertefelt then there was me and Tess Lispi...
Now with this article by Tog looks like there will be a lot more on that list...
Will you be one?
So this is the newest RSS aggregator on the blog (sorry block)
Bloglines is a web-based RSS aggregator that will aggregate rss feeds for you and you can read all the feed online on their site.
It even provides blogs with an 'add to bloglines button' that looks like this:
Interesting. But I prefer Info Aggregator which delivers the RSS feeds into Outlook (or any other email client) and also has an optional web access.
The AlwaysOn Network's interview of Vinod Khosla, Founder Sun Microsystems and a VC with KPCB:
Matthew Thomas shows you how to recognize a Weblog tool by its permalinks and goes on to suggest ways to make the permalink URI more usable. The truth is, if URIs were usable Google will be out of business...
Geoff Bowers didn't yet want to post the Fullasagoog stats page yet as stats for Aug are just coming in, but PeterJoel just couldn't wait to show off ;)
So the top three blogs with maximum click-through are:
enterFrame was 8th with an average of 36 Clicks
The top three blogs as per the number of posts are:
So that is not a bad click to post ratio. Thanks for visiting guys...
Here is a list of official Google parodies The list itself is in Flemish, I reckon, but just click on the links, the renditions are really funny...
As a follow up to their Foreign Policy article about India and China, Huang and Khanna have this follow-up interview with Harvard Business School. Makes an interesting read.
[via Emergic]
Just picked up this Slashdot thread about a rediff.com article about a new video compression software technology...
As expected, most of the discussion on Slashdot is veering towards what is more important, drinking water or technology? Well, the answer, though obvious, is not an easy one to answer. The people who are motivated to develop technology are not the same people who are going to deliver drinking water. If you ask them to do that first and then concentrate on the technology aspect, they'd rather just give up. Both aspects need to be considered, and most of the time it will be a different set of people doing the two. That does not make this effort less important by any means....
In search of stupidity: Over 20 Years of High-Tech Marketing Disasters is a new book by Merrill Chapman. The foreword for this book has been written by Joel Spolsky.
If the foreword is so good wonder how good the actual book might be...
I first came across this book while viewing Jeff Johnson's presentation on Stanford Online. If I can have just one book on HCI and UI design, without any hesitation, this would be it.
GUI Bloopers! Don'ts and Dos by Jeff Johnson, is as the title says a book of guidelines for Interface Designers and Programmers. If you've been working on developing UIs for application, you'll appreciate the loads of wonderful information that is contained in this book. The tips, or bloopers, have been divided into the following:
The only complaint I have is that the web section does not explore web application related bloopers. But since a lot of application UI related issues are covered in the rest of the topics, this is sort of made up for. I've recommended this book to all the designers who have worked with me, and have no hesitation in recommending it to you. Go, check it out on Amazon...
Those are the four Indian Languages that Google is currently available in.
Very interesting. Just about 25 more Indian Languages to go...