journal

The Other You, one of the sites I worked on earlier this year, is on the Cannes Lions Titanium shortlist!!! We’ll know later today whether or not it wins.  But being on the shortlist is incredible to say the least!  The Other You was an absolutely incredible project.  We used every technology in our arsenal to create this site; Papervision, After Effects rendering servers, text messaging, multiple Flex and html sites, myspace, facebook the works.  And the most incredible aspect of it all was that it was done in 3-4 weeks.  Alot of long nights, seriously, alot….that carried over into the next day…and night…for real….alot.

But it was soooo worth it.

Alright, adding “Flash Killer” to my blog titles is meant to be a joke.  Mainly because Adobe is so ahead in the game its not even funny.  But this thread makes me rethink how I should word my posts…. NAAAA Its still funny.

So Apple pulled a fast one on us at WWDC.  They had a small session on Cocoa for the Web in which they used a javascript MVC framework called SproutCore to create a thick client with bindings just like Cocoa.  I’ve been trying to get a look see as to what all the hoopla is but the SproutCore site is flooded.  Keep ya posted, in the meantime here’s a great article on it and here.

So Firefox is trying to break a Guinness World Record for the most downloads in one day, so go ahead and pledge and set our email up with them so they can send you a reminder!

http://www.spreadfirefox.com/en-US/worldrecord/

Full Feature List

• Animation
  1. Support for animating custom data points
  2. Object Animation support (animating structs)
• Deep Zoom
  1. New XML-based file format
  2. MultiScaleTileSource to wire up your own images and get the Deep Zoom experience
  3. Better notifications when sub-images enter the view
• Controls
  1. Customize the look and feel of controls using Visual State Manager. Interactive control templates were never so easy.
  2. Some base controls are now part of the core platform, rather than packaged into apps. Say hello to smaller app sizes.
  3. Calendar now supports multi-selection and blackout dates
  4. New TabControl
  5. Control properties changes (Background, Tooltip, FontFamily, FontSize…)
  6. DataGrid improvements: auto size, reorder, sort, performance and more
• TextBox
  1. IME Level 3 input support
  2. Text wrapping and multiline selection highlighting in textbox
  3. Scrolling and clipboard support
  4. Document level navigation keys
• Improvements in error handling, reporting
• Parser and Property system
  1. DependencyProperty.Register/RegisterAttached now supports PropertyMetadata
  2. New DependencyObject.ClearValue
  3. Visual tree helper
• Data-binding
  1. Per binding level validation
  2. Support for element syntax for binding markup extensions
  3. Binding to attached properties
  4. ItemsControl extensibility (OnItemsChanged method)
  5. Fallback in value conversion (Binding.UnsetValue)
• Input
  1. Support for limited keyboard input in Full Screen mode (arrow, tab, enter, home, end, pageup/pagedown, space). I’ve seen more than a few requests for this on the forums.
  2. Managed APIs for Inking and stylus input
• Networking and Data
  1. Cross Domain support in Sockets
  2. Cross Domain security enhancements
  3. HttpWebRequest and WebClient callable from background threads
  4. Upload support in WebClient
  5. Isolated Storage: default size increased to 1MB and new ability to change quota with user consent. Also a new management UI.
  6. Duplex communications (”push” from server to Silverlight client with no need to “poll” for data)
  7. LINQ -to- JSON serialization
  8. Significantly improved SOAP interop
  9. “Add New Item” template in Visual Studio for “Silverlight-enabled WCF Service”
  10. ADO.NET Data Services support
• UIAutomation and Accessibility support in the platform
• Media
  1. Platform support for Adaptive Streaming (also referred to by people as multi bitrate), the ability for Silverlight to switch between media depending on network and CPU conditions
  2. Content protection with PlayReady DRM and Windows DRM
  3. Basic server-side playlist (SSPL) support
• Localization
  1. Changes to localized application model. You now create one xap per locale, instead of one monolithic multilingual app
  2. Expanded localization languages of runtime and SDK
  3. Japanese SDK Installer and documentation (July 10)
• Several changes to make API and behavior more compatible with WPF
• Tools
  1. Beta 1 projects will be automatically ported to Beta 2
  2. Remote debugging for VB on the Mac
• CLR
  1. A new developer-oriented runtime package with debugging binaries, localized strings, docs etc.
  2. Support for OS fallback logic for resources
  3. CurrentCulture and CurrentUICulture isolation to AppDomain level
• DLR
  1. Performance improvements
  2. Various new DLR and IronPython 2.0 Beta 2 language features
  3. Various new IronRuby features

Check out Ted Patrick’s latest blog post with a bunch of screen shots of the new Thermo app.  It looks incredible.  And oddly enough its not built on Eclipse, looks more AIR to me.  Beautiful app though, hats off to UX.

http://www.onflex.org/ted/2008/06/thermo-screenshot-exclusive_856.php

So Adobe has launched there first suite of Office applications on the web at Acrobat.com.  It looks like they’re all free to use so you should go and try them out.  The list of apps is as follows…

Adobe Buzzword

Buzzword is the word processor from Adobe and sports a sleek and elegant design interface. Of course, Adobe uses Flash/Flex to prove the UI and interaction complete with a WYSISYG tool. Adobe have taken care that your Buzzword document whether on a large screen or small screen or on a printed page, what you see on the screen - fonts, letter spacing, colors, and graphics - are all reproduced perfectly.

Buzzword documents can be edited by multiple person at a time and it can be commented. There are tabs at the bottom that shows who has accessed the documents recently and it also indicates their status whether they are authors, reviewers, co-author or readers. There are pagination features too.

The timeline whose dots indicates different version of the document is an awesome tool that will simply glide smoothly from one version to the next. It is always accessible at the bottom of the screen.

Adobe Brio

Acrobat.com has Brio, which is a light version of Adobe Acrobat Connect. It lets up to three people have online meetings for free, with screen sharing, desktop video, voice conferencing, chat, white-boarding. You can add in a regular toll line for a fee.

Adobe Brio, unlike WebEx and GoTo, works flawlessly and beautifully on a Mac.

Adobe Share

Adobe Share allows you to share files with others. Just many other typical file sharing platform, Adobe Share allows you to share large files instead of emailing them. You have full control over your documents — approve the recipient list and their access to a particular document. The document previewer built into Acrobat.com also lets you launch and view PDF and image files right in your browser instead of having to launch the original application.

Acrobat 9

The big news for Acrobat 9 is the support for Flash. You can now create documents with embedded Flash movies, or developers can design entire new skins for electronic documents using Adobe’s Flex. PDF documents made with Acrobat 9 also support collaboration among multiple authors and reviewers over the Internet, making them connected documents.

The PDF portfolios in Acrobat 9 allow you to combine multiple file types — documents, audio, video, even 3D objects — and compress them into one PDF file.

For professional paid version of Acrobat, there are varying levels of features available in the Standard and Professional allowing for the ability to create, convert, track, and protect PDFs. However, all versions are enabled to work with Acrobat.com. Even with all the new feature additions, Acrobat 9 takes lot less time to launch than Acrobat 8.

Here’s an official press release regarding our move into Sapient.

Sapient Expands Its Interactive Practice With Strategic Group Hire

“We are thrilled to be adding this phenomenally talented and creative group of people to our Interactive team,” said Sapient Chief Creative Officer Gaston Legorburu.  “Client demand is accelerating the need to grow, but it’s absolutely essential that we do so with people who share our passion for revolutionizing the dialog between a brand and its consumers.  These are some of the most sought-after specialists in the industry—and by bringing them into Sapient, we are increasing our ability to continue to deliver rich interactive experiences for our clients.”

The group hire comprises primarily producers, art directors, Flash developers, sound designers and video editors from iChameleon, which is renowned for providing custom interactive development and execution for some of the largest and best recognized brands in the world.

About Sapient
Sapient, a global services firm, operates two groups—Sapient Interactive and Sapient Consulting—that help clients compete, evolve and grow in an increasingly complex marketplace.  Sapient Interactive provides brand and marketing strategy, award-winning creative work, web design and development and emerging media expertise.  Sapient Consulting provides business and IT strategy, process and systems design, package implementation and custom development, as well as outsourcing services such as testing, maintenance and support.

Sapient’s passion for client success—evidenced by its ability to foster collaboration, drive innovation and solve challenging problems—is the subject of case studies on leadership and organizational behavior used by MBA students at both Harvard and Yale.  Leading clients, including BP, Essent Energie, Hilton International, Janus, Sony Electronics and Verizon, rely on the company’s unique approach to drive growth and market momentum.  Headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Sapient operates across North America, Europe and India.  For more information, please visit www.sapient.com.

[source: Sapient PR, May 19, 2008]

This Technology Will Blow Your Mind.. - Celebrity bloopers here

Flash Player 10 beta, which you can check out here, has two new window modes (wmodes) on top of the three existing ones.  The tips below are extremely important regarding the new Flash Player if you’re deciding to use these new modes.

The three existing modes: 

normal: In this mode we are using plain bitmap drawing functions to get our rasterized images to the screen. On Windows that means using BitBlt to get the image to the screen on OSX we are using CopyBits or Quartz2D if the browser supports it.

transparent: This mode tries to do alpha blending on top of the HTML page, i.e. whatever is below the SWF will show through. The alpha blending is usually fairly expensive CPU resource wise so it is advised not to use this mode in normal cases. In Internet Explorer this code path does actually not going through BitBlt, it is using a DirectDraw context provided by the browser into which we composite the SWF.

opaque: Somewhat esoteric, but it is essentially like transparent, i.e. it is using DirectDraw in Internet Explorer. But instead of compositing the Flash Player just overwrites whatever is in the background. This mode behaves like normal on OSX and Linux.

The new modes:

direct: This mode tries to use the fastest path to screen, or direct path if you will. In most cases it will ignore whatever the browser would want to do to have things like overlapping HTML menus or such work. A typical use case for this mode is video playback. On Windows this mode is using DirectDraw or Direct3D on Vista, on OSX and Linux we are using OpenGL. Fidelity should not be affected when you use this mode.

gpu: This is fully fledged compositing (+some extras) using some functionality of the graphics card. Think of it being similar to what OSX and Vista do for their desktop managers, the content of windows (in flash language that means movie clips) is still rendered using software, but the result is composited using hardware. When possible we also scale video natively in the card. More and more parts of our software rasterizer might move to the GPU over the next few Flash Player versions, this is just a start. On Windows this mode uses Direct3D, on OSX and Linux we are using OpenGL.

What this means

1. Alright so just because the Flash Player is using the video card for rendering doesn’t mean its going to be faster.  Some people just don’t have robust video cards. So here are some tips you should follow.  Content has to be specifically designed to work well with GPU functionality. The software rasterizer in the Flash Player can optimize a lot of cases the GPU cannot optimize, you as the designer will have to be aware of what a GPU does and adapt your content accordingly. This is something you’ll just need to test thoroughly on multiple client machines and even then you may want to be cautious in how you use it.
2. The hardware requirements for the GPU mode are stiff. You will need at least a DirectX 9 class card. We essentially have the exact same hardware requirements as Windows Vista with Aero Glass enabled. Aero Glass uses exact same hardware functionality we do. So if Aero Glass does not work well on your machine the Flash Player will likely not be able to run well either in GPU mode (but to clarify, you do NOT need Aero Glass for the GPU mode to work in the Flash Player, I am merely talking about hardware requirements here).
3. Pixel fidelity is not guaranteed when you use the GPU mode. You have to expect that content will look different on different machines, even colors might not match perfectly, text and vector images may loose their crispness. This includes video. Future Flash Players will change the look of your content in this mode.
4. Frames rates will max out at the screen refresh rate. So whatever frame rate you set in your Flash movie is meaningless if it is higher than 60. This is the case for both the ‘direct’ and ‘gpu’ mode. In most cases you should end up at a frame rate of around 50-55 due to dropped frames which occur from time to time for various reasons.
5. Please do not blindly enable either new mode (gpu or direct) in your content. Creating a GPU based context in the browser is very expensive and will drain memory and CPU resources to the point where the browser will become unresponsive. It is usually best practice to limit yourself to one SWF per HTML page using these modes. The target should be content taking over most of the page and doing full frame changes like video. Never ever, ever enable this for banners. Plain Flex applications should not use these modes either if they are not doing full screen refreshes.
6. GPU functionality ties us together with the video card manufacturers and their drivers. Given that you can expect that a significant amount of customers will not be able to view your content if you enable this mode due to driver incompabilities, and various defects in the software stack.

Finally, this beta version of the Flash Player is not yet tuned for maximum performance in the gpu mode.  There is still development going on in terms of the gpu mode but the above tips should apply from here on out.

The ‘direct’ mode should never make your content slower, except in respect to point 4. It should either not change anything or lower CPU consumption somewhat with very large content, i.e. something larger than 1024×768 pixels.

These modes in general should be considered still in beta, there may be a lot of bugs until possibly Flash Player 11 so use caution.