journal

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.

What sucks is that I was building this and was possibly going to release it this weekend.  Then all of the sudden Google beats me to the punch.  Figures.  But of course they own the technology so better them than me.  http://code.google.com/apis/maps/documentation/flash/

bummer.

Well not exactly in Flex Builder but in Aptana.  If you download and install the latest release of Aptana, it features two panels that you can use with your Flex and Actionscript projects.  One is called the snippet panel which can provide you with code snippets.  One of the snippets I use frequently is ASdoc class header comments.  To test it out go to Window > Other Views > Aptana Standard Views and select Snippets.  Then in the root of your project folder add a directory called snippets.  Create a new regular file in there and name it Asdoc_class.as.  Its important to name your file with the actionscript extension.  If you’re making a snippet for html name it with the .html file extension.  Now open up the file and copy and paste this code in…

/*
 category: Actionscript
 name: Asdoc Class Header
 toolTip: Asdoc Class Header
 toolbar: true
 language: text/actionscript
 icon: com.aptana.ide.snippets/icons/wrap_js_function.png
 prompt(description): Description of the class
 prompt(author): Name of the author
 prompt(date): Date 
 
*/
 
/**
 * ${description}
 *
 * @langversion ActionScript 3
 *
 * @author ${author}
 * @since  ${date}
 */

Alright so you’ll notice that there is a custom comment at the top, the category assigns it to whatever category you want in the snippets panel. If you save the file you can look in the snippets panel and you’ll notice an Actionscript folder. The name, which we named “Asdoc class header” should be referenced in that Actionscript snippet folder. Language is of course whatever language you’re creating the snippet for. The tooltip, toolbar, and icon params I’m figuring are involved with getting it to display a button on the toolbar but I haven’t gotten that to work yet. If anyone can fill in here and help me out with that. And last but not least are the prompts. Each prompt has a parameter and a description. The parameter in the prompt function references the variable in the found in the actual code so when the prompt displays for the description, it gets filled out at the ${description} variable.

As far as ideas go, I’ve created one for getters and setters and for singleton code.

Now one thing to note. Snippets are fairly cool, but that’s all they do. Seriously that’s it. I even wanted to make the description field a little higher in the prompt but no go. But if you want to get really crazy I’d check out the scripts panel. Scripts are way more robust and you can even call snippets through a script, aka calling a snippet through a keyboard command. One of the scripts I created was a simple thing to open a new panel for actionscript help based on the keyword selection in your editor panel.

/*
 * Menu: Actionscript > Actionscript Help
 * Toolbar: Header
 * Key: M3+1
 * Kudos: Jody Brewster
 * OnLoad: main()
 * DOM: http://download.eclipse.org/technology/dash/update/org.eclipse.eclipsemonkey.lang.javascript
 */
function main() {
		var sourceEditor = editors.activeEditor;
 
        var range = sourceEditor.selectionRange;
        var deleteLength = range.endingOffset - range.startingOffset;
        var selection = sourceEditor.source.substring(range.startingOffset,range.endingOffset);
 
        webView = views.getView("AS3RefWebView");
        webView.showView(true);
        webView.setTitle("Actionscript Reference");
        webView.url = "http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&safe=off&rls=en-us&q=site%3Alivedocs.adobe.com%2Fflash%2F9.0%2FActionScriptLangRefV3%2F++" + selection + "&btnG=Search";
 
}

So there you go, some new little features that hopefully have opened up some possibilities to you. If you have any snippets or scripts, post a link to them in the comments field so we can all take a look.

Well its been awhile since I’ve seen a really great Silverlight demo.  But this is definitely an incredible demo that everyone has got to see that’s interested in the future of presentation technologies.  Just remember that this is a demo of Silverlight applied to the medical field and the top black bar is a guide to the different screens of each section of the system and there are three main sections of the system.

http://www.mscui.net/PatientJourneyDemonstrator/

I was checking out the new Opera browser and they’ve added some awesome web developer tools code named Dragonfly.  One of the main things I saw just from my quick run through is the javascript debugger is outstanding.  Probably one of the best I’ve seen built into a web browser.  They’re saying there is going to be alot more features coming, this is just an alpha release, so we’ll see in the coming months.  Here’s a snippet from Ajaxian…

Features

• Reach breaking point step by step: Opera Dragonfly’s fully featured JavaScript debugger makes building sophisticated Ajax applications easier than ever. Step through your code line by line, setting break points along the way. This allows you to make sure your application and scripts are acting as you designed them.
• Redefine your style: Its not just the DOM you can inspect. Check out what CSS rules apply to which element, and what rules are inherited or set by browser defaults. Overridden rules are highlighted so you can see what styles are or aren’t applied. Support for editing CSS rules will be added in an upcoming version.
• Spot your errors: An improved error console allows you to see, filter and log any errors in your scripts, pointing to the exact position the error occurred. Use this in combination with the other tools to hunt down and fix your site’s bugs.
• Debug the DOM: View source isn’t much use if you use DOM Scripting to alter the DOM. Opera Dragonfly allows you to inspect the updated DOM and all it’s properties. Support for editing the DOM will be added in an upcoming version.

The features that are not there yet, but are upcoming, include support for editing of CSS, JavaScript and the DOM, a single window mode, improved JavaScript thread handling, XHR and HTTP monitoring, improved keyboard navigation, and translation into a number of languages.

Found this great new resource listing out all of the public AIR apps out there.  If you have an app out there, add it to their list.

http://www.freshairapps.com/