Firstly, its been way too long since I have written anything of substance. Its a tad pathetic really and I suppose I could blame it being busy, but the truth suggests that its more due to apathy .

Last year, I made a resolution to stop using the word ” fail” and try to refrain from being critical without being constructive.Its just too easy to say ” this doesn’t work ” followed up by a big fat “fail” proclamation. I haven’t been perfect, I have had my moments – but I do feel like a bit of progress was made on this front. Embracing the positive has been the best thing for me rather than wading in the negative.

Professionally, at the beginning of last year, I was at CES where not one, but two projects that Teknision was a part of, were shown. I started teaching again for Algonquin College and had one of the best experiences as an instructor there that winter semester – working with two groups of highly motivated and talented students. I spoke at a few conferences including FITC Amsterdam, FITC Toronto and FATC. In June, I left my work family of several years, Teknision, and moved from Ottawa to NYC to take a job at Big Spaceship – joining the crazily talented Milkshake Enterprise team. I stopped working only with Flash and moved into learning HTML5/CSS/ JS. I struggled with css , excelled with JS, and wondered why the fuck people tossed around ” html5″ as this crazy all encompassing term. I embraced responsive design , hated Facebook even more, discovered LESS, thanked backbone.js and fell in love with underscore.js. I picked up PHP again, learned a few development frameworks such as codeigniter, cakephp, and symfony – delved into templating with Smarty for PHP and Handlebars for JS. I learned to love ANT tasks, all over again. I started using GIT – yes, yes, I’m behind on the GIT movement, but now that I’m fully converted, I can’t imagine ever using svn again. I dabbled with Ruby, picked up some Python, busted my brain with Mongo, got scared by Scala, and lastly started going steady with the Play framework.

All this and what did I learn this year? That no one knows what they mean whey they say mobile – that it brings about an entirely different set of problems in terms of content strategy and implementation. That the only thing more fragmented than browser support, is device resolution.  That testing and debugging on devices is ball bustingly annoying, entirely inefficient and often horribly underestimated in terms of time. That people spend way too much time trying to mould something into something it was never meant to be, because they understand that other perspective better.  Branching out into different languages wasn’t necessarily easy, but I was glad to have spent the time. Too often, right now , I hear that people are “lazy” and don’t want to learn something new. If thats the case, you’re in the wrong industry. And no one said its easy – but once I started doing JavaScript, I was pretty happy I had the ActionScript background that I did . For me, JavaScript was easy – keeping it organized was the challenge. It was CSS that was hard for me, with its years of quirks and hacks and fixes that you learn by years of cross browser experience. If anything, I appreciated Flash more, for all the things it could do inherently. But I also remembered the years of experience and lessons learned in Flash that never made sense, but you just knew – ” wait a frame”, ” add a trace”, and that made me curse a bit less at CSS and the browsers.

On another note, I have learned that people always remember my sense of humour and not necessarily anything else. It borders not being taken seriously – and granted, I have done that to myself, because I don’t want to take everything so seriously, I’d rather live life. But to some extent, I’d like to correct this a bit , this year, so that I do have something to offer – more than just a witty response.

Personally – 2011 could best be described as schizophrenic – or bi-polar – many highs, many lows. Battled depression – something I wish on no one, lost an aunt,lost a grandfather,  nearly lost my mom, nearly got arrested, lost my best friend, had my heart curb-stomped , watched my life become a jerry springer episode,  replaced the emotional walls,  sold my house, moved to a different country,re-discovered running, lost 32 pounds( and counting) , ran a 5k race, learned to solder, found a lump in my breast for the second time,mastered the ability to mix a magnificent manhattan …. and started to write – which by the looks of things thus far, means I might have something to discuss in next years “year in review” post, and that is what I am currently most excited about. In between that, I have made many new friends whom I love and adore – and many friendships I already had were definitely strengthened- even if it was just bonding over NASA underwear.

2012 can’t come soon enough for me. I’m looking forward to playing with the Arduino, doing some more Python, exploring OpenFrameworks and Processing a bit more. Of course, there will be JS/HTML5 and all that jazz. Mostly I’m looking forward to forcing myself into productivity – 5- 10 ideas to be executed as quickly as possible – to just get stuff out there, is my main goal.

Personally, my goals are small. Complete a 10k. Spend more time with my friends. Spend less time wondering and more time doing. Favour collaborative over competitive. And, move on, move ahead.

Like I said, fuck that noise.

Our industry makes it a bit different for what we take for granted – we assume the idea of source control isn’t foreign, that we know to google before asking, that making the logo bigger isn’t going to make it a better product but that it will appease the client. Mostly, though, we assume that members on our team know how to log a bug and how to log one effectively. And sadly, this isn’t the case.

This is not a scenario of ” the developer knows best” – developers can be just as fabulously craptastic at logging bugs as anyone else – which makes it worse, because they should know better. Shame on you developers. But nothing is more annoying, except for receiving emails permanently marked urgent, than seeing a bug report that is as vague as Kim Kardashian’s magnificent ass is wide.

First – not the bug, but how do we go about reporting it? Some people like to send a little email. Those are the people who promptly get punched in the throat repeatedly until they shit out their own voice box. Email is useless – it will get lost in the shuffle, there is no real way to prioritize it, there is no real effective way to see the overall state of the project based on bugs logged/resolved. Then there are those spreadsheet loving freaks who seek out any opportunity to open their very beloved spreadsheet application. So suddenly you get this document, yet another document, that needs to be updated and maintained and has it locked down if someone else is viewing it and immediately you are spending more time formatting that cell in a spreadsheet than you are resolving bugs.

And then we come to basic bug software – at this point we have lost all interest from any of the more visual oriented people, because let’s face it, generally, and I am comfortable making this generalization – bug tracking software is downright fugly. Bugzilla? Complete butterface. Adminitrack? Barf. Mantis? Meh. JIRA? Yawn.  And there really isn’t any need for them to be. But if it looks good, a designer is more likely to want to use it and if it looks good and works well, its easier to other non-technical people on board.. So if bug tracking is the Mark E Smith of your software toolkit visually, you have to focus on the benefits it provides to get people committed and invested in using it.

Bug reporting is a way of communicating. Its no different than trying to give directions to your new matchstick home in suburbia hell where the urban planning looks like some city planners speed induced tribute to Jackson Pollack. You have to be explicit. You have to provide steps. You have to provide circumstances. You need to make sure that the person can get to the same destination you do if you follow the same steps. You need to provide the address. You need to provide any other items that may help them – landmarks, pictures, maps, a phone number. So here are some suggestions on how to log bugs, well maybe better?

Check before you log

Before you log a bug, do everyone a favour and search to make sure it doesn’t exist. There is nothing more annoying that duplicate bugs simply because they are unnecessary.

Bug By Bug

When logging a bug, remember you are logging a single bug. Do not put multiple bugs in a single report. One report per bug – this makes bugs easier to search, re-open and gives a better sense of activity. Some bug bases can generate release notes from logged bugs, so its important to separate items. Don’t be a lazy ass, take the time to make the multiple entries – your developers will thank you.

Before you log:
Make sure you have a way to communicate what are looking at. This is most often communicated through the idea of a build/release version. How can you be sure you are looking at the most up to date build? And moreover, how can you communicate this to other people? In terms of Flash/Flex development – a build number ( however you want to define that- a svn revision number, a build process number etc ) can be exposed to the end user in a non-intrusive way by making it available in right click context menu. This is an idea given to me by Julian Dolce, and its been one the of best, yet simple, things that I have integrated. I can always make sure people are talking about the exact same thing through a version/build number. Now its one thing to expose it and its another to make sure those logging bugs use it. You can expose to the user all sorts of things, but its important for those who log bugs to understand that its important to log OS, browser, and plugin ( including minor) or runtime versions. Educate them on what to enter , how to get those values.

Oh shit, you think you found a bug.

Try to recreate the steps you took to make the bug happen. Consider what happened versus what you expected to happen. Does this constitute a bug or a feature? Can you recreate this bug through by introducing variations into your steps to replicate? Can you always replicate the issue or is it hard to reproduce? Can the issue be replicated in other environments ( other browsers etc ) Remember, you are going to have to give directions to someone, they should be able to know exactly what to do and understand what will happen as a result of those steps.

Logging a bug
All bugs have titles of some sort. Make your title be concise yet capture the essence of the bug in as few words as properly. Think about others who might do a search in the bug base – what keywords might they use to log the same or similar bug?  Vague titles help no one – “Saving File in Asset Explorer” says nothing. “Saving File from Asset Explorer saves file with incorrect name” says way more.

Descriptions should give a good overview of the bug and kinda allows you to add any other helpful information – what the issue is, expected versus actual results/outcomes, any known software or hardware dependancies etc. Most bugbases let you enter in things like OS, Browser etc. Force people to use it.

Step to reproduce
Its important to include the steps to reproduce the bugs. Write these as steps and don’t leave out a single step no matter how simple it may seem. You need to be able to provide a path for another person to take, so be explicit and write out the steps as short and concise directions.Someone who isn’t’ overly familiar with the project/feature should be able to follow the steps and replicate the bug. Start your steps from the beginning – don’t assume the user has made its way to a section/area to where the problem lies.

Record what the results where. What happened. What did you expect to happen and why did you expect that to happen.

Sometimes its hard to articulate the issue – sometimes only a picture will do. Take a screenshot and then mark up the screen shot.If you can , mark up the image, circling what the issue is or making it blatantly obvious what the issue is. This is important for things that can be design oriented – sometimes different people have varying attention to detail – so what might be a pixel off to you, someone else might not immediately notice. Although an image can say a lot, it can’t say everything. Images are not meant to replace anything in bug reporting, they are meant to help describe the problem, just visually.

If you are developer and are logging a bug against a code base or public api – provide a self contained piece of code that can be run independently that illustrates the issue. Remove your dependencies, try to replicate the bug outside of your current implementation  – you’ve done everyone a favour as you’ve pinpointed the source of the problem and reduced the scope of the issue. If you point someone to your code base and implementation you are basically asking them to debug your code and theirs. Make it about them, as much as possible. Oh love, its not me, it really really is you.

Finally, be professional. Yes go ahead and laugh at the irony of that statement. Know who will be looking at your bug base. Not all clients are going to want to see your critical bug list including one titled ” Beer supplies low, must replenish for optimal productivity” when they are checking on the status of their project. Trust me.

- RIARadio – we’ll ( we being Garth Braithwaite, Leif Wells, Zach Stepak and  I ) be podcasting from Max and hitting up anyone we see. Come say hi & shoot the shit with us. We promise not to bite. At least Leif promised

- Workflow Panel on Wednesday morning with RIARadio. We’ll be discussing developer/designer workflow – come and let us know what works for you, see what has worked for us.

- Tuesday at 4:30 – Are you Smarter than a Flash Evangelist. Yep, this bitch will be on the community team. Not sure I can answer the questions correctly, but you know I’ll be answering them Pretty sure i was selected for entertainment value. Come and see us crush the evangelists!!! Serge  posted about this event here .

- FITC Unconference The good folks at litl will be providing the beer, and I’ll be providing the entertainment as the last person on Wednesday at 2:30  – I’ll be having some fun interviewing whoever I can find dumb enough to let me take the piss outta them. Come learn just a bit more than maybe you bargained for….

- Wandering. I’ll be wandering around with my good friend Bruno Fonzi ( @brunofonzi ) from FDT – we plan to capture some peeps on camera with some impromptu interviews. Should be a good time If you see us, say hi.

All in all, I’m starting to get that super excited feeling – looking forward to seeing my old friends, and making some new ones. So if you see me, just be your bold bad self and come and say hi. Also, DEEPA! I be looking for you!!!

It’s been a few years since the amazing city of San Francisco has seen a Flash focused conference – and finally, the good folks of FITC are bringing it back!  Mark off August 17 – 19 on your calendar now, as this is gonna be an event  you’ll want to be at, and hopefully remember

I am completely honoured , as always, to be included in what it a stellar & pantstastic lineup of speakers. Yes, I said pantstastic, I am off to trademark that phrase right after this blog posting.  I can’t decide what I am more excited about – the speaker lineup, or the city. Is that horrible of me to say? C’mon, its San Francisco!!

So here are my top 10 things that have me super stoked about this conference, and maybe they will convince you to be just as excited:

1. Yugo Nakamura. Heh, FITC, plan ahead and get this girl a restraining order already, cos you know I’ll be jumping Yugo in hopes to gleam just 1/1000 of his awesomeness and then forget to claim it at customs.  Its YUGO, folks. Yugo. I am not sure about you, but for me, he’s it – the one person who’s work that got me interested in Flash to begin with.

2. Ben Fry. Hellllo processing folk, this should be making you sport intellectual wood, on demand. Need I say more?

3. In and Out Burger. If I need to explain this, you need to be edumacated on the fine art of fast food dining the California way.

4. Jared Ficklin!!!! Dude is a reality tv star? Did you know that? Can we organize a ” get your pic taken with Jared” moment? If you haven’t seen Jared speak – its awesome. He’s very much Bill Nye the Science Guy if he was actually cool. And hip, and shit.

5. Brendan Dawes. Yes, this is the only person I got tongue tied around and couldn’t spit out a full functioning sentence. Huge hero.

6. Proximity to Adobe. I mean c’mon, my main goal is to get invited to the offices and then see who’s cubicles I can screw with.

7. Anchor Beer. Yummmmm. & Napa wine.

8. Muir Woods. Its not too far away and its just amazing. If you want to feel small and inconsequential, I suggest you spend an afternoon there.

9. 4 tracks of presos and additional goodness like getting to hear the goods from Adobe in  the under the hood sessions. Get close and personal , but not too close or personal, cos jail bond is your responsibility.

10. Trolley Cars! Re-visit the rice-a-roni experience! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qJijGGOqCOI

As for me, I’ll be speaking at the same time as Eric Natzke and Andre Michelle. Does that make me part of an inspirational Manwich?

For those looking to attend, I put up a tourist type map on google maps – check it out . Feel free to suggest anything I am missing!

What are you waiting for? Go get your tickets now! Rumour has it , if you use “bitchwhocodes” as a coupon code, you get 10% off.

Hope to see you all there!

First off, the city – NYC. What better venue to have a conference where you can spend some time to explore the city and are actually encouraged to do so with the various city tracks that the conference had. If a session didn’t interest you , there was typically always a city track going on where you could join some of the attendees to do various NYC activities. It was a pretty good idea – in the sense that I saw and met way more of attendees’ better halves, than I have ever seen at a conference.

Personally, Flash and the City was a great opportunity to meet people that I know virtually but have never met in person, if only because we don’t tend to attend the same conferences. People such as Simeon Bateman, catching up with Jesse Warden, finally meeting my RiaRadio co-host Garth Braithwaite – that is what made the conference for me. Its a bit bizarre, I have to admit, to meet people who know you primarily by your twitter name. I’d say my name – nothing, blank stare. Say my twitter name and BOOM, instant twisted smile.

A couple days were spent recording interviews for the RiaRadio show with Leif Wells, Garth Braithwaite, and Zach Stepak – which is so much more fun in person than it is over the interwebs and skype.

I managed to do my session on Social Media APIs on the last the day of the conference right after lunch. I think they served beer at lunch, which could explain the crowd’s willingness to add as a laugh track. I had a great time doing my session, it came off very much like a stand up routine, which is how I intended to a degree. I believe that a session shouldn’t be something where people are reading their slides to the attendees, but it should be as entertaining as it is informative. I’m never going to inspire people in the way that someone like Mario Klingemann , Eric Natzke or Ralph Hauwert can. And thats not my m.o either, I’d rather make someone laugh and try to enjoy an otherwise boring and bland topic. I think my session went over ok – and I even got this compliment from Joel Hooks which completely blew me away.

At the end of my session, I talked about how in twitter, and social media, we’re having a conversation. I showed an application I built in AIR with the 2.0 sdk – using RobotLegs as the framework, Hype to visualize and utilizing the nativeProcess feature in 2.0 to visualize what we “hear” if this is the conversation we’re having. This idea all stemmed from from my tendency to be a complete asshole – one day at work , I copied about 50 lines of my code, and sent it to my text to speech on my Mac – and walked away. Note, once you start that process, its hard to stop it, so as I walked away, there was my computer “speaking” my code. And therein lied my inspiration – what if i could parse the text of a tweet and send it to my text to speech and play it back ? Moreover what if i could visualize it. Off I went looking into the nativeProcess feature, learned a bit of applescript to sent text to speech then convert the .aiff file to an mp3, and then played it back in the AIR app and used some of the Hype soundAnalyzer goodness to visualize what our conversation looks for a twitter search result. It ended up being something like this, which is a high res output using the Hype framework.

After my session, I went over to the museum of sex where I was interviewed by ActionScriptHero - nothing like having dildos for a backdrop.

Thanks again to everyone who attended my session, for the peeps at NYC for having me, and can’t wait to see everyone again really soon!

Now I fully realize, there are a bunch of reasons why someone might want to post a phone number, but I can honestly say, it still makes me feel incredibly uncomfortable to see people make that data available – and I can’t pinpoint why. Perhaps its because if you distill my facebook list of friends, it results in maybe there only be 5% of the people that I actually actively give two shits about. Yes, perhaps I’m guilty of the quick friend acceptance – having so many friends on my list from high school that were bitches back then and probably bitches now, but that I still accepted as my “facebook friend”.

So I decided to be an asshole. I grabbed this list of phone numbers, and quickly parsed the feed for the cell phone numbers. I then used Twilio’s API to send out SMS messages to each number with a message that looked much like this:

The entire process took me 10 minutes from start to finish , as the Twilio API is dead easy to use. And here I sit, somewhat amused with myself, because, well, I think its funny, and a bit dismayed that 40% of my list had exposed phone numbers.

I’m not sure about other people, but I forget to play. I get consumed with the getting stuff done part that I forget that sometimes, you don’t need to have a purpose other than to create something that is a source – whether it be a source of amusement, inspiration, entertainment, just a source – that doesn’t necessarily need to have a point. So for the next few months I’ve decided to dedicate time to just remembering how to play again – whether it be with Hype , Quartz Composer, Processing, … it doesn’t matter. Its just a muscle that needs to be exercised. I guess to give myself some structure, I’m just looking to see what I can bang off in less than a half hour. Granted, I had to kinda delve into the Hype framework and see how things worked and that has taken a bit of time – but from here on in, short lil burts of fun. Curious to see where it will take me.

This first attempt with the Hype framework had me mixing web cam motion detection – with the SimpleProximity behaviour ( yes Branden, its behaviour with a U). I created a new behaviour – called the ProximityByPoint behaviour as the simple proximity in the framework calculates distance difference based on mouse position. I wanted to have this calculate based on a point where the most motion was occuring in the motion tracking – so I literally copied, pasted, added a prop, changed a line and was done.  I just laid a bunch of circles on the stage in a grid pattern – pretty much ripped from one of the simple proximity examples. This one ended up being white.

Now for a variation – i just captured a bitmap snapshot on an interval and used that with the PixelColorist – the ode to Natzke approach of sampling colors from an image. The examples show an image from the library – so I once again made a new colorist called PixelFromBitmapColorist – where i passed it the bitmapdata to use rather than a bitmap. Once again, super simple change , took like a minute to do. I then use that image, which is the image snapshotted from the web came, and the colors get mapped onto the sprites on the stage.  3 lines of code( not even)later to accomplish that.

If this is what I can do in a few minutes everyday with the Hype framework, scared to see what people can do if they hours.

In Defense of Design
I admit. I was one of those people who reduced design to nothing more than “pretty pictures”. Its not that I never appreciated great design – its just that I underestimated the process that drives a design. Dismissing the importance of design, means that I was dismissing the importance of the role of a designer, and particularily a good interactive designer on a team. Yes, I have wronged, and wronged others, I have seen the light – but it has taken this developer some time to come to a point where I don’t see design as something separate from development. That’s not to say that all developers are designers or designers developers- but fostering a mutual appreciation for each other skill sets is fundamental to a good working dynamic. I’m always astounded by how something could be technically so simple, yet without a good design, the simplicity becomes something people detest rather than appreciate. We’ve all seen those interfaces that look like some developer went to town in MS Paint – any interface for managing your routers immediately come to mind for example.
Design is important. It is more than pretty pictures. Design, simply, is not decoration. And this becomes even more integral when dealing with interactive design. A good design is not just about esthetics. When a developer says ” this just needs to be skinned” in many ways, they have just reduced design to the pretty picture implementation.  Shame on us, really. Perhaps great design goes under appreciated because most people can’t digest its full value if its not immediately self-evident.

Developers and designers are different but not in the ways that most people categorize them. To dismiss design as nothing as making pretty pictures is as offensive as suggesting that a developer is not “creative” or even better not “a creative”.  This becomes evident when you see companies that define their divisions this way – the developer is isolated from the designer, neither are given responsibility for the success of the project as a whole, just their sides- and an invisible line has been drawn in the sand and the interactive civil war has begun. Something that is not pretty, not necessary and doesn’t always require toolsets to resolve.

TOOLS
Wireframing/Prototying

http://pelfusion.com/tools/20-web-applications-and-tools-for-designers/

Omnigraffle 
http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/OmniGraffle/

Omnigraffle Stencils 
http://graffletopia.com/

Balsamiq Mockups 
http://www.balsamiq.com/products/mockups

Wireframe inspiration

http://www.behance.net/

Thimel
IPlotz

http://iplotz.com/index.php

Pencil Project

http://www.evolus.vn/Pencil/Home.html

Templatr

http://templatr.cc/

Protoshare

http://www.protoshare.com/

Use Magnets!

http://konigi.com/tools/wireframe-magnets-diy-kit

Screenshots

Skitch

http://skitch.com/

SnagIt

http://www.techsmith.com/screen-capture.asp

Snapz Pro

http://www.ambrosiasw.com/utilities/snapzprox/

PicPick

http://picpick.wiziple.net/

Code Snippets

http://code.google.com/p/snippely/

Snippets Panel in flash – http://theflashblog.com/?p=771
HTTP Monitoring

Firebug 
http://getfirebug.com/

Charles 
http://www.charlesproxy.com/

Browser

BrowserShots http://browsershots.org/
Positioning / Placement
Screen Ruler – http://www.sharewareconnection.com/titles/screen-ruler.htm

Perfect ScreenRuler http://www.fileguru.com/Perfect-Screen-Ruler/

info
Xscope – http://iconfactory.com/software/xscope
Rulers

http://www.ilovemacapps.com/tool/rulers-measure-you-screen

WonderWebWare Screen Ruler http://wonderwebware-screen-ruler.software.informer.com/3.0/

Omnidea Rulers http://www.omnidea.it/en/software/rulers/index.html

PixelWindow http://www.pixelwindowapp.com/
Pixus

http://code.google.com/p/pixus/
Firefox plugin

Measure It https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/539

Adobe Apps for Web Designers 
http://sixrevisions.com/tools/adobe_air_apps_web_designers/

http://sixrevisions.com/tools/22-awesome-adobe-air-applications-for-designers/

Mutual Respect/Dynamics

http://www.myinkblog.com/articles/webdesign/left-brained-vs-right-brained-the-designerdeveloper-paradox/

http://www.webdesignerdepot.com/2009/01/6-reasons-why-designers-should-code/

http://www.computerworld.com/s/article/9137708/Opinion_The_unspoken_truth_about_managing_geeks?taxonomyId=14&pageNumber=1

http://www.slideshare.net/stephenpa/eye-candy-is-a-critical-business-requirement

http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2009/07/flash_actionscr.html

SVN

http://sixrevisions.com/project-management/the-ultimate-guide-to-version-control-for-designers/
http://www.slideshare.net/mza/subversion-best-practices
Designer need to use Subversion http://www.petebernardo.com/entry/designer-need-for-subversion/
http://carsonified.com/blog/features/design/subversion-for-designers/
Automation
ANT Tasks

http://code.google.com/p/fuelanttasks/

http://flashartofwar.com/2009/12/19/my-workflow-with-ant-and-fdt/

http://deleteaso.com/fuel-ant-tasks/

JSFL
Flash JSFL extensions

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/exchange/index.cfm?s=5&from=1&o=desc&cat=140&l=-1&event=producthome&exc=2

Stage selection focuses library selection

http://www.jonnymac.com/blog/2009/03/04/flash-jsfl-command-locate-selected-symbol-in-library/

Embed fonts in all textfields

http://deleteaso.com/fix-textfields-jsfl/

Distribute to layers and put items on whole pixel ( workaround for flash bug)

http://summitprojectsflashblog.wordpress.com/2008/10/17/flash-cs4-fails-to-fix-distribute-to-layer-jsfl-script-in-response/

Set width and height of selected items to whole values

http://codeendeavor.com/downloads/width%20height%20whole%20numbers.jsfl

Publish all open fla’s

http://codeendeavor.com/downloads/publish%20all.jsfl

Selected layers to guides

http://codeendeavor.com/downloads/guide%20selected%20layers.jsfl

Guide layers from selected items on stage

http://codeendeavor.com/downloads/guide%20layers%20of%20selected%20instances.jsfl

Enable bitmap smoothing

http://codeendeavor.com/archives/234

Create buttons

http://www.stevensacks.net/2008/02/01/using-jsfl-to-create-auto-buttons-in-flash/

Get filters and convert to code

http://durej.com/?p=29

Rename items on the stage
Command line tool to publish flas
h

And good riddance. It’s oddly fitting that only a cliche could capture my sentiments to a year that, with such varying highs and lows, appeared to be a lil’ drama queen in full tantrum training.

At first, I struggled with this blog post. I don’t want to start 2010 off with the type of royal rant that is typically expected of me – the glass is half full, the sun will come out tomorrow, dream the impossible dream – I tried optimism on for size and it gave me nothing but the oh so attractive muffin top. And I am optimistic about 2010, so at least there is that.  So here is my 2009 in review.

Professionally, I have much to be thankful for, this year. And perhaps my greatest regret this year in that arena, is that I haven’t given back as much as I have been given. I’m honored this year to been a part of many amazing community events and conferences : Speaking at FITC Amsterdam, FITC Toronto, FlashBelt, FOTB, FlashPitt, and FITC Edmonton. To each of the organizers of these conferences, I truly appreciate the opportunity and support you have graciously bestowed upon me without reservation. I also managed to make a roadtrip down to Boston to attend Flash on Tap and then again, equally stupid enough to make another 7 hour roadtrip to Philadelphia to attend FlashCamp. I spent a weekend in Februrary doing the final judging for the Communication Arts Interactive Annual – which is truly an amazing experience as you get to see what amazing work people are doing out there. A good part of the year saw me ranting more than raving on the Summer of Flash podcast – which is now called RIARadio with Garth Braithwaite, Leif Wells and Zak Stepak. In the fall I returned as a part time instructor at Algonquin College teaching ActionScript Development. It has been busy.

Twitter & Blogging
I stopped blogging almost entirely. I wouldn’t say this is because I have been busy “micro-blogging” on twitter – which is not at all the case. I use twitter, as most people have discovered at this point, more often as a glorified link dump or community IM tool, than a medium to make profound proclamations. File micro-blogging under a term that I really don’t get, mostly because its something I rarely do. Twitter is just not the place for meaningful, and productive conversations when expressiveness is restrained by the almighty 140 character limit. That’s not to say that meaningful conversations have not taken place, its more to say that people need to stop expecting more from it, than it can inherently provide based on the limitations that ultimately drive it. I’m often confused by the tweets that I read where people say “they are catching up on their twitter”, almost like they they have died, gone to housewife heaven and have replaced twitter for their “soaps” or “stories”. The appeal of twitter is the immediacy and that, well , it requires you to be present, in every sense of the word. Time spent looking back is often time wasted when what matters or should matter is what is happening now. I fully realize twitter has outgrown the whole ” what are you doing now notion” as its function organically grew with its users. I prefer to use it for real-time engagment. And yes, you all have license to stab me repeatedly with a dull object as I just puked out and used a term of the highest social media douchebaggery type. Fear not,  I’m pretty sure I have that covered under my insurance in fine print, with Canada being as progressive as it is. Ahem.

Back to blogging. I haven’t done it in awhile, and yes, its something I would like to change. Its not because I haven’t had anything to say. Its because I haven’t found the right words to say it. Self-censorship – a sign of growing up or a sign of growing old? I have to say that most of the topics this year that people were discussing, were more interesting than inspiring. Nope, I’m still here – I didn’t spontaneously ignite into a ravenous balls of  flames as I gracefully took my  front row seat in hell. To me, it was a year that was, in some ways, seemed to be creatively stagnant(outside of a few highlights like Hype ) on some fronts as technical implementation took front and center stage. Guaranteed, I’ve just insulted a bunch of people, but this is a generalization based on the overall topics dominating the community conversation. The dialog and trends in our community is often bi-polar at best -  we have these pendulum swings – moving from extreme creative to the extreme technical end – always seeking to find a balance between the two.

So what were people talking about this year in our industry? Or , what did I hear?

Mirco-architecture.

Micro-architecture – or the less obtuse, frameworks. I say obtuse with a grain of salt and a generous dash of sarcasm by the way – as I know the whole terminology debate is a sore one. People couldn’t get enough of them – PureMVC, RobotLegs, Parsley, Cairngorm, Swiz, Mate – the list goes on. Its not that I’m not interested in this topic – just the opposite, but I found it got a bit tiresome. That is not to take away from some of the great work people have put into creating, sharing and educating the community on implementation . What differentiates these frameworks is just that – the implementation, not the overall message present in its adoption.  You can only hear ” use a micro-architecture” so many times  before you wonder when did this go all propaganda on my ass and start to question why? The word overkill sometimes comes to mind, and as someone who sometimes struggles with the perverse ability to unnecessarily over complicate – I have been making a concerned effort to find elegance in simple solutions when possible.  I didn’t see much discussion about the pitfalls of over-architecture – but more on the evils of not adopting one.

Optimization

Once again, very important. Once again, hammered into my head like a bad tv theme song from the 80s from which only recalling the chorus hasn’t stopped me from spontaneously busting out into song in aisle 6 of the grocery store. Many people have weighed in on optimization tricks  with object pooling taking an early lead out of the gates in this discussion. For me, one of the more interesting discussions mostly,  because it seemed to be an area of optimization not thorougly addressed , was around events – with Robert Penner’s Signals ( as3 Signals? ). Optimization – its an important discussion to have, even an on-going one as the pain of the Flex Profiler will attest to,  but I still reserve my right to say it can only hold my interest for so long.

Multi-anything

Device, platform, screen. Multi saw growth in the harem department this year. In the same breath, multi was reduced to one – multi-device, single codebase. Insert audible shudder here. That makes me nervous. Yes, we are working in the “cloud“   – but the idea of a single codebase means that people again are going to be choosing deployment ease over user experience. People buy devices for the features they offer and want to take advantage of those – to ignore that altogether by advocating a single click build utopia makes me think the fetal position might have been invented just for this occasion. Okay, so maybe its not being advocated – but I have definitely seen on many occasions people saying ” same codebase for all xxx deployments”. Are we going down this road?  The same road where people think just because CS5 has the magical “make iphone application” option, they can make anything now into an iPhone application and its perfectly logical to do so?  Cross-device has suddenly replaced cross-platform as a primary deployment concern – yet we seem to have forgotten that these concerns are inherently different and aspiring to a write once, run many mentality actually takes away from each multi-screen archetype rather than taking advantage of it.

Odds n Ends

Let us not forget things like continuous development, agile principles, test driven development and of course, the ever-present design patterns. I’m not suggesting these are not important topics,  to re-iterate, I am merely proposing that they have dominated the community conversation, and perhaps rightly so.

Let there be breasts!

Of course, long forgotten, as a community we struggled with what it means to be female in this industry. Did we come to any conclusions that we didn’t know already? Was progress made or better yet, was there any way to determine that?I’m not even sure what the benchmark would be to measure if we have made progress as a community. Did female attendance at conferences increase? Likely- longer lineups for the bathroom certainly do suggest so. Do more females actively participate? Perhaps. Females in high profile positions? Questionable.  I may be ostracizing myself by saying this, but it seems that there were many calls to action, but I’m not sold that many answered that call. I don’t mean that as a criticism as much as I do an observation – for it to be a critical statement I’d have to have more of an emotional stake in the statement than I currently do. If change can’t be defined, than I am not sure how it can be achieved. The only thing I truly took away from all of this, at this point in time, is that if you want to burn someone at the stake, Twitter has proven to be the perfect venue for it. Twitter,  now with 100% more pitchfork.

Community

I always struggle with how personal to be in what has become an increasingly social context with the media that I choose to abuse. Sure, I say some things that are questionable. I’m often carefully guarded, and this year has given me more reason than normal to be that way as the biggest challenges I had to face were not professional, yet personal, and intimately so. My love for the community and the people in it grew exponentially this year. I was shown love and support by many people from this community who I am honored to know personally and not just professionally. So thank you. You know who you are.

So for 2010, I hope I can show some of that love and give back in more meaningful ways to our community. If I have only one resolution – it would be to echo the sentiments of my Christmas cards this year – well not literally of course   It is better to give and I hope to do much more of that.

Here’s to 2010 – a year full of promise. Now if someone could invent a synonym for mobile, I’ll have one less thing to bitch about