Adobe MAX Debrief

Wow, so ok, the plan was to blog everyday during the conference which obviously didn’t happen. There is one good reason for this. Suprisingly, the wi-fi coverage at MAX was not the greatest, at least not throughout the entire conference center. In fact, when inside the main sessions, there was no wi-fi coverage at all! The reason that I haven’t blogged since it ended is simply because I’ve been sick and busy, hehe. Either way, we’re all here now so gather round and here the telling of the Adobe MAX 08 conference in all its glory!

11.16.08 – 11.19.08

Day 1 (Sun):

So Sunday was the first day we actually stuff to do after getting to San Francisco on Saturday. Sunday was the educator’s pre-conference held at Adobe’s SF office. This was a time for many of the educators coming to MAX to see what certain institutions are up to along the lines of using Adobe products, as well as hear from industry what things design and development students need to know before they enter the workforce. We actually gave a mini-presentation at this event and led a breakout discussion about our cgCentral application and what other apps/uses for Flash, Flex, and AIR in Universities people could think of.

The outside of Adobe's SF Office

After the educator’s pre-conference we went back to the Mariott (where some of the conference festivities were being held) and presented at the Adobe MAX educator’s reception. Basically we stood around for a couple of hours, talking about our project whilst eating ridiculously tasty finger-food.

The best part of Day 1 however was the cocktail party that SoDA held after the reception at a place called the Slide Lounge. It’s called this because of the Slide you can take to get into the bar. Anyway, fun was had, people were conversed with, it was a generally all around good time.

The Slide

Day 2 (Mon):

Day 2 was the first day of the actual conference, and it was a blast. The highlights of the day were as follows.

• Couple of pretty good sessions
• Awesome Keynote focusing on the future of the Flash Platform
• The new ability for Google to search Flash content!!!
• Meeting my favorite designer, Simone Legno of Tokidoki!

Simone Legno of Tokidoki and myself at Adobe MAX 08

Also on day 2, I got to show our cgCentral app to the Adobe AIR team who totally loved it. They were surprised and delighted to find out that it was created with Flash instead of Flex as well!

Day 3 (Tues):

Day 3 ended up being a little different that I had originally planned, but still much fun. Basically, there was another keynote showing some specific new features in the Flash Platform, such as how to use Flash Catalyst (aka Thermo), a sneaks session including project Alchemy which allows you to convert C and C++ code into ActionScript (yeah, it’s awesome… they ported Quake and an NES emulator directly into ActionScript), and spending most of the day in sessions with SoDA which were so interesting I actually skipped most of my scheduled sessions to hear them discuss. It was really really cool to be able just sit and talk with people like Michael Lebowitz of Big Spaceship and hear their ideas about the similarities between massive digital agencies and small design shops and what we all need to do to further our industry.

Day 3 ended with an amazing “Customer Appreciation Event” put on by Adobe. They essentially rented out two enormous museum’s for a giant 5,000+ attendee party. The museum’s were the De Young Museum and the California Acadamy of Sciences. There were 14 entertainment groups including African music, a “rave” room, and a swing style band using a Theremin. It was crazy, there were all kinds of food choices in different parts of the museum, contortionists, and even a room full of old 80’s arcade machines. In short, it was awesome. After all of the festivities however it was back to the hotel to prepare for our presentation the next day. This included working on interface design prototypes for three new educational apps which you may hear about sometime in the future if your lucky!

Day 4 (Wed):

Last but not least we have Day 4! This was the day that I had been anxious about for some time as it was our presentation day. Basically we just got up super early and finished putting our presentation together, then went back to Moscone West where the rest of the conference was and practiced a few times before it was our turn. The presentation went really well, and people seemed to like our ideas on how small course-specific RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) could be useful in a college classroom. As I mentioned before we showed some very early prototypes of three new applications that, based on the reaction of the attendees, really need to come to fruition!

Then there were the last few sessions and with that the official end of MAX. After that we had the pleasure of being able to take a tour at AKQA’s San Francisco office since a former CGT student from Purdue works there, followed by dinner with a couple of other CGT grads.

That’s it! I’m sure there is more, but I’ve written this over the course of a couple days, so if you have any questions or comments please feel free to post!!! Also, for more photos from the event, just check out the set on flickr! MAX 08 on Flickr

And Now For a Quick Adobe AIR Tip and MAX 08 Update!

Hey everyone! I was getting a project ready for our presentation at Adobe MAX last night and I ran into a major snag that I had not thought about. Worst of all, I could find NOWHERE on the web that explained how to fix my problem, so I looked around Flash for like 2 hours and finally found my answer.

Problem: When incorporating external data files into Flash that you want it to find locally on the server you just place them in the same folder as the .swf itself. But when you are working with AIR, the idea is to create an installable application. Normally I would just have it connect to the internet and grab the files, but I needed to make a net connection independant version of our cgCentral application for MAX just in the off chance that we didn’t have a net connection when we needed to make our presentation.

Solution: It turns out that the problem is VERY easy to solve, it just wasn’t really documented anywhere well that I could find. When you mess with the setting for creating the .air file, there’s a box below that let’s you pick what other files should be included in that application package, just like including data files in a normal desktop application package. It seems pretty silly now, but it hit me while I was working, “where the heck do I put my data???” I put the files where my .swf was during testing and it worked just fine. Then I simply included those files in the .air file creating settings and it was good to go!

And now for a MAX update!!!

The Purdue team is only going to consist of 3 people, which is pretty awesome. Those three are myself, Frank Garofalo, and Kellen Maicher. We’re heading out on Saturday, and we return on Thursday, giving a few presentations in between. I also just found out that on Sunday we’re going to spend almost the whole day at Adobe’s SF office!! I was hoping to have the next XML demo done before I left, but I’m not sure that it’s going to happen. Either way it should be up early next week as hopefully I’ll be doing as much coding and work as humanly possible when I’m not learning more and taking in the sights and sounds. I’ve been to San Francisco before but I was pretty young and couldn’t appreciate many of the things I could this time! I’m planning on posting pretty much every day that I’m there, so look forward to that!!! In other news, if I haven’t posted it before, I get to do a session with Simone Legno of Tokidoki, which is just absolutely amazing!! Alright, well, I’ll let you know how everything goes!

XML Tutorial Part 1

So I finally finished part one of the XML Is Your Friend series of tutorials! Here’s the link. I hope you all enjoy it!

XML Is Your Friend! Part 1

Good afternoon internet, Alex says hello!

Finally, after doing the initial design back in December, my full site is live! There are still some things that need done on it, but nothing glaring, mostly just features I want to add for fun, lol. Head on over to streetalchemydesign and check it out!

Click the image to see the site!!

A somewhat worrisome happening.

So today I get an email from Twitter.com informing me that I have a new follower named “Vocano.” So I go to check it out and the only tweet they’ve posted is “www.Denook.com Community for all Web designers to enter Contest and win money!” This immediately set off some red flags. About a month or so ago I was working on a website design proposal and I came across this FANTASTIC article about how to write a powerful proposal as a freelance web developer. In that article there was a link to another article denouncing what is called Spec work.

You may not know it’s called Spec work, but you’ve probably done some of it yourself if you are a freelancer in this field of work. Essentially, spec work, or speculative work is what it’s called when a company asks you to design something for them, and if they like it, then they may pay you for it. The main obvious problem with this is that as a web developer, designer, or any other type of creative professional really, your time is WORTH something. To be more specific, your time is worth money! Companies and sites asking you to do design work with any possibility of if not being accepted and you therefore not getting paid for it, would qualify as asking for spec work.

Some other huge problems with spec work are the ramifications on the rest of the industry, and the company asking for the spec work. Basically, the short of it is that spec work devalues creative professionals as a whole because “why pay the appropriate price for work that you can get for next to nothing?” and it hurts the company because no company is going to get truly good designs without talking to the designer. To do a good design that will help a company grow and actually solve problems for them you need a plethora of info, essentially everything from what do you sell, to how do you sell it, and who do you sell it to. I don’t want to get too deeply into this, so I’ll send you to the experts!

Click here to visit no-spec.com

So yes, basically, please don’t help these people in trying to get work for nothing. Be thoughtfull of how much you are really worth, including your time, and your creativity. Obviously there are times when spec work is needed, but you’ll know when those times are, and it’s usually when you really trust the people asking for it, not people holding design “contests.” Let them hire you for what you’ve done, not the free work they ask you to do!

This about sums it up…

Sorry for the lack of real content lately. Working on the full website has been taking up TONS of time as of late, but it’s coming along. And now something to make me feel wonderful about what I do! Thanks to xkcd for this one!

The new meaning of my life? Well at least for right now, hehe.

And some good press!

So ok, last week our project team on Welcome To Opus City for sticktoschool.com did an interview with a local paper. It’s an ok article, and it’s not the worst photo of me, but it certainly isn’t the best either!

Journal & Courier Opus City Interview

Photo from the Journal & Courier

It’s really weird to have stuff like this start happening. It looks like this blog is actually getting a few hits every day which is pretty cool, and articles about Opus City are floating around it seems, and my full website is almost done! Well, there’s still a lot of work to do until it’s fully complete, but at least the site should be up next week, even if not all the info is there yet!

A Small Problem…

So, a small problem has come to my attention. This morning I finished the app for the XML demo that I’ve been promising for… well quite a while now. The problem is, I can’t really post it here in the blog since the blog is actually on wordpress’s servers, and that someone inhibits my needed use of flash. Not that the written part of the tutorial is done yet, but the actual demo is, and the writing shouldn’t take me any more than a day or two. So in the next few days *hopefully* I’ll be moving the entire blog to my servers where I can host wordpress free and liberated!

It’ll be interesting tho because the refractionblog.com address is on a different hosting service so eventually it’ll have to move, but we’ll see and I promise I’ll keep everyone posted as to where things are going, but in the meantime here’s a teaser screenshot of the silly demo app to help ya’ll learn XML! (Yes, I used ya’ll… what of it?)

Froggy Land v0.01b

Pure and simple…

Ok, so I’ve been waiting to post this until I was a little more sure that it was going to happen the way I thought it was. I’ll keep it really short and simple. So simple in fact that it’s just one image… behold…

 

MAX Speaker

“Bad” Press better than no press? I say yes!

And on top of that the title of the post rhymes! So my colleague Travis Faas has already put this hilarious happening into perspective, but I wanted to post it here for two reasons. First, my blog has at least a slightly different audience than his does and second, because it involves me and the big project I’ve been talking about all Summer. So long story short about the project in case you haven’t heard about it yet, we worked on a website to help convince high school kids to stay in school appropriately called www.sticktoschool.com. After the website was created (btw I was in charge of all CSS on the website itself if you’re interested) a game was created to go along with the site and pull from the same job information database that was created. The result was essentially an online version of the Game of Life and a pretty good one at that. Needless to say, fun as that game was, the powers that be wanted a more action oriented game that would capture the interest of today’s students. Therefore, another game needed to be developed.

We were tasked with essentially creating a driving game that was fun to play, and would teach the students about jobs they could get with a high school diploma. So basically what’s the best example of a driving game with missions, action, and the ability to capture a high schooler’s attention for hours? Well, you can probably think of one, I know I can. So 300 hours of work later (that’s just my input, not counting the other programmer Travis, and our 2.5 designers), we had Welcome to Opus City.

Apparently a story about the website showed up on a local West-Lafayette/Lafayette news site and someone known only as Dr. Manhattan from the University of Iowa decided to write a review about our game. In it he questioned whether the game could actually help these kids stay in school, but he did post an update saying he was impressed by the features in a game created by a bunch of undergrads (and yes, the comment on his posting that says two of us actually graduated in May was mine, hehe). Honestly, I was really impressed with what we came up with. The idea was solid and the development cycle was astounding, because seriously we hand wrote I don’t know how many different systems for this game and they all work! No one can see it, but the game is actually entirely modular and updateable, and now there are a couple of stories floating around the internet about our team! Hopefully it’s the first of many. In the end we did what we were tasked to do, and I’m extremely proud of it. I know I would much rather play this game than take those normal career test things like I had to when I was in HS.

Now yes it’s not the best press in the world, but in this huge blogging world we live in, if someone is blogging about you, you must be doing at least something right!

Btw, I’ve begun work on the demo for my XML tutorial finally, hehe. To give you a taste I’ll give you the subject of the tutorial. “How to create a choose-your-own-adventure with XML and Flash!!!” I wanted to create something at least a little non trivial as opposed to something like “Here’s some data from XML!” This app won’t do a whole lot, but it’s concepts are what was used to create the entire storyline system in Welcome to Opus City. Basically the XML file will hold the storyline, possible choices to make along the way, and where to go based on the choices. Once you can get that up an running, XML will be your best friend for the LONG haul!

Update: It came to my attention that I was looking at this whole situation in the wrong way, and did some editing to reflect that. I am extremely proud of what we created with Opus City, it’s the largest and most complex project I’ve worked on yet, and I really do think it will take a step in the direction that was needed. Seriously, any avenue we can give these kids to help them succeed we should, whether someone in Iowa likes it or not.