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I’m torn. I generally avoid spending too much time on social media sites cause they’re a huge time-suck, but Facebook has become a bit too addicting lately. It wasn’t as big a deal a year or so ago, but it seems that a global New Year’s resolution was for all the Facebook holdouts to finally join up. Which has been really, really awesome. I’ve connected with some people I haven’t seen since my elementary school years in Virginia, lost compatriots from Musician’s Institute, and all the cool people from high school I haven’t seen in years.

For years, I’ve gotten used to interacting with high-tech/web colleagues via social media sites like Facebook, Flickr, Twitter and the like, but the deeper life connections being made within Facebook are just too strong to avoid. Staying in touch with industry colleagues is great- don’t get me wrong – but the depth and breadth of connections on Facebook trump any of the other social sites hands-down.

So- I’m probably going to find myself posting on Twitter less and less, and Facebook more and more (especially as FB can send Twitter my status updates anyway). Interesting.

Posted in: General, Technology by Scott / Tags: culture, journal, socialmedia

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I’ve been pretty hectic between travel and SxSW the last couple weeks, but a few cool items of note may have slipped past. Catching up now…

• Kuler just got an update today, with a feature I’ve been drooling over since I heard about it a few weeks back- color extraction! You can now upload an image, and have Kuler extract the dominant color theme from it. Simply awesome feature- saves me from my old “Posterize > sample colors to a swatch” workflow in Photoshop. Make sure and give the Kuler team your feedback, too.
• The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced at SxSW last week that the Dreamweaver Task Force is being renamed and expanded to the Adobe Task Force, covering a wider range of our products. Don’t fear, though- our historical cooperation with WaSP from the Dreamweaver team is alive and kicking as always, and will continue into the foreseeable future. I love those guys for keeping us honest over the years!
• Chris Charlton has been working overtime again and sneaked a peek at his upcoming DW extension for Drupal developers – the Dreamweaver Themer’s Kit extension for Drupal. I swear that guy never sleeps, if you’ve been following his developer site xtnd.us you know exactly what I’m talking about. You can also check the Adobe Technologies group he manages out over at groups.drupal.org. Get some rest, Chris- we need you for the 4th quarter, man!

Anyway, since I didn’t feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy’s interview of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general ‘wish you were here’ posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.

Posted in: Community, General, Technology, Web Standards, dreamweaver by Scott /
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So you like those fancy-schmancy Spry accordions, but have the need to deep-link into closed accordion panels from an external page? That’s a pretty obvious use case usability-minded designers (and their clients) may require, and Dreamweaver and PHP guru David Powers has a great tutorial on just that topic on his Foundation Dreamweaver blog – “Linking to a non-default panel”.

If you’re strictly using the visual Spry tools in Dreamweaver to author, you’re probably missing a lot of the hidden gems in SpryURLUtils.js (included with the Spry 1.6 update), and this is a great tutorial for taking that first dive into the extra goodies v1.6 provides.

Posted in: Technology, dreamweaver by Scott / Tags: ajax, article, learn, spry

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The ‘Hot News’ page on Apple.com has some good news for iPhone owners- according to Steve Jobs, you can get your hands on an official iPhone/iPod Touch SDK in February ‘08. Reportedly the delays were mostly security-related concerns, as Nokia’s third-party application signing plans were referenced (Adobe AIR M5 applications also require code signing, for what it’s worth), but you can read the short but sweet note and the details on Apple’s site right here.

Posted in: Technology by Scott / Tags: apple, iphone

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If you’re using Dreamweaver CS3 but hesitant to get started with AIR development, I put together a very quick one-off screencast showing how to configure DWCS3 for AIR previewing and deployment using the beta AIR Extension for Dreamweaver (available on Adobe Labs).

This screencast covers installation and general functionality of the extension, and should get you up and running quickly. From there, it should be a snap to start leveraging your existing XHTML/JS/Spry/CSS skills to write sweet desktop apps using the AIR runtime.
Enjoy!

Posted in: Technology by Scott / Tags: air, code, dreamweaver

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Notorious Aussie rebel Andrew Muller has written up a great article on building an AIR RSS viewer using Adobe’s Spry framework for the plumbing. Although he’s using Aptana in the article, Dreamweaver users have it just as easy (if not a bit easier) following the same steps, as obviously Spry’s much more integrated with DW CS3 than any other dev tool at the moment. You just need to grab the Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3, which you can pick up for free (in beta form) at Adobe Labs.

Minor modifications to use Andrew’s article with DW CS3:

• Install the AIR Extension for DW CS3 via the Extension Manager.
• I suggest creating a unique site definition for each AIR app, to help keep assets managed well
• Build the RSS application in Spry using either Andrew’s explicit instructions in code, or supplement that workflow with the visual Spry tools in Dreamweaver for a richer coding/GUI experience
• Preview the application using Dreamweaver’s “Preview in Browser” toolbar menu > “Preview in Adobe AIR”
• Package the application using the “Package in Adobe AIR” command from Dreamweaver’s Site menu.

Simple, quick and easy! And great little article to get your feet wet with AIR and Spry. Make sure to give Andrew some props if you like the walkthrough.

Posted in: Community, Technology, dreamweaver by Scott / Tags: air, ajax, spry

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Again proving his boundless reserve of energy and innovation, John Allsopp has just announced an Internet Explorer beta of XRAY, his sweet little page instrospection bookmarklet I noted last week in it’s initial Firefox-supported release. Just one more reason why you should run – not walk – to John’s site and download this little gem postehaste. Just hit the first link above, drag the ‘XRAY IE’ link to your bookmarks toolbar in IE, then revel in your newfound page element wisdom.

Awesome stuff. Thanks again, John- XRAY kicks some major butt.

Posted in: Community, Technology by Scott / Tags: browsers, code, css

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Amidst all the new iMac/iLife/iWork iNews this week, I somehow missed this little tidbit (thanks to JD for the nod)- Apple’s new ‘My iTunes’ site offers several downloadable/embeddable page widgets to share your iTunes prefs with the world- and said widgets are delivered in Flash format.

Widgets and code snippets like this aren’t quite breaking news, but given all the chatter recently about what Apple ISN’T doing with Flash today (most notably the iPhone, of course), I found this a rather interesting example of some cool things Apple IS doing with Flash.

Posted in: Community, Flash, Technology by Scott / Tags: apple, itunes

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Does John Allsopp ever sleep? I swear, between developing Style Master, speaking at conferences, and general Microformats evangelism among his other pursuits that guy is so packed full of energy he makes me feel like a cardboard cutout of myself.

John and WestCIV’s latest venture is XRAY- a small JS bookmarklet you can use to quickly introspect the box model for any element on a page. Whereas Firebug is the ten-ton-monster of site introspection, XRAY is light and easy to use (and just as handy)- just click the bookmarklet on any given page, and you’re shown the entire CSS inheritance hierarchy for the clicked element, it’s dimensions, etc. Beauty and simplicity in a small bookmarklet.

Right now XRAY is only supported in Safari 2/3 on OS X (with some caveats for Windows Safari), and all Mozilla-variant browsers on OS X and Windows (Firefox, Flock, Camino, etc). Howver, reportedly an IE version is also in the works. Any way you slice it, XRAY is a must-have utility for anyone doing serious browser-based work, and you should install it right now. Seriously. And make sure to give John some props/feedback while you’re at it.

Still reading? What are you waiting for?

Posted in: Community, Technology, dreamweaver by Scott / Tags: browsers, code, css

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Twitter’s popular these days, that’s for sure. I’m hooked, at least – and have been for over a year now. And although there’s many very cool third-party clients you can use to consume your tweets, two recently came to my attention that use Adobe technology to deliver your regular tweet fix – TwitterAIR and Spaz.AIR.

First, Aaron West’s sweet TwitterAIR app gets the strong nod-and-wink for being the first AIR Twitter app I’d seen (and damn nicely done, too). Respect.

Secondly – but not least – Spaz.AIR uses both the AIR runtime as well as the free Spry framework from Adobe (along with some JQuery) to do it’s magic. A double shot of Adobe technology in that little package, that’s cool in and of itself.

Now to be perfectly honest- I primarily use the Iconfactory’s Twitteriffic as it both integrates with my menu bar well, and Growl for system notification (mainly, I’ve been using it for so long it’s just become part of my workflow), but were I to rethink it all – which I might – either Spaz or TwitterAIR would be my successors of choice. Boo ya!

Posted in: Community, Technology by Scott / Tags: air, software, twitter

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