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Adobe Design Achievement Awards: Finalists

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ADAA 2011 Finalists

I strongly suggest that if you are interested in digital artistry (including; installations, app development, browser-based design, mobile, animation, game design, print, et cetera) you head over and check out the Adobe Design Achievement Awards finalists for 2011.

You can read about each finalist, view team members, see samples of the work, and even comment or share via social media. Really amazing work from people all over the globe can be seen over at http://www.adaagallery.com/.

Plus, if you want to attend the awards ceremony in Taipei, there is an open invitation this year!

Flash Development for Android Cookbook – eBook giveaway!

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I’ll be at Adobe’s San Jose headquarters this week for the Adobe Education Leader Institute – and thought this will be a great time to run a little contest in promotion of my book! I’ll be giving away a couple copies of the eBook version through Packt.

The eBook version is great; I’ve been using this myself, as I go about my mobile work for quick reference and it’s been delightfully helpful. Very easy to do a quick text search or pull up the table on contents and so forth.

All you have to do to win a copy is visit https://www.packtpub.com/flash-development-for-android-cookbook/book and leave a comment here about a feature that interests you. Then, just link to your comment on Twitter – use the hashtag #FlashAndroidBook and be sure to follow me or it will not count!

The giveaway will run for a week and I’ll pick winners at random on Sunday the 31st! Spread the word!

Incidentally; for those interested in reviewing the book, contact Shaveer Irani (shaveeri – AT – packtpub.com) with the subject line of “Flash Development for Android Cookbook – Review” and the publisher may just hook you up!

Capturing a Domain

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After 4 long years, I am once again the owner of JOSEPHLABRECQUE.COM.

Let’s rewind to about 5 years ago. I’d been running my weblog for a while at http://josephlabrecque.com/ and things were going well. I was getting good traffic and this actually contributed to my nomination for the Adobe Education Leader program.

In 2008, I had a humbling experience. It was such a humbling experience that the very thought of having a domain name that matched my own was disgusting. I deleted my weblog – deleted the database, even. Then I went in and unregistered the domain. Canceled. Deleted. Gone.

I tend to react to things in extreme ways… and I felt really good about what I had done. Free of the trappings of the internet and so forth. Feeling as though I had gained some anonymity back. That I was better off without such self-identification. Here is an except of the letter I posted for visitors:

While the content of this website may have been useful for some, it is an unnecessary and fleeting distraction for myself. We have very little time on this earth with those that are close to us and we have to make the most of it. The entire idea of having a website domain bearing my name makes me ill, as the past few months have been rather humbling to say the least. While there is value in what I do- much of it is still dust and ashes and I cannot waste my time on trivial pursuits.

Of course, a few months went by and I started blogging again. I set up a new WordPress instance off of my memoryspiral.com domain and was actually able to reconstruct a bit of the data I found in backups. This is where that weblog has lived ever since, In Flagrante Delicto!

You see, I tried to get josephlabrecque.com back but it had been snatched up by a domain reseller. Apparently, there are companies out there that exist solely to snatch up domains as they expire (or are cancelled by crazy people) and then sit on them hoping that someone will want to buy the domain for some outrageous amount of money. In the meantime, they throw a page up with a bunch of ads to see how much revenue it generates. If enough money is made off the ads, then they renew the domain each year, else, they will let it go.

Apparently, josephlabrecque.com was making someone a nice chunk of ad revenue. After the first year went by, I signed on with GoDaddy’s backorder/monitoring system. The service they offer is that if the domain is released by the current owner, and passes through the grace period without activity, finally to be released for someone to freely purchase… that they will snatch it up for you. Well, the first year came and went with the squatter renewing registration. Damn.

The next year came and the same thing happened. On the third year, I had hope- but someone else snatched it up before my backorder service could. Another squatter. Damn.

This past year, however… was different. I started getting emails from strangers. Emails like the following:

Priority?

So genuine...

A lot of people huh? Doubtful.

You are?

Selling something that isn't yours huh?

Wow. Hadn’t gotten these before. After checking in with GoDaddy; sure enough the domain was pending deletion from the current registrar. I continued to monitor the cryptic domain status dashboard and these people continued to send me emails offering to buy the domain for me. I stuck to my guns with hope that the backorder which was in place would actually work this time.

On May 4th; I read this:

This damn thing updates like once a day is all...

And later that day, I actually got the domain back. Hot Damn.

Gotcha!

Verified through a WHOIS query!

GoDaddy let's me know a day later...

So I guess the moral of this story is that persistence pays off (sometimes) but it helps if you don’t shoot yourself in the foot to begin with. If anyone else is going through this waiting game- there is hope. You just might have to wait 4 or 5 years.

“Flash Rules”? <= Yeah, it’s pretty nice to work with :)

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"Flash Rules"

I’m duplicating my comments from the post “Flash Rules” over at QuirkeyBlog here, as I think they are a pretty good summary of my thoughts on Flash and “HTML5″ at the present time. Aaron makes some great points, and is really fair with his assessment of the current situation. most of the comments are pretty balanced too, aside from the usual injection of zealotry.

I strongly encourage anyone who feels strongly about these issues to go and comment over at his blog in support of his honest attempt at cross-platform dialog.

Great perspective article. Really enjoy reading a level-headed assessment of the current opinions surrounding Flash.

Flash, as a platform, reaches across a variety of devices and environments. It isn’t just ads, video, or even Web. A lot of articles critical of Flash never mention this. I’ve been working with the platform as my primary focus for over 10 years and have only made a banner ad with Flash once (and that was many years ago). Most of the Flash work I do these days for the Web is to build up modular functionality just not possible any other way. Most of my development projects are now done outside of the browser on desktops and mobile; all using Flash Platform tech.

HTML, on the other hand, is also beginning to seed across devices and environments. Already well beyond the traditional mark-up usage it was intended for. Now that HTML5 (along with CSS3 and JavaScript) is picking up some of the functionality that has been in the Flash realm for years- it can only be a good thing as choice is fundamental to the Web.

Flash developers have no need to worry as the platform has expanded to envelope much more than what it has been known for. HTML developers should be grateful to Flash for pushing the Web forward and encouraging growth in HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. It’s mutually beneficial :)

I’ll also note that most Flash developers are also quite well-versed in other languages and platforms simply because of the nature and history of Flash. We are no strangers to HTML!

It’s really too bad we don’t see more level-thinking along these lines from the big tech sites who always seem to make it an all-out war between Flash and HTML. It’s not a war. Not even a battle. More like a one-sided quarrel that’s gone on far, far too long now.

Simplified WordPress Theme for 2011

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I’ve been wanting to take control of my blog theme for some time in order to both simplify how everything was being displayed, and to obtain a greater degree of flexibility over time. There are a lot of great themes out there for WordPress, and I’ve been fairly happy with many of those I’ve tried – but they still were not exactly what I wanted.

I decided to come up up with something of my own by creating a child theme of the default WordPress “TwentyTen”. Seeing as how I don’t need many features on here, and that “TwentyTen” is a modern design that supports all the new 3.0 features, a child theme sounded perfect. I also tend to shift these around over time, and this would allow that as well.

Adobe Fireworks


The first thing I did is sketch out on paper a sample of the sort of layout I was looking to create. I then created a basic measured layout in Fireworks, followed by a number of textured image segments for the navigation menu, page background, and content area. Fireworks is great for stuff like this, due to the robust texturing system available.

Adobe Dreamweaver


Dreamweaver CS5 has extended support for PHP-based CMS and blogging systems like WordPress. During prerelease, I was playing around with these features quite a bit but had actually never done any work with the final release. It’s actually very convenient to be able to view and interact with the live website files (on my testing server, of course) while designing and tweaking elements of the theme. Dreamweaver can also be enabled to provide code-completion for core WordPress functionality, although I didn’t need it in this case.

Most of what I did was remove a lot of the header stuff I didn’t need, and create a custom navigation menu along the top of the page. The rest of the work was just a lot of CSS hack and slash to get things looking right, setting up new elements, and skinning everything with my exported images. It actually went a lot more smoothly than anticipated.

Adobe BrowserLab


Most of the cross browser rendering checks were done on my local machine using Chrome 8, FireFox 4 beta, and Internet Explorer 8. I have other machines I could log into and check browsers like Opera or the IE9 beta, but don’t have a way to test on OSX from my home. Anyone familiar with DropFolders knows the snails-pace I take when it comes to doing any Apple stuff… So I fired up BrowserLab and was able to check my basic design rendered on what must have been nearly 20 different browsers across Windows and OSX.

It is interesting to see how relatively similar the design rendered across browsers. The most trouble that I noticed was lack of support for my embedded fonts in older browsers. You can also see in the above image that we definitely have some shifting going on in regard to the positioning of elements on the page, but nothing so terrible to render the design unusable.

I’m very pleased with both the resulting design, and the simple, unified workflow involved in getting to this point. There are lots of little things that will probably come up which I’ll modify in the future… but it’s great to know now how very simple it will be to do so.