links for 2009-01-31

• 30 Essential Controls for Web Interfaces
  Here is a great list of controls/patterns for designing web interfaces for RIA or other web apps.
  (tags: webdesign reference UI patterns)

Annabelle Gets an Animatic

I put together an animatic for the film over the break. Now we have a really good idea how this thing is shaping up. It is really fantastic to finally see these guys moving around on screen, and the animatic has gotten a good response from everyone who has seen it. It is just the shot in the arm that I needed at this time. It really gives me confidence in the direction I am going with this film.

Of course, the best part of putting together this animatic is that the wrinkles really start to show themselves, and boy does this film have some wrinkles. I will be ironing them out this weekend in preparation for the upcoming recording session.

In this weeks podcast, we discuss the animatic in a bit more detail. Give it a listen.

Force-Cast Interviews Dave Filoni

The Force-Cast (a favorite podcast of mine) Recently did an extensive interview with Dave Filoni. Dave is the Supervising Director behind The Clone Wars series and is also well known for his work on Avatar: The Last Air Bender.

If your like me, and you are a fan of The Clone Wars series, (this weeks episode looks like it ROCKS!) then be sure to check this in-depth hour and a half long interview out!

An appropriate title for my first blog post, don’t you think? My primary focus at The Iona Group is in our Learn practice area. This practice area focuses on helping our clients develop and deliver effective learning programs. Our work is primarily in the area of eLearning, although we work hard to recommend the right solutions for our clients and eLearning is not always the right approach.

In any case, I have been doing a lot of reading and thinking lately about what makes good learning and what makes it successful. When you think about it, learning in a corporate setting ultimately has one purpose and one purpose only: to change behavior. To achieve positive business results we need the right behaviors to change, but that is a different topic. What I want to focus on here is how to get people to do things differently from what they are currently doing.

There are three things that affect behaviors: beliefs, attitudes and knowledge. Often, corporate learning only focuses on one of the three: knowledge. This can be problematic because knowing what do to and doing it are often two different things. For instance, think about smoking. There is overwhelming evidence to support the negative health effects of this activity and this information is widely available. And yet, according to a 2006 study by the US Department of Health and Human Services, every day 1,300 children between the ages of 12 and 17 try their first cigarette and go on to become regular smokers. So information alone is not always enough to change people’s behavior.

When I sit down to work on a project with a client I always ask three questions: Who is the audience? What is the message and what do you want people to do differently as a result of your message? What I find is that in general, people have thought a lot about the message and only a little about the audience and what they want the audience to do differently after receiving the message.

A great example of this is safety training. Safety training can be some of the most important learning companies offer their employees. But simply providing people with safe practices and procedures does not necessarily mean they will be followed. The key is to affect people’s attitudes about safety – that it is important and change their belief that following safe practices and procedures – whatever they are – will make a difference. In a recent series of safety training and messages we worked on for one of our clients, we did this by tying our messages to the idea of people returning safely home to their families every day. By connecting safety at work to its impact on loved ones at home, we aimed to produce a more lasting and effective message that would result in people taking safety to heart.

By beginning with the end in mind, and focusing on how to impact peoples’ knowledge, attitude and beliefs, training will become more relevant, more interesting and more personal, resulting in learning that will change behavior and achieve the desired results.

Welcome to my blog. My name is John Feser and I am one of the partners and owners of a creative communications company called The Iona Group. We work with Fortune 100 companies, small and medium sized business and non-profit organizations to help them creatively and effectively communicate their messages. If this sounds too much like a marketing message and more abstract, I apologize. It is always interesting when I describe Iona because what we produce is so diverse (corporate websites, HD video, eLearning, computer interactives), yet how we go about producing these various forms of communication is so incredibly similar. If you would like to learn more, check out our website at www.ionagroup.com.

I am fascinated by how we as humans communicate with each other and how our communication affects how we work and interact. I am interested in everything from our use of technology, to the written and spoken word as well as the impact it has on our relationships, our society and our culture. Obviously, communication is pervasive in every aspect of our lives; so much so that we tend to take it for granted.

My goal with this blog is to share my observations and experiences with communication and how they relate specifically to learning and human performance, especially in the workplace. I’ll explore what makes good communication work and why along with examples of ineffective communication. I welcome your comments and feedback on all my posts and sincerely hope that I learn as much from those who follow this blog as they learn from me.

links for 2009-01-18

• Beautiful and Creative Examples of Vibrant Web Designs – Six Revisions
  Some fantastic uses of color in contemporary web design. Some great great work here.
  (tags: webdesign inspiration color)
• rikrikrik.com – jQuery quickSearch plug-in
  Quickly filter a table dataset via jQuery.
  (tags: jquery filter table)

A Few Plugins, Components or Tool Add-Ons Worth the Money for a Web/RIA Designer

I have shared tools, and components and source code libraries here in the past, primarily focusing on free and open-source libraries. I do enjoy using and getting to contribute to these community projects, but sometimes, there is no way to get around it, you just have to buy a component or plug-in to get the project done. When doing so, it’s really difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here are a few commercially available tools or components that I have used that aid in creating web, RIA or other rich-media experiences like kiosks or tradeshow pieces. There are some add-ons that I have used in the past that I haven’t included here because they were troublesome or too buggy for final use, so view this as a list of only the ones that have stayed in my toolbox after a successful deployment.

• FlashLoaded’s 3D Wall/Spiral/Tube, etc – If you want to create a simple 3D gallery or touch-panel display, need it done quickly and don’t have a lot of time to to learn Papervision, this relatively inexpensive group of component will achieve most of your needs. It’s pretty much bug free and does have a fairly large and accessible API for managing and working with the properties, methods and events in the component. You can integrate video into the the 3d planes, and put interactive SWFs in the panels as well. Pretty cool. That said, if you are already adept at Papervision and have a grasp on how you might want to build image galleries using the library, this product would have very little use to use to you. FlashLoaded does a respectable job at offering support, updating the components when there are bugs or issues and even adding features after a components release, offering updates free of charge to registered purchasers. They are worth a look.

• JumpEye Component’s Menus – JumpEye is a well known rich media design/development consulting company, but they also offer a wide variety of components for sale at their JumpEyeComponents.com site. The menus they have there are pretty good in particular, and fill the void created after Adobe Flash CS3’s release, when the more advanced menu components and accordion panel were inexplicably removed from the product. It’s a shame you have to purchase a replacement for a component that Flash used to ship with straight from Adobe, but it seems that advanced UI components, etc have been migrated out of Flash and into Flex. This site has a number of add-ons available that help you overcome that shortcoming if you need to produce some advanced UI in Flash. For the price, it’s tough to argue for custom development of a menu when a deadline is looming. Highly cusomtizable and powered by XML, the components are flexible enough to make them useful for a wide variety of implementations. Find out more here.

• IconFactory’s IconBuilder- Do you find yourself needing to produce a wide variety of icons for AIR apps, Windows apps, Mac apps, websites, favicons, etc? If so, this will save you a ton of time. If all you ever need is a Favicon from time to time, this probably overkill, but Iconfactory’s IconBuilder is great for simplifying the process needed when moving through the design process for multi-sized icons inside of Photoshop or Fireworks. It can create icons of pretty much every size dimension and palette, even helping you verify how the color indexing will look for final output to older, or smaller icons used in list views, etc. It’s pretty indispensable for that reason. If you are delivering custom apps for clients and you aren’t creating custom icons for those apps, step up to the plate and add some polish to your deliverables. It really finishes off the presentation. This app is for Mac users, for Windows users, but the Mac version does have a few extra niceties for the extra $.

• ixis’s (formerly Softheap) Public PC Desktop – Have you ever produced a kiosk for use at a trade show, exhibit or other installation? How did you lock it down? You know, prevent those pesky users from monkeying with the system? An absolute necessity. This app is super handy for keeping nosy people out of the OS. You can lock down the computer via a white-list for applications, URLs, services, firewalls/proxies or pretty much anything else. Additionally on lockdown, you can have Public PC desktop auto launch your kiosk app. This helps in the daily routine for a exhibit when the computer reboots after being off for the evening. I wouldn’t dream of putting in a touchscreen at a remote location that didn’t have some level of protection on it. This is a key step in setting up that final disk image that gets shipped on pretty much any project we do. This app is by no means the only out there that does this sort of thing, but is probably the easiest to use that still offeres enough configurability to fit your clients needs. The site is pretty poorly designed, but here is a link directly to the product page.

• Zoomifyer – This app gets a bit of use from time to time by me. The intelligent slicing, loading and simple navigation UI it adds for deep image viewing, panning and scrolling is pretty nice. Advanced hotspots, event management and other interactions make this a very nice choice for making an image viewer app. A simple version does ship with Photoshop, but the full product adds a suite of bells and whistles that make the upgrade worth it. To do this sort of thing by hand, you’d need an army of graphic prep artists and a very regimented workflow to ensure the proper consistency. Check out some samples here.

• Multidmedia’s Zinc – More than just a plug-in, this IDE allows for Mac, Windows, and Linux applicaiton compilation. Wht’s the big deal? Why would you use this instead of AIR? Well, not a lot of major client I encounter have made the jump to AIR yet. On top of that, Zinc compiled apps have deeper access to OS level APIs, file IO, Database connections and much much more. This compiler really does take your Flex or Flash app and turn it into a desktop program. It’s got an impressive list of features. My main complaint against it is that the developers seem to prize a rapid release cycle over a robust testing cycle, so sometimes even minor point updates can break previously stable code. I have learned this over the years and now only update Zinc after reading the suport forums and ensuring that the most recent release doesn’t mess things up. This is by far the best SWF to EXE tool out there IMHO, and I have used pretty much all of them. Check it out. Absolutely worth the $ if you have projects that require this sort of functionality.

So there you go, a group of tools I have found useful in my projects over the last couple of years. These get used again and again by me and my team, and maybe you will find a use for them as well. Got others in your toolbox you keep going back to? Share ‘em with me by leaving a comment.

Puppet time!

Along with animation, I really love puppetry. and Josh Burton has stumbled across something great!

Thanks again Josh!

Top Secret Conspiracy

The new viral site for Monsters Vs. Aliens is up now, and it is a lot of fun. As a big fan of UFO’s, Hidden Creatures, and Government Conspiracy, I get a real kick out of this site. Check it out!

2008 In Review – Flash Platform Shortcomings

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m making a list. Or in this case, two. The first list was a celebration of things that happened in 2008 that were perceived by me as being advancements in the Flash world. Well, in the interest of being a true pundit/critic, I have a list of the things that burn me when working in the Flash platform. I’d be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on this list and if you have some things you might want to add.

1. The Flash IDE wasn’t really improved – Now a thing of comic proportions, Flash CS4 Professional has all been but abandoned as a code editor by most professionals I know, respect and follow in Flash platform blog world. Flex Builder, FDT, Flash Develop and many others out there fill the function better. Adobe missed a huge boat by not enhancing this much begrudged part of the IDE. I mean, the autocomplete is dopey, the need or (un)need of import statements is erratic, and on and on. The language has evolved, with AS3 forcing you to write better structured code, but the editor itself is pretty much still a scripting sketchpad. It’s obvious this is an impediment to users learning AS3, as it seems to pop up as a topic on blogs a lot. Case in point (read the comments on Mike Chamber’s post).
2. The Flash Mobile Platform is still pretty much a mess – Now, I might take some heat for this view from some evangelists and others in the mobile trenches, but I don’t see a game changing strategy here. With Blackberry, iPhone and Android all out, all popular and not able to play Flash content yet (I hear Android is coming soon, though), it sure seems a bit disjointed to me. Some phones may use openscreen Flash players eventually, some Flash Lite, some Flash. It’s a bit of a mess, IMHO. Furthermore, when I visit Adobe’s Flash Platform page, I see no mention of Flash for Mobile, you have to dig a bit. I just think we need a concerted effort to put Flash mobile devevlopment front and center on Devnet, and make Flash part of mobile vendors lexicon in their sales pitches, i.e. “Did you know you can play Flash games and watch Youtube videos on this Phone because it has Flash?”, etc.
3. No standard animation syntax across Adobe products – Flash, Flex, After Effects, Spry Framework, Director, heck, even Photoshop are capable of producing animation. All use their own syntax. Some of it is due to mergers and tech acquisitions, some is just due to lack of a “motion czar” at Adobe. Sounds ludicrous, I know, but why should a CS4 user need to know so many syntaxes to make things dance around or produce transitions? Moses supposes propsed this over a year ago, and no movement has taken place on this AFAIK. Dont’ think its a big deal? Look at this diagram. Then look at this one. Which world do you want to work in?
4. Flash Player 9 never got it’s garbage collection issues patched – It’s a bit disconcerting that such a huge bug never got patched as a revision level thing and they waited to completely update the player to fix it. I’ve written about this in the past, and Grant Skinner has a great series of posts about it on his blog, but really when it comes down to it, the poor audio handling in Flash player 9 (also a well documented bug) and lack of a true unload and cleanup mechanism among other things illustrate to me that maybe a 12-18 month revision cycle is just madness. I’m sure it’s half marketing, “Well, Silverlight just bumped their number, so we have to do it for our player, too”, but that doesn’t make it right. Patch and update the software you have, save the revision number changes for big big revelations and allow your devs to sleep at night in stead of updating their code.
5. Ever Diverging APIs – I’ve mentioned this issue on this blog before as well… With a “platform”, it’s apparent that some features that Flash IDE can produce aren’t readily apparent in Flex and vice-versa. Add on top of that the AIR APIs and you start to get a LiveDoc soup. What can one do that the other can’t? What are the dependencies? Etc, etc. Flex’s Framework has some hot stuff in it, and, if you chance upon the docs from a Google search trying to do something in Flash, it may not be clear until you’ve read practically the entire class description and gotten your developer hopes dashed on the glacially slow LiveDocs frame based UI website.
6. Adobe still really doesn’t show the Mac much love at all. – Seriously. Not going to spend much time on this here, but Adobe products just run better on Windows. This pains me. I hate Windows and simply will not switch. Please
7. Death of Flash Paper with no successor in sight – This is a perplexing move by Adobe in my view. FlashPaper had it’s flaws, but it was a capable tech for replicating Acrobat Reader in a light and compact fashion. No more. End-of-Lifed this year and told not to let the door hit it’s backside bits on the way out, it left my team hanging, pretty much immediately after launch on a project. No IE7 support. Nothing. Not even a proposed replacement or simple way to write PDFs straight from the Flash player. Seems like it was killed on some sort of sacrificial altar of Adobe/Macromedia merger-y black magic. “One shall die to make the other stronger” crud like that. I’m sure I may be exaggerating, but c’mon… Where I am supposed to go after this? Print2Flash, AlivePDF, etc are all promising, but why no Adobe solution in CS4/Flash Player 10? The Flash API’s PrintJob class blows for much more than most simple jobs… Help us!
8. CS4 Installer not much better than CS3 installer – John Nack’s blog has been the hotspot of talk from the installer front, with several posts commenters lambasting the team and berating the children of the installer team’s developers. I won’t go that far, but wow. Just please please please make CS5’s better. Shock and awe us with its simplicity. Maybe even *gasp* use the OSes’ native installers (If Final Cut Studio can install simply on OSX and MS Office can do the same on Windows, Adobe can figure it out)! If nothing can be done here though, at least make Adobe Updater go away and stop making us quite all our apps while your yipping dog fails yet again.
9. SEO enhancements for Flash, but with no real documentation – Oh, how I wanted this to work out. This summer, it was announced that Adobe and Google would be working together to improve the searchability of Flex and Flash content. Ryan Stewart even ran a contest on it. Only real downside… no actual documentation. Or technotes. Or tutorials. Or, you get the idea. Just a simple little FAQ. C’mon! Peter Elst has a little more info on this at his blog.
10. Global Pricing for Adobe Products unfair as ever – The world definitely doesn’t seem flat when it comes to selling downloadable software packages. Take a look at this comparison of prices for CS4 across the world. Ouch. John Dowdell has a bit on this at his blog entitled CS4 painpoints, so it’s obviously a known issue there, but not sure what’s going on in this realm right now. I do know that it has to hurt to upgrade when the software costs twice as much if you live outside of the US. May as well fly to buy it, or just skip the revision and save the dough in this downtrodden global economy. I have a feeling alot of people may be doing just that.

So, there you go. My list of the ‘08 disappointments in the Flash platform. Any things I missed in your opinion… I’m interested in hearing from other designers and devs out there on this one.