Joshua Davis, the well-known artist and technologist based in New York, will be the guest speaker for the next NYMMUG (New York Macromedia Users Group). Joshua will be sharing with the attendees some of his most recent discoveries working with Flash, what promises to make this meeting greatly inspirational.
The meeting is set for next Thursday, March 20th at Motion Over Time. For more information and to RSVP, visit NYMMUG’s web site.
Is anybody using this beta version of the Bandwidth detector I’ve made? I see people downloading it, but not a question nor a comment… If you have anything to say abut that component, please drop me note. Thanks
I just finished reading Al Ramadan’s “Macromedia.com Progress Report: Beta 1″, and it’s been very refreshing to learn how committed these guys are to their customers’ satisfaction. It’s not so much about the instruments they’re using to measure user experience, it’s more about how fast they are working to address the most outstanding issues encountered and reported by the site users.
Something that really surprises me, is the disappearance of the products and solution quick-links at the bottom of the homepage. Al writes in his report that less than 5% of visitors actually used them, during the first beta. Sadly, I am part of that 5% and will miss those “products and solution pickers”, if they are gone for good. I never noticed the “Tray Navigation” though, maybe I need glasses.
In general, I can feel the site has speed up significantly in most sections. Applications like the Macromedia Membership and the Exchange need some more work in that department. I believe is a good thing the development team is trying to find an adequate balance between Flash apps and HTML, integrating both technologies in the dynamic of the site.
I will be releasing version 2.1 of the Bytes-based Preloaders as soon as I can update the documentation; actually, that whole section of the site will be improved.
Things are getting very dynamic at work lately, many projects. Lucky me, it is involving more and more Flash.
Finally, after some weeks of using my leisure hours to work on my new and very own blogging system, I can plug this working beta for testing. This is actually the first ‘new’ posting I’m making from my control panel, although I used it to import all my previous messages to the database.
I’m sorry if some of the old postings have been reproduced in the aggregators as new ones, and some links to older postings may be broken as well. Last night I updated my RSS feed and some of the posting titles could have been altered by a dot (‘.’) and screwed the list.
So, what’s new here? Basically, I followed the most common models from existing blogging software and tried to emulate and integrate them to a MySQL database I designed. This database works with only 2 tables: one for the postings and another one for the comments, and all the functionality and interface is written in PHP. Nothing new yet. What I added to my system, that I think is missing elsewhere, is the ability to notify readers when a new comment is posted on a posting that may interest them. Here, it is accomplished in two ways: you can subscribe to the thread when adding a comment, or as a ‘Listener’. As a listener, you don’t need to add a comment to be notified.
Also, the system supports categorization for my postings, meaning that I can have more than one blog working within the same database. For instance, that short message that appears in my ‘Personal Column’ exists in the same database than the other ones, but it belongs to the ‘personal messages’ category, and it won’t appear in the rss feed aggregators take; furthermore, that category could even have it’s own feed.
Well, I think that’s about all. So, please let me know if you think something is not working properly, or if you have any suggestions. All feedback is very welcome.
It’s been a lot of work, but worth the effort: my new blogging system it’s up and running.
Now it’s for real. Macromedia has just launched it’s new web site, and the news are in everybody’s mouths (and fingers) in the MX community. Remember: this is still a beta version, and it should be taken just like that. Let’s test it, experience it, yell at it… and then practice constructive criticism. Keep in mind that this is one of the first attempts to build an almost all-Flash application with ColdFusion in the back-end, at this scale. I say ‘almost’ because this site is not making use of the features Flash MX offers as a developmet platform: a real Flash application shouldn’t be reloading itself through HTML documents…
I like the new front page a lot, I think it is one major improvement in the usability of the site. Less is more. The information flow is fresh and we (old users) just need to get used to the new arrangement of things in the site… all the links in my bookmarks work, though. About the look and feel… well, I don’t love it, but it works. It looks good, although I miss the Macromedia Logo as a central element of the design.
What is really a pain in the neck is the waiting for each time you load a Flash-based page (reloading the Flash object through HTML documents). We don’t need to know details about which elements are being loaded (i.e. “Processing Content..” and other messages), we just want to see the information as soon as possible, so a single progress bar would be a better way to go. Another thing I think is missing is a provision for broken connections, a status message or a dialog box that prompts us to try again when the information we requested couldn’t be retrieved. This just happened to me a couple of times when editing my profile.
The new Macromedia Exchange requires special attention. Although in some sections it seems like the pages contain more information than they can handle, the improvement in functionality is really awesome. You can ‘subscribe’ for updates on your favorite extensions, the number of views for the extensions has been incremented, and if you happen to have uploaded Extensions to the Exchange, you can actually manage them.
[via Computerworld]
“The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has been working in secret for more than two weeks with the private sector to fix a major Internet vulnerability that could have had disastrous consequences for millions of businesses and the U.S. military.
Since Feb. 14, the DHS and the White House Office of Cyberspace Security have been working with Atlanta-based Internet Security Systems (ISS) to alert IT vendors and the business community about a major buffer overflow vulnerability in the sendmail mail transfer agent (MTA).”
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