Oscar Trelles

James Talbot, from Macromedia, will be talking about Macromedia Flex at NYMMUG’s upcoming monthly meeting, to be held on Thursday (April 29th). I don’t have the exact agenda for the presentation at this time, but James is a very knowledgeable person and a very dynamic speaker, so you can expect a very informative and enjoyable session. I’m definitely dropping by, so I hope I see you there.

For more details about the presentation, and to RSVP visit NYMMUG’s website.

Although the title of this post states the obvious, I just read good document that can help make the case with stubborn clients. Bunnyfoot Universality, an usability and accessibility consulting firm in the UK, has published a whitepaper on user response to pop-up ads.

Using a sophisticated non-intrusive eye tracking system, in combination with attitudinal interviews and other techniques frequently present in focus groups, Bunnyfoot Universality delivers an insightful view into users reactions to pop-up ads. Is interesting to see how they synchronize eye-tracking with video feeds, to see the expression on the subjects faces when browsing through web pages.

The results of study pretty much confirms what we find on our on experience: Pop-up ads not only don’t work, but they drive people away from websites that ‘attack’ them with that kind of publicity, harming both the website’s traffic and the brands they advertise, in that fashion.

Thanks to this cold I’m having, I’ve been giving the gift of time, to catch up with my unread magazines. Browsing through more than 20 issues of several IT-related publications, I’ve found a couple of articles on Flex, which I wanted to comment here.

The first one is an article by Jon Udell, for InfoWorld (March 29th issue), where he discusses some of the most important aspects of Flex, as a platform for RIA development. Although he makes a point when asking for XPath support to probe complex XML structures, he finds everything else worth a try, at the very least. He declares that working with Flex for about a week left him “hungry for more”, and that’s something I can relate to, although I haven’t had the time to sit and create something from scratch. In general, Jon makes a good job describing how Flex works and who will benefit from the new technology, while sharing his own experience with the tool.

On the other hand, the subtitle for this article from eWeek (April 12th issue) claims to reveal some shortcomings in Flex’s first bake, but the article immediately dismisses any, thus making the whole thing completely pointless. However, I would like to comment on something that Jim Rapoza says in the article: he claims that although the combination of MXML, ActionScript and Flash components provides great flexibility, “it is also a potential weakness, as developers will constantly have to bounce between environments when building Flex applications.” I strongly disagree: Flex has been designed for collaborative, multidisciplinary teamwork, and it’s price tag confirms this. The only thing required to succeed using Flex is good production design. Besides, I believe giving choices to the public is paramount. In the same fashion, not tying the developer to an exclusive editor for MXML allows for broader and easier adoption. I’m currently using DW to edit my MXML files in windows, and the super-popular vi under Linux. There are some weaknesses, but that’s not it. Consider Flash Player 7′s ubiquity as a limitation, as it is required to run Flex applications; consider the current price as an obstacle for small and mid-size companies… those are weaknesses that should be commented.

Completely off-topic, but I thought I would share this link with you, as it may suit our busy lifestyles

I just got this message from an old friend from high school, with whom I just recently got in touch again. Of course, we don’t remember each other’s birthday, so he got account at BirthdayAlarm.com and notified me, in order to go and add my birthday to his list of reminders. A simple need, and a simple solution. I’m sure there might be tens of other similar services, but this is the first one I’m using one.

By the way, if you want me to remember your birthday, follow this link.

Well, it’s time to eat my own usability dog food. Ever since I redesigned this site, I’ve been trying to monitor your people have been using it. As one can expect, I haven’t received much direct feedback from visitors, and most of it has been positive. I’m glad most of users of this site find it easy to use and not so ugly.

However, without critique it is difficult to make things better, as one may assume that “everything is fine”, while people just won’t tell you what is wrong, or what they would want modified. Some times it just happens that usability problems are not that obvious, or are difficult to put in words. This might sound familiar to those of you involved in usability tests, survey evaluations, etc. In general, your public will most likely not answer questions related to quality if your product is “good enough”, they will only comment if your product is outstanding or if they have complaints

So, I’ve been checking the statistics for the last couple of months, and I’m happy to see that most my assumptions were correct. As a matter of fact, the new organization has determined a greater polarization in the statistical results, which makes it easier to read visitors’ behavior. During the migration to my new server, I started using a new program for statistical analysis: AWStats. I used it before (version 5, I think), but it wasn’t installed in my new box, so I got version 6 running, which does a great job discriminating viewed traffic from non-viewed traffic. It has many other great features which allow for more detailed information about your traffic. If you use another web traffic analyzer, you may notice some differences in the number of hit and visits reported. For instance, Webalizer reports an average of 602 daily visits for this month, while AWStats tells it was only 474. The difference is significant and is due to the fact that AWStats lets me leave out of the count any traffic generated by aggregators, robots, my visits to the statistics pages, etc., producing a ultimately cleaner report.

Two months, however, are not enough time to make a serious study, even for a small site like mine, but I feel like this is going somewhere. During this time I’ve adding more tools to the blog, some for you adn some for me. For example, that list of searches at the bottom updates with every new query, I am counting the times a post is viewed, etc. If you have any suggestions, please let me know.

So, it seems that the downloadable trial version of Flex made it faster to the DevNet subscriptions page, than the CD I ordered!

Well, not really true… you see, I use a P.O. Box as my mailing address, but I haven’t had the time to go and check it since last Saturday. So, my CD is probably there, waiting for me to pick it up.

I’m already downloading my copy of Flex for Linux, which is about 101 Mb, so it will a take a few minutes…

This is more of a note to myself and is not Flash related, but it might be useful to someone out there. Bottom line is that I want to know where to find this info later on, for proper documentation. Anyway, I needed to replicate the experience you get when accessing a redirection system like the ones used by the PHP online manual (try http://www.php.com/mysql_query) or Macromedia’s ‘go’ pages (try http://www.macromedia.com/go/flex).

I found out this could be done directly from Apache, using mode_rewrite, a module write by Ralf Engelschall and available on Apache versions later than 1.3. Here you will find detailed information about how complicated processes does mod_rewrite relies on to provide extremely flexible and powerful URL manipulation mechanisms… and here you will find a guide to some popular uses for mod_rewrite. Both are highly recommended readings.

But if you are in a hurry, and would just like to have a solution for simple redirections like the examples mentioned, all you need is to follow this steps:

First, we create the php file that would create the redirection. For sake of simplicity and to demonstrate the point of this example, we will just print the filename request:

Then, we create a new .htaccess file on the directory you will be using for redirection, in this case /go:

That’s it! Now, whenever you make a request to your ‘go’ directory, index.php will print the last part of your url request. For example, http://www.digitalmediaconcepts.com/go/something.

Using some instructions we could redirect queries to specific documents, or send every failed request to a different web server. Very handy.

Although this might not be completely new to some, I wanted to share the whole list of ‘quickeys’ available. As you may know, quickeys allow you to you press the escape key followed by a sequence of two letters, and have the the Actions Panel complete the correct code for you. For example, if you press Esc + 'gp', Flash will write the complete gotoAndPlay() for you.

I knew a couple of combinations more, but then I found out all those codes are contained in the ActionsPanel.xml configuration file. So, I wrote a little script to parse that file, and the result was this list of quickeys:

Mixed feelings this week. While everybody agrees with the huge potential of Flex, as a powerful platform for RIAs delivery, it’s initial pricing has almost everybody turned down. The little guy wants to play with it too, but with no enterprise level budgets to justify a single license, lots of great ideas will not meet Flex in production soon enough. Or will they?

If you work in a large enterprise, you are most probably familiar with licensing prices for control version applications, content management suites and collaboration tools, that can be 3 or 4 times what Macromedia is asking for Flex. I was recently involved in some product research for a client; we were looking for a cost-effective enterprise level content management system, and the price quotes we got ranged from $40k to $160k. That’s one of the reasons my jaw didn’t drop on monday when we all learned Flex’s price tag. Since the beginning, Flex was marketed stressing the fact that it was targeted to “enterprises”, although a formal definition is missing.

Small shops will have to wait until a volume licensing is available to hosting providers. While it happens, you can either start working with Flex’s developer edition, or explore other alternatives. I ordered the trial CD on monday, but I learned today that Flex’s developer edition will be available to DevNet Pro subscribers… a bit too late to cancel the order. Anyway, even the trial version needs the underlying support to be worthwhile; remember that you would need ColdFusion or J2EE running on your server, etc. Here is the list of requirements for different platforms, just in case you were wondering. If all the ROI talk over at Macromedia’s Flex Home doesn’t convince you, or you just can’t afford preparing a server just to try Flex, you can try Laszlo’s solution, which has a developers edition available for free, right now. I just downloaded it, so I’ll give it a try later, probably during the weekend.

Regardless of your decisions in the short-term, the most important aspect of Flex is that it is bringing together people from very different backgrounds. I remember having a conversation with Sean Corfield around this subject, back in Sydney during MXDU’s speakers BBQ; Flex is coming to close the gap between the ‘traditional’ Flash developers and designers, and those hardcore application developers, harnessing the collective effort toward a single objective: create richer experiences. During the time of the beta, I’ve got the feeling that some fellow Flashers where confused about what would their role be once Flex released. Some felt threatened by the idea of their job being taken over by the new players in the Flash game. Not quite. As I wrote in a comment over at Daemonite, I think “it is probably easier for Flash IDE users to learn Flex, than for hardcore developers to deal with the Timeline. Let’s don’t forget that Flex only generates RIAs based on Flash content already existent in the form of SWC files on the server.” Flex is designed to compile MXML files into SWFs, based on components already existent in the server. So, unless they want everything Halo, somebody needs to create Flash materials before hand. And those are the new opportunities Flex generates for us!

Ultimately, Flex will help pushing up Flash as a platform for serious application development. The days of Flash being synonymous of cheesy advertising and annoying popups are counted.