Velloff.com

Well, it has been a long time coming. Finally I have a new site up to showcase some of my best work.

Check it out 

Things have been super busy these days. I finally got a spare minute and grabbed the latest build of  Papervision3D. I decided to spend a couple hours playing around with it. There’s lots of buzz around the impressive new 3D engine.

In case you haven't run across it yet, Papervision3D is a 3d rendering engine for Flash. It has been ported (in alpha currently) to AS3 to take advantage of the AVM2 performance increases. It features linear texture mapping, optimized for rendering speed and quality. It can load Collada scenes you export from Maya, Max and Blender. It looks like there are some big brains on this one and I am excited to see how development progresses.

The first most obvious use is a new level of flash gaming. The bar is REALLY going to be raised in this arena. The less obvious use is this can really allow people to showcase products and display data in more intuitive and engaging ways.

You often get to see good technology surface and some impressive demos developed… but rarely does something so quickly get integrated into mainstream projects. Coming from the agency side of things, I know of projects already being developed for major brands using this technology; and that is great. 

Things just keep getting more exciting in this space.

Check out this Papervision 3D demo that shows some cool potential to queue up multiple videos without crushing the processor. 

Interactive talent? Where are you? Are you hiding?

Even if an agency can lure you into "shop hopping," there is still too much work and (contrary to a certain belief system) there are not 80 hours in a day. Faced with the fact that everyone wants a viral web ad,guerrilla micro site,rich internet application, anything in Flash/Flex or "what is that new Papervision3D thing….I want it!," how does an agency just get work done?

Strategy: Try to get anyone who has the word "Flash" and/or "Creative" in their title to move to my shop.

I picked up my new Creativity Magazine today to see a full page advertisment by R/GA trying to find implement just that strategy. The objective of the ad is for Creatives to realize how stifled and "stuck" they are at their current agency and see their eye-opening future at R/GA. Here's the final well-written line. 

"How much of this will James take, churning out more and more obvious solutions for the same lateral channels? He does really have it in him to think big, but folks of sanity need to be moved into action by moments of fear. If, for you to step out onto a ledge is impossible, then be a friend of the cold and lonely side of creativity. James is blissful. Has anyone really gone blind by staring into the sun?"

In keeping on the this topic, we heard about another interesting hiring strategy. Word is that CP+B put packets on the seats of chairs at OMMA Hollywood a few weeks ago. The packets were clever little kits to assist you in

a) tendering your resignation at your current shop and

b) to move over to work at their shop.

Although not as fun or creative, this reminds me a bit of the way lawyers are recruited – late night calls to the offices in hopes of discovering disgruntled employees putting in late hours.

More on the "crisis"  

AKQA NY Needs Developers
Developer Shortage slows web development
Digital Talent Dearth Breeds Crisis
Flash Developers Needed*

*Interesting update to this last link. 

I still agree that even though there is a STRONG need for talent – salaries are not as inflated as speculated in this article. In the January 2007 edition of Entrepreneur yesterday, that the overall salary increase has only been 4%-5%+. However,the article pointed out that key management/talent is being recruited with stronger salary and bonus options. It is difficult to keep employees who are jumping around and most likely a $20K raise is not going to provide the retention you are expecting. So if you are looking for a new "Director of Technology" or "Creative Director",  stock options, moving expenses, housing allowances, 20 – 30% salary increases and even a $50K promised year-end bonus are all things that I have heard being incorporated into packages. Wait til online advertising accounts for more than 17% of the overall ad spend! Better start getting some advanced (and real) development classes into those interactive College programs!

One last note. I don't mind last minute contract projects or those that have less "details" than anticipated. It's ok even if we haven't worked together on a previous venture. However….
(Posted by Lindsey)

Will you be attending Adobe MAX in Las Vegas this year? I will be giving a 15 minute capabilities presentation at MAXUP, a contribution based "unconference" designed to get people involved and share their ideas and work.

"The Adobe MAX conference showcases Adobe software. MAXUP will allow designers and developers and to showcase their work created with Adobe tools in Barcamp format. "

This is hosted by Ted Patrick and Mike Potter… 

I sat down to play around with some of the data binding utilities in AS3 as it relates to building custom components and got completely distracted by some of the new "toys" Adobe has given us in Flex Data Services.

I wanted to test out some of serialization capabilities in AMF3. I must say, I was very excited by the result.  As it turns out, any class on the Java side that implements java.utils.Collection (ie. ArrayList) gets converted to mx.collections.ArrayCollection  when it comes over the wire.

Also, you can map your VO classes to Java VO classes and send your strong typed objects back and forth. Gone are the days of the layer of abstraction and the conversions necessary when sending complex data types over AMF!

Java UserVO:

    package com.flexRemotingTest;

    import java.util.*;

    public class UserVO implements java.io.Serializable{
        public String firstName;
        public String lastName;
        public ArrayList buddies;
       
        public UserVO()
        {
            this.firstName = null;
            this.lastName = null;
            this.buddies = null;
           
        }
        public UserVO getInstance()
        {
            return this;
        }
    }

Mapping your UserVO on the client side to UserVO on Java side using RemoteClass meta-data. 

As you can see, the result is a strong typed object UserVO! No casting or re-deserialization! 

Woohoo! the buddies property of type Java ArrayList mapped to ArrayCollection… making it component ready! the values of the ArrayCollection are of type UserVO.

 Just update your model with the UserVO instance… i cast it here but you dont have to as it is already cast.

And voila'! Any components bound to your model data are updated! 

The FWA was kind enough to offer to publish an article today on a concept that I have always taught/impressed upon other developers. It's based on the different types of flash developers and how a "hybrid" flash developer can advance in the industry by sharpening skills and also alleviate the oh so common rift between designer and developer. 

Check out the article –

Hybrid Flash Developers: A unique species

Websites awarded site of the day or month are judged for various criteria broken down this way - 

• Design 40%
• Navigation 25%
• Graphics 15%
• Content 15%
• Personality 5%

It's easy to submit your work to see if you stack up to the global competition.  

The FWA is currently celebrating the 10 year anniversary of Flash by allowing visitors to vote for the most influential flash project each decade. Be sure to get your vote in here. 

well i have to say i gave flex a really close look. as a mac user i installed parallels, bought xp pro and installed the flex trial. something about flex just doesnt “compute” for me. it just feels too much like something one(not me) could pull of with dhtml and ajax. as someone who really believes the impact of a site lies in the design and “feel” of the site or application, i really cant get into the mxml world quite yet. yes, i know you “could” pull off just about anything using flex with a load of actionscript… but why? rapid development? sure. my problem with this is that nothing i have ever done or seen done well online was “rapid”. i was explaining some of the new developments in flash to a developer i used to work with… he said “At the end of the day.. it’s all written in C”… well, i said “sometimes it’s not the tool but what you do with it.” that is my main problem with flex… i feel it may not force, but definitely promotes mediocre work. now let’s get to the good part of flex… eclipse. while i may not be willing to use flash components and flex, i really appreciate the effort put into the eclipse plugin for actionscript projects. beautiful work. the documentation is superb. the debugging and project management options are on par with any platform i have seen… svn, introspection, hinting… its just flat out great. i will be using flex for all future projects… but i wont be touching mxml for now…

nick

www.velloff.com 

I spent a couple hours trying to figure out why my ComboBox component closed when I released the scroll handle. I ended up having to go into the messy source of mx.controls.scrollClasses.ScrollThumb and make a couple changes. In the interest of time I will only publish the fix if someone else has the problem.

those that work with adobe flash know that different people have varied strengths and skill sets in reference to the flash medium. i have found in working with developers and designers that each tend to focus too closely on their role in a project and do not take the time to understand the project objectives and/or full picture. when working with a more design oriented person, i find that the they tend not to look at technical elements as they relate to the project and solely focus on the visual and emotional impact of the work. the more developer oriented individual tends to solely focus on the technical implementation and can lose site of the importance of the emotional and visual impact of the project.
if i had a dime for every time a developer missed a detail pertaining to visuals of a site… well i might be blogging from my own personal island somewhere. for example… say… “pixel fonts”. back in the days before “advanced” text control introduced in flash 8, designers often used pixel fonts that would render very crisp characters. there were a couple rules, though… size had to be 8px and the textfield had to be “on pixel” which meant the x/y coordinates had to be a whole integer. well this is where some developers didn’t take the time to be sure the design is rendered as intended. this was especially prevalent when menus were generated dynamically and moved… and to match the design, all you really had to do was round the coordinate to the nearest whole integer. seems simple … but you have no idea how many times it was missed and in turn continued the rift between the two groups. the designers felt that this lack of attention to detail proved a lack of investment in their design, or just pure laziness. we have all experienced the rift between the groups – as both are sensitive to their talents and hard work. but the two groups really shouldn’t be so challenged to understand each other. making sure that both developer and designer are involved in the project from day one and regularly throughout will ensure project success and reaching the end goal with a little less drama and headache that come from these relationship issues. remember… your talent in solving complex programmatic challenges can translate into a great asset to solve visual interface design issues.. and can make the success of the project that much more rewarding.

For some ideas check out the “code head checklist” that I update with suggestions regularly.