Adobe MAX 2009

Adobe TV has a MAX 2009 channel with a lot of content, with videos divided into three categories – Develop, Design and Envision.

Here’s some of the highlights:

Develop:

• Building Applications for iPhone with Flash Professional CS5
  Aditya Bansod
• Designing Applications for Desktops and Mobile Devices with Adobe AIR
  Arno Gourdol
• Designing and Developing for the Multiscreen Web
  Thibault Imbert
• Multi-touch Development with Flex
  Andrew Trice
• Creating Real-time Social Apps with Flex and Flash Collaboration Service
  Kevin Hoyt
• Introduction to BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services
  James Ward
• What’s Coming in Adobe AIR 2
  Christian Cantrell

Design:

• Multi-touch and the Flash Platform
  Daniel Dura and Matt Bugbee
• From Big Screen to Browser, Desktop and Mobile Device with Flash
  Jonathan Wall
• Flash for the Digital Home: Flash on TV!
  Matt Snow
• Using Code to Prototype Interactive Design
  Remon Tijssen
• Design Considerations for Contextually Aware Solutions
  Ali Ivmark and Christian Robertson
• MegaPhone: Your Phone is Your Controller
  Colin Moock

Envision:

• Adobe MAX 2009 Keynote: Day One
  Shantanu Narayen
• Adobe MAX 2009 Keynote: Day Two
  Ben Forta
• Open Screen Project Fund: Fuelling the Future of Flash Experiences
  Bill Perry and Mark Doherty

Future of Web Apps

Carsonified have only uploaded a small handful of talks over the past few weeks but they’re all worth a watch. So far I’ve only found their London talks on their Vimeo channel, but the Dublin sessions have started to appear on the FOWA site.

Here’s what I’d go for:

• The Future of HTML5
  Bruce Lawson
• How to Build Amazing Web Apps
  Blaine Cook
• The Future is Ruby without Rails
  Emma Perksy
• 14 Web App Survival Tips
  Ryan Carson
• Introducing Atlas: A Visual Development Tool for creating Web Applications
  by Francisco Tolmasky
• Taking your Site from One to One Million Users
  Kevin Rose
• Branding and Marketing Essentials for Your Web App
  Alex Hunter

I’ll update as and when more work their way online!

I’m loving this.

Basically, you put in a Web address, collect a browser ’set’ of those supported (currently, Firefox 2.0 & 3.0 on both XP and OS X, IE 6 & 7 for XP and Safari 3.0 for OS X) and screenshots of actual browser renderings are generated in real time.

Not only that, but there is a side-by-side ‘2-up’ comparison view to see overall differences – and even better, an onion skin (and zoom!) view can be used to measure discrepancies to the pixel.

More info and an FAQ is on the Adobe Labs page.

Back in December at the Adobe MAX Sneak Peeks session, I saw a demo of ‘Meer Meer’, which has now fully evolved to become this.

I’m not sure about the Web version, but I think the Dreamweaver CS4 plug-in stores all the popular webkits and browser engines, rendering them in real-time like a highly enhanced version of the ‘design view’ that we’ve always been familiar with. My download is halfway through now.

I’ve written posts about hacking your operating system to run multiple versions of Firefox and Internet Explorer, and recommended virtual machines for cross-platform testing - all  that seems so over-complicated and completely redundant now.

Brilliant!

There’s also a lot of talk on Twitter about it, I think a lot of people share my feelings.

I managed to get to the opening night on Thursday, mainly to see ScreenGrab09, the degree show of Bournemouth Uni’s Interactive Media Production course, that I graduated from two years ago.

One of the great things about the course is the diversity of work that the students regularly produce.

At ScreenGrab you can see Web apps, games, interactions and interactive experiences, quite unlike the rest of the work under the ‘design’ banner of the week,stood out from the rest of the work I saw from other universities on the night.

Vic Bishop’s OIC, photo by Will Goldstone

Corin Wilkins’ MyFace, photo by Will Goldstone

Today is actually the last day that ScreenGrab will be in London, so if you have the chance to get down to Brick Lane, it’s highly recommended.

Otherwise, the show moves to back down Bournemouth exhibiting on the Talbot Campus on the 4th and 5th of June (more details here).

You can follow the #screengrab09 tag on Twitter to see what people thought about the show, and photos of the event are collecting on Flickr, tagged screengrab09.

Avoiding copyright infringement means I can’t use any bad-ass images of Superman, we can’t have any people we ‘know’ – assuming this includes famous people scratches out using Kirk, Kara Thrace or Tim Berners-Lee etc – even his Semantic Web stack is too square to use as well. (Put this on a t-shirt for me and I’ll be your friend forever).

Anyway, after trawling Flickr for anything half decent under a Creative Commons license I’ve narrowed it down to five images – bit geeky, quite unimaginative, cliché retro.

TAC-2 controller

"Yeah" by Sameli

The background is as good as the joystick itself, TMNT ftw.

Atari 2600 games

"Day 323/366" by Great Beyond

Brilliant. We could use patterns instead of photos if we like – this is almost both.

Commodore CBM

"Cutting Edge Technology, 1981" by Superbomba

Could I pass this off as me?

Girl coder!

Original by Dave & Bry

Older still, maybe a bit obvious.

Then I started looking for trash – I love photography of pretty much anything abandoned or broken. Flickr has a great pool of Abandoned Swimming pools.

Mac and Toaster

"Macintosh Plus + Toaster" by Eric__I_E

They belong together!

Abandoned Monitors

"Four Toxic Computer Monitors" by Tonx

Possibly the strongest contender. Looks like they’re their holding cables ready to cross the road. Not too overly techy either?

What do you think?

Suggestions/recommendations/votes welcome – need to decide before Friday!

But what about the other browser choices? After all, my original intention was a to develope a versatile testing environment, specifically for cross-browser, cross-platform intended web sites.

Surprisingly, running multiple versions of the other major browsers isn’t as complicated as the Firefox process.

Opera, for example, gives you the option whether to install the set-up as an upgrade or separately, straight out of the box. They offer alternate releases of the current version on their site (9.62 at the time of writing) and have a publicly available archive that goes back to version 3.21 for any old release candidates you need to test.

If you want to run multiple versions of Internet Explorer, you can alter various system and user profile settings in a similar way to my method with Firefox, but it’s far easier to take advantage of the many ’standalone’ versions you can find online. These are generally third-party, non-Microsoft developments.

TredoSoft have collated standalone versions of Internet Explorer from 3 up to 6, ready to install from a single set-up – it’s called Multiple IE.

It’s brilliant to see IE3, I decided I’d use it as my default browser for a day – loved seeing the frantic alerts about some alien idea called a ‘cookie’ and whether I wanted to risk accepting it onto my computer.

NB: If you’re concerned about what’s being installed when you use Multiple IE, you can do it all yourself with the instructions on Manfred Staudinger’s Multiple IE page.

There’s standalone applications for other browsers too. I only use Windows nowadays, but I’ve recently found Michel Fortin’s standalone versions of Safari – he’s even numbered the icons for your dock (via). That page also links to instructions on running multiple versions of Firefox for Mac.

As for testing Linux system – and this goes beyond HTML and CSS debugging, I use VMware Player from VMware. Not only because when I’ve been developing server-side applications, I’ve not wanted to bother installing those on my home computer base – because it can be tricky, time-consuming, potentially damaging if things go wrong, etc etc and I tend to use Linux-based system for deployment anyway – but because appliances are so damn handy.

Virtual appliances run within a virtual machine like VMware Player as self-contained, packaged software. They can be created and restored as system images, so if something goes wrong – it’s so easy to turn back, with no risk to whatever personal data you might have on your computer as you would installing software as services on the base.

More than that, they’re readily available. VMware has an Appliance Marketplace, with over 900 ready-to-go appliances and a simple, central repository to develop or distribute your own.

There’s popular Linux distributions, various Red Hat, Ubuntu, Fedora – all pretty clean, the basic install, but also some interesting others.

I particularly like the Web Developer appliance, specifically designed to safely test and fine tune web apps. Based on Ubuntu, the creator has consciously included some trendy applications that are gathering more attention, like Ruby on Rails. On top of the expected with Apache, PHP and MySQL, you get a a handful of browsers, various database and debugging tools, code and graphics editors, all as standard, all configured and running – great way to get started.

I truly believe that there is zero excuse for slapping ‘this page is best viewed with [browser name] in [screen dimension]‘ on any website, unless it is specifically designed otherwise – and especially if it’s text and image content only – when it’s really so straightforward to adhere to some basic standards which, with almost an exponential effect, can improve the way your content is delivered, cross-browser, cross-platform. That kind of disclaimer is just a cop out, plus Tim agrees - and he’s the man.

A part of that development process is to determine, amongst things, which browsers on what device or platform are the priority. In turn, getting hold of these browsers readily for testing and ideally, available frequently for an agile development. Not leaving testing until a stage where any damage might be irreparable because of time constraints and deadlines, or viewing testing time as an easily squeezable phase, first to suffer when scope is altered.

The BBC have outlined such requirements, they have very in depth guidelines publicly available on their site. The following table defines the ‘levels’ of browser support that all projects must comply with:

Abbreviated definitions:

Level 1:

• All content and functionality must work, minimised variations to presentation, fully-styled, maximise user experience.

Level 2:

• Core content must be readable, usable and navigable, any degradation to must be graceful, no content must be obscured.

Level 3:

• No support or testing necessary. 

Read the full support documentation.

What can be really tricky sometimes though, is getting hold of the all those browsers and platforms to test with. There’s various ways of reconfiguring application and registry settings to install multiple versions of browsers, but the following method is how I installed and concurrently ran multiple instances and versions of Firefox on Windows XP.

Firstly, Firefox 3 (current version, 3.0.4) is readily available from Mozilla, as are previous releases of Firefox 2. Firefox 1.5 though is slightly harder to find. Along with a strong recommendation not use them, you can get other releases from the FTP archive going back to v0.10!

With each set-up, select Custom Installation, giving each version a different installation folder, so something like:

C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 1.5
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0
C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 3.0

Be sure to uncheck the option to run Firefox when you click Finish, this bypasses writing some default system settings.

Then you’ll need to create a seperate Firefox profile for each version of the browser you’ll be running. Open the profile manager from Start > Run:

“C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0\firefox.exe” -ProfileManager

It doesn’t matter which you choose. Create three new profiles, I named mine ‘Firefox 1.5′, ‘Firefox 2.0′ and ‘Firefox 3.0′ to keep it obvious.

Then I created three .bat files in Notepad, these function as shortcuts to the different versions, as follows:

Firefox 1.5:

set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
start “” “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 1.5\firefox.exe” -P “Firefox 1.5″
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0

Firefox 2.0:

set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
start “” “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 2.0\firefox.exe” -P “Firefox 2.0″
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0

Firefox 3.0:

set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=1
start “” “C:\Program Files\Mozilla Firefox 1.5\firefox.exe” -P “Firefox 3.0″
set MOZ_NO_REMOTE=0

Obviously change the path and profile names if you don’t use the same as mine, open those up et voila!

Click to enlarge [via].

Update (18.08.09): This also works with Firefox 3.5, just follow the same steps!