Posted by Brett Tackaberry on April 21st, 2008 
No comments
Speaker: Julian Dolce of Fuel Industries
The session spoke to the development process in creating www.fairiesanddragons.com.
Explore the inevitable challenges working with a highly inter-disciplinary team presents. Learn about the various tools and approaches adopted to ensure a smooth project work flow from conceptual to delivery, on time and within budget.
Challenges and moving from short-cycle projects to long term and high resource projects:
- Working with a big team
- Version control
- Bug logging
- Testing & Q/A
- Multiple locales
- Cross platform development
Step 1: choosing technologies for a desktop app installed from cd. A feature comparison and requirement checklist between Zinc, mProjector, SWF Studio, and AIR. Side bar note: current reservations with AIR are with the requirement of the AIR runtime which really puts up an obstacle for the general public and general accessibility to that platform. Chosen technologies: mProjector, Zinc, InstallBuilder (enable easy and streamlined installation), FDT (flash coding ide) and WPF (windows presentation foundation) for integration into windows platform.
Step 2: Tactics in streamlining production. A couple examples:
- Automatic nightly builds
- Image cropper and importer - automatically prepare images
- JSFL to automate flash processes =
Step 3: Debugging and QA.
- Use Mantis or Bugzilla
- Test on low spec machine
- Check OS configurations. For example, UAC on Vista
Cross platform development:
- Key elements: folder delimiter, performance of transparent desktop, and build on each separate platform.
Weird "features":
- Cool OSX trash can feature
- OSX Icon refresh rate
- Windows titles could not exceed 8 characters when running off a CD on Windows NT
- On lower end machines mouse clicks get ignored by the desktop wrapper
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on April 21st, 2008 No comments
Speakers: Patrick Keenan and Alan Smith from The Movement
This talk is about design, people, and meaning. Let’s call it “Creative Sustainability”, or maybe “Sustainable Creativity” ?
I care about the big picture and care about making great work. The folks at the Movement have started to put structure to ideas and concepts around what they call sustainable creativity.
The presentation started off with the question: "What have you done that is meaningful?"
The underlying theme of the talk is about a philosophy and concept that, as stated, is sustainable creativity. Its about solutions and an approach to problem solving. Its about how to change relationships. It means doing things that make a difference. To me it means doing work and working in a way that matches my values of creating meaningful work, engaging in mutually beneficial relationships and have a positive influence on the environment around me.
This is the creation of meaningful wealth.
The second question to the crowd came as this: How much do you make? …How much what? Money isn’t our only currency. Is there an accounting for non financial things.
Time as currency: Banking time. See Timeraiser to pledge time against a good cause.
Task as currency: trading tasks.
Non profit margin: distribute profits from centres that can afford to others that can’t but require attention. See good magazine - 100% of subscription fee is directed to the non-profit of your choice.
Next question: What is the victory condition for how you spend your time at work?
See Wiser Earth to connect with other groups.
Spread the word - action and reward. A cause based design camp. (Can’t find any further information though, anybody?)
A 12 step program to make change:
- take note of impact
- consider what to preserve and what to change
- draw the line, what won’t you do? have a to don’t list
- set priorities, what matters most? Urgent and important
- share the worst deed you did for an evil client
- tell somebody you’re about to make a change in your professional work
- implement a system to help you out
- make an ideal client list. don’t let this list just sit there, contact them.
- join something
- meet-ups and serendipity
- do. then talk. then do more.
- try these, then try something else.
Posted by Steve Lounsbury on April 21st, 2008 No comments
Live blogging presentation by Sean Voisen
To develop with AIR you need to know AS3. AIR has a built in SQLite database and you can use it to store data on the client.
You can synchronize data with the client so that you can use that data while offline. This leads to faster startup times, making things easily exportable and makes working with large datasets easier.
There are a few sync strategies:
- Manual Sync
- good for small amounts of data, requires a button to be pushed, easy to implement, but user can forget to do it.
- Background sync
- user doesn’t need to know about it, uses a timer, server can push data to the client (AIR tech: Livecycle data services)
Question you need to answer: who is the master, the client or server? You need to know who to trust when data collide.
Design of your code is important, aka Design Patterns (yeah man!)
Design Pattern: Brett Rampata, Adobe XD: gives the user a nice heads up view and can use both manual and background sync, shows connection availability.
Update: Link to Brett Rampata’s design pattern from above.
Demo of Paypal Desktop AIR App.
Demo of Paypal Desktop AIR App. 2.5 months of development time (one dev, one designer)
SQLite
- embedded database, stored in a single flat file, supports views, transactions and triggers
- Adobe added some types to the SQLite db to support AIR app development
AIR and SQLite
- supports synchronous and asynchronous connections.
- synchronous will stop the app while the query returns data.
- asynchronous will run in the background and uses an event listener to let you know when everything is done (nice and clean).
- supports prepared statements and named parameters in queries, and you shouldn’t use string concatenation (nice!)
- better performance over and above string concatenation because AS compiler will cache query and optimize for you.
- supports results paging.
Connection detection in AIR
- AIR will let you know when you have an internet connection available.
- Event will only tell you when things have changed, not if you are connected or not. You have to figure out if the change event means you are connected (ping some site, etc).
- Can use the service monitoring library which will let you know if a URL is available.
Action Script Programming strategies
- Use a DAO to abstract your SQL from your app. They are singletons (only allow one object to exist at a time) which handle the DB interfacing.
- Use “CREATE TABLE IF NOT EXISTS” so that you aren’t destroying your tables on each startup.
Demo “Library” App Available on Sean’s site
Resources:
coenraets.org
peterelst.org
probertson.com
xd.adobe.com
Posted by Brett Tackaberry on April 20th, 2008 No comments
For the past couple years, and this year included, 76design has sent a small contingent down to Toronto for FITC. FITC is a design and technology festival and the only one of its kind. We’ve been attending for a number of years now and always found it to be an inspirational and engaging conference. Last year we documented a few of the sessions and this year we’ll do the same.
Posted by John Sobol on April 10th, 2008 1 Comment
I know, I know - it’s not polite to brag. But please, cut us some slack here, because we really do have something exciting to brag about!
Yes, for the 3rd year straight, 76design has been made an Official Webby Honouree for the work we did conceiving, designing and building the Ottawa Public Library’s new children’s website.
This was a really innovative project and it definitely feels good to get this recognition. In case you don’t know the Webbys, they’re kind of like Oscars for the Web. We didn’t actually win a Webby - we got the equivalent of 2nd place. But considering our co-Honourees in the youth category include the likes of Disney Channel, Barbie and MTV, we figure we’re in some pretty elite company.
What’s even more amazing though, if I do say so myself, is that this is the 3rd year running that one of our sites has been a Webby Honouree. Last year it was our corporate website, and the year before it was the site we built for Maisonneuve Magazine.
76design is not a huge shop. We don’t charge as much as the big international agencies and our clients’ budgets tend to be - well - just a tad smaller than Disney’s. But the quality of our work speaks for itself. Year after year we rank alongside the world’s top interactive agencies in the toughest competition there is.
Next year we’re aiming to crack the final frontier and become an official Webby award winner. Which of our clients will benefit from that acclaim, and be the proud owner of one of the best websites in the world?
It could be you.
Posted by Steve Lounsbury on March 31st, 2008 No comments
We recently released two Wordpress plugins to help better you interact with and inform the readers of your blog. We call them Friendsroll and Toplinks.
Toplinks takes the pain out of updating your blogroll by keeping it fresh for you, automatically. This lets your readers get a handy snapshot of what sites on the internet influence your opinions.
Friendsroll lets your readers indicate to you that they value your opinion and want to be associated with you.
You can download and install both plugins from http://friendsroll.com. And you can come check us out at DemoCampOttawa8 tonight!
