Recent Entries

To start off the day I attended “Flashier Rich Media Advertising” What i got was a demo of some of the coolest interactive banner ads I have ever seen, along with a lot of best practices when doing Rich media Advertising. I like to think I already knew a lot of that, However the way it was presented made me take a different spin on how we can use it within my own place(s) of business.

The Sessions the rest of the day were stellar. Lets start off with this one. “Creativity and Chaos” with Jason Theodor who you can follow via Twitter @jted and who was also gracious enough to already have his slide deck up on the web for us here: http://www.slideshare.net/jted/chaos-and-creativity You have take the time to go through his 241 slides, good for you.. but i would say you would have had to have been there. This guy may border a little crazy… However all us creative folk are. He gave a great session on Creativity, being creative and how to pull that creativity out. My favorite line from his presentation was:

Create Something that critics will Criticize

Go Crazy when brain storming a new project.. Nothing is wrong with that. Then scale it back to meet the needs of the client and reality.

The biggest thing i took from the next session with Ralph Hauwert who you can follow via twitter @unitzeroone is this whole “Skunkworks” concept:

The designation “skunk works”, or “skunkworks”, is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Great concept, This will be something DigitalOctane will always run with moving forward.

The last session of the day was with Colin Moock. Showing off a TON of code and officially announcing during his session at #fitc that Union will have a Free Standard license for up to 1000 Concurrent users. This is something our team is defiantly going to be playing with over the next couple months. As we have another upcoming project which we will write about later next week.

Writing is hard.

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I started off day 1 with “Open Source Flash 3D” with John Lindquist from the Papervision 3D team. Who you can follow on Twitter via @johnlindquist . John Talked about the Past, Present and Wild Assumptions on the future of 3D on the Web. He also spoke in length comparing the big 3 players out there right now. Flash, Unity3d and WebGL.  WebGL is the low, unheard of player in this game, However one thing to note with WebGL is its not plugin required. You can View Source on this.. HTML5.

We all know Flash, as John said in his presentation “Some say Adobe missed the 3d Boat”. Maybe… However Adobe still has several benefits that Unity3d is yet to bring which includes Webcam and audio support.

Unity 3d is another plugin install. With a Very low saturation rate… You may be hard pressed to get a user to install something they most likely have not heard of before. However Unity3d’s quality far surpasses Flash & Paper vision.  If your building a game for the web or mobile, Unity3d may be worth a look.

Second Session of the Day I attended ( Keep in mind there are 5 sessions running at a time. So make your picks Wisely) Now i don’t know what went on in the other 4 sessions.. But I definately made the right choice going for “The Importance of Whiskey While Working… (And other work flow tips too!)” Presented by Jamie Kosoy from bigspaceship . You can follow him via Twitter @jkosoy . If you can take 1 word from his presentation its “Collaboration”. Your typical company operates in what would be called a “WaterFall” System. Sales, Design, Production and Launch. Everyone has their part… everyone washes their hand at the end. this is as Jamie put it “Bad”. At Big Space Ship the system goes Sideways. Strategy, Production, Design and Development. They all have their input from beginning to end. They work in Project Teams. Each different discipline is represented for each project. Devs and Designers are in the same meeting as the strategists putting out ideas and setting accurate time lines, Jamie says to “Dream Big” in these sessions… and scale back depending on time-line and client budget.

I think one of the most encouraging things Jamie brought up was the humble beginnings of Big Space Ship, back in the day landing a Movie Website for a Romantic Comedy. Doing a great job, they got pinned as the best “Romantic Comedy Website Company” and signed themselves another few Romantic Comedy websites. Finally getting themselves a Horror film… and it blew up from there. Jamie defiantly did a much better job telling that story and im not doing it justice.

The Adobe Keynote was alright, and The last session of the day was an inside view of North Kingdom here is their most recent demo reel:

North Kingdom Showreel 2009 from Designchapel on Vimeo.

We got a great insight into the creative process and techniques and display the many challenges they face from clients, users and the business in general.

To wrap the day up I will leave you with 1 tip from Jamie at Bigspaceship. I dont have it word for word so I am going to ad lib here a bit:

Spend the time to come up with a consistent naming convention for the site to ensure everyone is talking about the same thing, and give this naming convention to the client to make sure when they are talking, everyone knows what is being talked about.

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First off, if you work on the web you should familiarize yourself with HTTP Headers.

HTTP Headers form the core of an HTTP request, and are very important in an HTTP response. They define various characteristics of the data that is requested or the data that has been provided. The headers are separated from the request or response body by a blank line. HTTP headers can be near-arbitrary strings, but only some are commonly understood. – wiki

Wow, What did that just say?

There are two add-ons to firefox which will significantly help you troubleshoot problems with your site especially if your making alot of calls for assets. You should have at least 1 of them, take your pick: Firebug or liveHTTPHeaders. Both will monitor HTTP Headers for you. I am sure there others, however these are the ones i have used and have had success with.

Now lets talk about how this can help you.

When you deal with Flash in the manner that i do. Your loading a base swf and XML. loading content in various swfs who’s content is loading XML, who’s XML has paths to images and assets. That can be a lot of data to look at, and when something doesn’t show up… Then what?

Personally, i turn to Firebug first. turn on headers and refresh the site. I then watch the headers, which is tracing every call I am making. With firebug you will quickly see red 404 show up with the file path that was called. This can very easily save you a TON of time digging through code… looking for some error only to discover you made a typo in the file name you called.

This very simple add on and change to your troubleshooting process can save you time and your sanity.

Firebug does not stop there, Firebug offers some Robust features for Inspecting elements which i will talk about at a later time. You should Install Now, And start using these great features.

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Ok, I may be over exaggerating a bit by saying version control saving your life. But it can certainly save you large amounts of frustration. Picture if you will, you’re working on a tight deadline; you have just about finished with your project and it’s the 11th hour. You’ve done a bunch of work but you only  have 1 copy on our laptop. Your laptop overheats and will not turn on! Now that the stage is set, you may be asking “What the Fruit is version control and how can it help me with this problem?” Basically version control is a way for you and your design/development team to work on the same project and even the same files with out having to manually make copies as you make changes. As you make edits to any file within the repo older “copies” (I use copies loosely in this description because it’s a bit more complicated than that behind the scenes) will be saved. File version control is really the tip of the iceberg regarding projects like Subversion which have project “branching”, file merging and more robust features. Check this out Wikipedia for more info on Version Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control.

You may notice that some open source projects such as Tweener, swfobject and PaperVision 3D are all on code.google. Each project has a repo accessible through a UI such as tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac). This makes it a lot easier to make sure your files are up to date with out having to download zips and manage the files yourself.

So which one should I use?

At Digital Octane we utilize both a Subversion Repository along with a Dropbox account(s). This isn’t a comparison between any syncing / version control apps. Each have their own benefits and it really depends on how you plan on utilizing your files when choosing one.

Dropbox

If you are a small boutique shop like we are, Dropbox is extremely useful for syncing/sharing files between our team, clients and freelancers. It’s a very simple client side installation for any user sign up is a snap. Once the install is complete the user will have a series of Dropbox folders added to their Documents folder.docs-dropbox

Making file sharing a breeze for non tech savvy clients. For those of you that are used to another method for version control you may feel a bit hindered by the lack of file/folder controls. If this is your first jump into remote file syncing or version control for your files. You wont really know what you are missing. Just knowing that if you accidentally lost a file or need to access your file from the web you can.

Subversion: The 30 second breakdown

Subversion’s overall controls are more robust compared to the abilities of Dropbox, but there comes a bit of  administration with Subversion and a little bit of know how (Which I will not get into here) to get things up and running. If you choose to go the Subversion route. You will be greatly rewarded for your hard work.

Here are a list of features within subversion

Some things to keep in mind about subversion

  1. You will need to install subversion on a dedicated server/machine that you can access locally and/or remotely.
  2. It’s in your best interest to install client side controls such has tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac) to make it easier on your users.
  3. Read up on project trunks and branching. If you have a good process for branching your code base. It can make deploying code to dev, staging and production servers much easier.
  4. Subversion has pretty good integration with task management systems such as Jira (using a plugin) I am sure others are out there as well.
  5. The Subversion project is quite large and community is very active.

So what did we cover?

In this article I talked about Subversion and Dropbox but there are a ton of other projects out there and Adobe has actually started shipping their own version control within their Creative Suite. Regardless of which product you choose. It’s a good idea to start implementing version control today if you haven’t already.

Oh and if you are interested in using Dropbox how about using this link (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTUxNDA4ODk) so we get a referal bonus?

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