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Blogs » Archive for March, 2008
Team SitePoint Learns To Improvise
One of the recurring requests in the reader survey we ran a few weeks ago was for more info about what goes on behind the scenes at SitePoint.
Well, last Friday a group of eight employees from across each of the different teams at SitePoint attended an improvisation workshop. It was something quite different from the usual daily grind, so I thought I’d share some thoughts about the day.
Artistic Director of Impro Melbourne, Patti Stiles, ran an afternoon workshop where we were introduced to the principles of improvisation — acceptance, being positive, being in the moment, making your partner look good, embracing and removing fear, enjoying failure, and storytelling. (No, we’re not thinking of moving away from the Web and into the theatre — we were about to learn how the skill of improvisation can enhance a workplace environment and the group dynamic.)
The workshop was held in a room at the Abbotsford Convent, a stunning historic sandstone building built in the early 1800s — quite a contrast from the shiny new SitePoint offices.
The Foundations Of Improvisation
As a warm-up, we formed pairs and played word …
Adobe Photoshop Express Launches
Well, we’ve known is been in the wings for quite a while, but the beta for Photoshop Express — Adobe’s first online application — finally touched down this morning. Although they undoubtedly bring a mammoth graphics reputation to the table, they may not have it all their own way as there are already some well-established and classy competitors in this new arena — specifically speaking Picnik, Pixer, Phixer , Pixenate and Fotoflexer.
First impressions:
1) The sign-up process wanted to know which country I came from — as long as it was the US. Come on guys! Are you FedExing the app to us? DO computers use a different gauge of Interweb in Europe?? Have the terrorists been waiting to use Photoshop Express to make particularly visually attractive evil plans?
Silly stuff. Don’t ask questions that only have one answer.
2) The interface is a basically an online Adobe Bridge, with lots of blacks and charcoals making your imagery appear richer. If you’re a Bridge fan, Express will feel very familiar, although being a consumer-level product, you would have to question how many users could draw on Bridge experience.
Even if you’re not a Bridge fan (like …
Adobe Integrated Runtime: More Than Just Hot AIR
Reprinted from the Tech Times #187.
I’d like to use this opportunity to take you on a journey into the Twilight Zone.
Of course, when I say Twilight Zone, I’m actually talking about that strange, unexplored space that exists between web applications and desktop applications. Only a couple of years ago this seemed like a wide, uncrossable chasm; an eerie, transitory void between two separate worlds.
While the Mozilla Prism package that I posted about recently takes the relatively low-tech approach of packaging an existing site into a box that looks like a desktop application, the Adobe AIR platform is entirely more sophisticated.
With its 1.0 release appearing just last month, Adobe AIR still falls into the “shiny and new” category, but feels remarkably mature. AIR is much, much more than a single-site browser—it’s a cross-platform runtime environment, and the differences between the two are significant. In fact, AIR’s extensive API means it has more in common with Java than it does with Mozilla Prism.
What makes AIR particularly interesting, however, is the fact that you can build a desktop application to run on the AIR platform using any of the following technologies:
- HTML, …
Other cool ruby projects
With all the noise that Rails makes, you would be forgiven for thinking that it is the be all and end all of the Ruby world – sure it has popularised the language, but there are lots of other cool projects using the Ruby. Here are a few:
Merb
Merb is another full-stack web framwork, which works a lot like Rails. However, the author has stripped quite a bit of the fat away, and made the framework mush less opinionated as well as making it thread-safe. Rather than having a large monolithic core, Merb tries to be as modular as possible relying on third party gems for much of it’s functionality.
It includes support for different Object-Relational mappers (ORMs – the thing that mediates transactions between your application and your database), including DataMapper, Sequel and even the Rails default ORM: ActiveRecord.
Merb stands for Mongrel + ERB, so it isn’t suprising that they make up a significant part of the framework, although you can use HAML and SASS as your templating engine.
Camping
Camping is a micro-framework (only 4k!) designed by the disturbingly talented Why the Lucky Stiff. It is probably more an exercise is …
The Week in ColdFusion: 19-25 March: Adobe have been busy
Lots of Adobe news: First, this week has been Adobe Developer Week, with three ColdFusion sessions being run by Adam Lehman. Don’t worry if you’ve missed them – Adam assures us that they will be recorded, and he will post the locations once they are available.
Still from Adobe: the web site for the 2008 Adobe MAX Conferences is now live. MAX 2008 North America will be held in San Francisco, MAX 2008 Europe will be in Milan, and MAX 2008 Japan will be held in Tokyo (oddly, sometime in 2009).
But-wait-there’s-still-more: ColdFusion product manager Kristen Schofield has announced that ColdFusion 8 certification is now available. Time to crack out those books!
Onto some code. Ray Camden shares a helpful reminder: when diagnosing odd code problems, make sure your framework is up to date, as it might not be your own bug you’re chasing. Ray is the ColdFusion Jedi Master, but I can’t help thinking Dan Vega deserves some kind of title for his awesome posts about CFGrid. If you can think of something cool, leave a comment! This week, Dan talks about extending CFGrid by tapping into event listeners, then asks for some …
.NET on the ‘NET March 18-25: New IIS7 Goodness and MVC opens up
Wyatt is a bit buried under work for a few weeks, so I will be your new source for Microsoft news and updates for a little while. It’s been a bit of a slow news week for .NET, so at least I get to start off slowly.
This week, the big story that most people are talking about is still the ASP.NET MVC project. While Wyatt has mentioned this a few times already, this past week the full source code was posted on CodePlex. There has also been a lot of buzz about MVC as people have started using it. Some of you Rails and Django guys might think this is old news, but MVC brings some nice things to ASP.NET such as running command line testing and having 100% control over markup.
Another rather big news item from the Microsoft camp is a batch of improvements to IIS7. The ASP.NET debugging blog has an overview of the changes, but the two that are most important are the new FTP Publishing Service and the CTP of the Administration Pack. The FTP publishing service provides support for IPv6, some new features for running shared environments and replacement of the IIS6 …
How To Become A Project Management Super Hero
We’re very pleased to announce our latest book, The Principles of Project Management, by Meri Williams…
These days, project management skills aren’t linked to a job title — they’re essential for anyone who’s responsible for delivering an outcome within a specific budget and time frame.
This might mean that, as a freelancer, you’re delivering a site to a client on time. Or that, as a team leader, ensuring that a design/development team delivers its part of a broader project perfectly to specifications.
In just about any role, your project management skills can make the difference between becoming a superhero or super-villain!
Author Meri Williams has done a fantastic job of explaining concepts that everyone can apply to their projects. She shows you that project management isn’t rocket science, and that you don’t need to do the PMP exam to be a project management superhero!
Download the sample chapter and check it out for yourself.
For more details or to order, visit the book’s sales page.
Microsoft set to launch Semantic Web light
Fascinating news coming from Microsoft Research. They are showcasing for the first time their “research-output” repository platform at the upcoming Open Repositories 2008 conference.
Here is an excerpt from the blog:
Our goal is to abstract the use of underlying technologies and provide an easy-to-use development model, based on .NET and LINQ, for building repositories on top of robust technologies.
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The platform has a “semantic computing” flavor. The concepts of “resource” and “relationship” are first-class citizens in our platform API.
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new entities can be introduced into the system (even programmatically) while the existing ones can be further extended through the addition of properties.
The key phrase in the above excerpt is: “The concepts of “resource” and “relationship” are first-class citizens”. Essentially this new platform being released by Microsoft will allow .Net developers to leverage their skills along with LINQ to create linked data clients that can participate in the upcoming linked data Web. The very same linked data Web that Yahoo! has thrown their full support behind.
This is what Semantic Web technology offers today, the ability to create Web scalable applications that can shape themselves to the incoming data. Microsoft is filling a gap between CouchDB and full-blown …
Mozilla Prism: Stuck In The Middle With UI
A recent guest post on TechCrunch reignited my interest in the space between web apps and desktop apps.
.NET on the ‘NET March 10-17: SubSonic Rocks and MVC is Hawt
This is being posted bit later than “early in the week.” But then again, I got the fun job of migrating some PHP apps (unfortunately of my own nubile design so I cannot point fingers). I never thought I would miss the yellow screen of death until I hit the blank screen of death. No IIS7 so no FREB love, just lots of feeling around, print_r(), SQL Server Profiling and on the fly coding. I don’t miss the old days. And now on to dotnet . . .
The lead story is that Rob Conery has been very busy boy post-MIX. He released SubSonic 2.1 Beta 2 and launched a new SubSonic project site. Also, if you missed it, Windows Vista SP1 has been released. Roll the dice and upgrade today!
ASP.NET MVC is the new hawtness. And, while you are thinking hawt thoughts about MVC, you should make sure to check out Stephen Walther’s post on the Life of an ASP.NET MVC Request as well as Jeffery Palmero’s post on unit testing ASP.NET MVC Controllers. Finally, don’t miss Phil Haack’s MVC Routing Debugger.
There …
