Archive for July, 2008

LiveScribe

Thursday, July 31st, 2008

I just came across this: The LiveScribe pen. It records both what you write and say, and allows you to publish it as a full screen Flash presentation that can be embedded on your website.

Pretty cool. Check out the end result here.

Funnily enough, I thought the demo presentation actually raised an interesting point that is extremely relevant to us. We are quiet confident that we can stir up interest amongst the innovators and early adopters. But how will we target the early majority, and build up enough momentum and plan for the late majority? These will likely be people outside the realm of the Adobe community, so it is something we will need to start thinking about in short while…

I repeatedly hear about Aviary setting the benchmark in building up excitement for their products, which is an essential model for us to learn from in this early phase of development and product exposure. But I would love to hear about unique methods other successful web start-ups have used to target broader audiences outside of their peer group.

Miscellany!

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

I just thought I would do up a quick post about some random goings on.

Firstly, I got some photos back from Pawel after Teknision came to Vancouver for our little brainstorm session.

Konductor Discussion
Exhibit A: John really seems to be expressing how he feels about things.

Konductor Team
Exhibit B: (Some of) the Konductor/Teknision team.

Second, I put up a little splash page for Konductor, http://www.konductor.net/. Maybe not the prettiest or most practical thing around, but it sure was fun to play around with Papervision3D 2!

Anyway, it took me a while to track down the info I wnated to make stuff look really cool, without having to do much work and 3D modelling. With the right combination of interactivity, lighting and effects, you can make stuff look cool with zero PV3D experience. Here is what got me up and running:

So the next big things we are working on is this: Branding and Marketing. We want to help people recognize what it is we are talking about, and how it can help them. The Dreamweaver Extension and AIR interface have the potential to save designers a heap of time, and there clients a bunch of headaches when updating there sites. Personally, I cant wait to get some public feedback on this thing!

Development-wise, I am still plugging away at the Dreamweaver Extension. The modified property inspectors are almost done – I will post a second part about streamlining Dreamweaver in the next day or so.

We have more exciting developments on AIR interface too, so I will post about these shortly. In fact, we have a lot of exciting stuff coming down the tubes, so be sure to stay tuned!

Intuitive Menu Management Is Harder Than You Think…

Wednesday, July 30th, 2008

We have discovered this over the last few months. There are so many ways to create and organize menus, and so much variance in how menus function and look. Plus, with Teknision having tons of experience creating slick interfaces, and us having built and refined menu managers over the years, I was thinking this would be a breeze. (more…)

Sneak Peek At Our AIR Interface!

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Ok, so this is awesome:

These are some of the design explorations Teknision has provided…

As a designer, I would pumped on giving this to a client! Sure beats contribute on the sexy test :P I love how how the interface caters for small sites and large ones using by giving the users a few views to choose from. And yes, those thumbnails are going to be real snapshots of the pages. Let me know what your think!

Streamlining Dreamweaver – Part 1

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Most people who use Dreamweaver have their own way of doing things. We don’t want to force them to do something they don’t want to. Our goal in making a an extension for Dreamweaver is to be as non-intrusive as possible, but still make life a little easier. Here is one we are planning on doing that.

If you want to use Dreamweaver’s templating features, step number one is defining a “Site”. While it may not be obvious, finding the menu item to do this isn’t too hard. (Site -> New Site…)

However, I have found the setup process can be quiet involved. I did a quick test, and found out that it is a 7 step process to set up a site that allows you create your template, put it on a server, and test it out.

Here is a little screenshot gallery of the easiest, fastest way to do this in Dreamweaver (that I know of at least)…

The best thing about Konductor is that a lot of these settings either stay the same, or they can be worked out automatically. We know what the FTP server will be, and we can control how testing takes place. We can also work out some more advanced stuff behind the scenes once we know who the user is (like the FTP upload path and so forth). So we have been able to cut down this process to one step! Check it out…

I know this is a pretty minor thing, but it does save time searching through your emails for FTP settings, remembering FTP upload paths and so forth. I’ll post some more in this series about how we plan to streamline the design process in Dreamweaver, without changing it.

What The Heck Is Konductor?

Thursday, July 24th, 2008

Well first things first, I’d better introduce myself. I’m Andrew Odri, a senior developer at a small software company called Konductor in Vancouver. I have worked with content management for while, and have worked with Adobe tools a lot. And here is what I have noticed…

Good web designers love designing web sites. And most of them use Dreamweaver. On the flip side, good designers don’t usually want to get bogged down setting up web servers, FTP servers, configuring Dreamweaver to work with these, and having to go through this process over and over just to edit some content at a later date. I guess that’s kinda obvious.

Then we have the clients of web designers. I’m just going to call them users for now. Users usually just want to change content, edit menus and add new pages. They know what they want to add, and they know what it should look like. In many cases, they want a new product page to look pretty similar to there old product page. What they don’t want is a big blank page with nothing in it. Or a scary interface that is just as complicated as Dreamweaver (*cough* Contribute *cough*). And they don’t want to bug their designer all the time just to make simple changes.

Anyway, those are some of the big problems I’ve noticed. Theres lots of little ones ones too. For example, does your user want to put a new photo on their site? Its 12 megapixels… So they either A) have to resize it themselves, or B) upload the whole thing to server. And what about previewing pages as you edit? True pixel perfect WYSIWYG, especially with custom designs, doesn’t exist at the moment.

Anyway, we are working on some tools using Dreamweaver extensions and Adobe AIR to get this right. We are actually really far along too. We have been working with Teknision for our AIR interfaces, consulting with Nitobi for our Dreamweaver extensions, and using our own expertise in this area to build the back end web services. We have them all talking to each other already.

We have a lot of exciting stuff post, and will be doing so very shortly. We are super excited about what we are sitting on right now – I hope you will be too!

More (substantial) stuff shortly…