So make sure you vote for Konductor, it would mean a lot

If you haven’t seen it already, check out the fancy new Konductor website. We’ve implemented the beautiful design that Casey did for us, and we have also added a bunch of new content as well. If you were wanting a little more information on who Konductor is targeted at, and what it brings to the table, make sure you take a peek. The new site is also running on Konductor, so check it out if you want to get a feel for the type of code it generates.

We also moved the Konductor blog and forums, and we are in the process of making these look pretty too.

The forums are now at http://forums.konductor.net/, rather than http://www.konductor.net/forums/. The new skin is up and looking good

The blog is now at http://blog.konductor.net/, rather than http://www.konductor.net/blog/. The new skin will be up in the next couple of weeks.

As far as the application goes, we have made a lot of progress, and we keep getting more and more excited with what we have. This is going to turn a lot of heads when we go live…

• There is a cool writeup about Konductor on O’Reilly’s InsideRIA blog (Even though it reads a bit like a blogvertisement in parts, it is very thorough)

• There a bunch of new videos about Konductor on our Youtube channel – if you want visual and aural updates of Konductor’s progress, then subscribe
• This one has been blogged to death already, but I am loving Big Spaceship’s Pretty Loaded – I hope they can keep adding new content

It has been a little barren on the blog lately, but I have a few posts I really want to write up about some really cool stuff we are doing with Dreamweaver extension development, so subscribe to the RSS feed and keep your eye open for it if you are into that kind of thing.

There is an awesome write up on the Teknision blog regarding their work on the Konductor AIR application.

Gabor, John and especially Tony (I am always biased toward the developer ) have really helped shape Konductor since beginning of the project. We started out with an idea, and, with their experience in planning and developing good UX, along with their ideas and discussions on how to apply AIR’s unique features, Konductor was really brought to life. We now have a slick application that is being rolled out to the public.

Not to sound like a broken record, but if you’re at Adobe MAX this year, come check our booth out. You can play with the application, and talk with Teknision and ourselves to find out how accomplished a lot of this. I’m sure you will be just as excited as we are about it!

http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1537v1001

Some portions of the Dreamweaver Extension and AIR application get a little cut out of view, but that is why we have a bunch of video’s demoing all the different aspects of the platform

Anyways, Adobe MAX is fast approaching, I’m looking forward to catching up with everyone there, and talking more about Konductor. I really think what we have will blow some minds. It will be great to finally see the guys at Teknision again too, who have been working hard on the AIR application on the other side of the continent.

Also, thanks Duane for taking the time to come check us out – Konductor does make AIR look pretty good though

I will go into a little more detail about exactly what is behind each of these functions, and what that does for you.

Image Optimzation

The problem: In order to upload a very large image for display on a website, a user will typically have to resize the image using appropriate software. This assumes that your users have a certain level of technical knowledge. Most often, though, we have found that users simply upload the image as is, thinking that the image size will automatically be reduced if the image is scaled down. This usually has a pretty bad effect on the upload time for them, download times for their users, and definitely on their traffic bill…

In AIR we can resize the image on the client side, and then upload the much smaller image afterwards. We have local file access permissions, and access to all of Flex/AIR’s bitmap manipulation functionality, which allows us to read files right from the file system, apply smooth bicubic smoothing to resized images, and apply custom levels of jpeg compression to keep file sizes down and retain acceptable quality.

What that means: it may seem simple to me and you, but not having to manually resize images makes this functionality far more accessible to users who don’t know how to resize images themselves, or who even don’t know the implications of not doing so. Plus it has a very positive effect on their monthly traffic quotas.

Below is a demo of how we have implemented that:

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=67rAadGk8Vw&feature=hd

Bear in mind that we actually be allowing you to adjust the dimensions of the image to be uploaded, and set the level of compression.

Form Builder

A big complains many users had reagrding CMS in the past was the difficulty in creating forms themselves. This is an issue we have started to address. I still think that a typical user with little technical knowledge might find our current implementation a little daunting, but I think it is a great step in the right direction, and we have some good ideas on how to improve it.

Here it is below:

http://ca.youtube.com/watch?v=lYhMlaGR26s&feature=hd

Let me know what you think, good or bad…

I has been a little while since updates, but there has been a reason for that – I have been working hard! I know a lot of Konductor’s focus is on the AIR application, and for good reason, but the Dreamweaver extension definitely warrants some attention too.

I will post more detailed information soon, but here is what we’ve got working in the extension since the demo video:

• Automatic updates (this is an exciting one for me – big thanks to the Extension Manager CS4 team for making this super easy in the new version!)
• Menu management using standards compliant XHTML and CSS (again, this looks great in Dreamweaver CS4 as you now get the nice, accurate WebKit rendered previews for dropdown menus)
• Intuitive interface (if something is not right with your design, or has a chance of causing some problems, the designer is made aware of this and offered the likely solution with the click of a button – this is huge for new designers, as Dreamweaver can be a little daunting at times…)

Also, I’ve been working with the pre-release builds of Dreamweaver CS4 and Extension Manager CS4, and they really do add a lot of cool new features. To be perfectly honest, when I started playing around with the new Dreamweaver I thought it was just CS3 with a new skin, WebKit rendering, and Subversion support. But after using it, and especially after developing for it, I have found that it adds a lot of value. More on that later too.

Anyways, thats it for now. Stay tuned for more updates, there is a lot of exciting stuff coming down the pipe.

I came across a little undocumented behaviour in the Dreamweaver API the other day. The Site.importSite() function (which will import a site from a Dreamweaver site definition file, or *.ste) expects the pw attribute of the remoteinfo element to be encoded… but as what?

Well it turns out each character has to be encoded as a hexadecimal code point, then you have to add  the characters position in the string to this number. For example, lets take the string AAA. The character A has a hex code point of 41. So AAA could look like 414141. Now if we add the characters position in the string to its hex code point, we get 414243. Not too hard, but not exactly obvious either.

In order to dynamically build an *.ste file from Dreamweaver that takes a user defined password, I wrote a little javascript function that will encode a Dreamweaver password:

function encodePassword(input)
{
    var top = 0;
    var output = '';

    for(var i = 0; i < input.length; i++){
        var currentChar = input.charCodeAt(i);
        if(currentChar < 0 || currentChar > 0xFFFF){return(false);}
        if(top != 0){
            if(0xDC00 <= currentChar && currentChar <= 0xDFFF){
                output += dec2hex(0x10000 + ((top - 0xD800) << 10) + (currentChar - 0xDC00) + i) + '';
                top = 0;
                continue;
                // Insert alert for below failure
            }else{return(false);}
        }
        if(0xD800 <= currentChar && currentChar <= 0xDBFF){top = currentChar;}
        else{output += dec2hex(currentChar + i) + '';}
    }

    return(output);
}

function dec2hex(input){return(input+0).toString(16).toUpperCase();}

Problem solved! Hope that helps someone else out there too…

UPDATE: I have a password decoder available in javascript too…

function decodePassword(input)
{
    var output = "";

    if(input.length == 0){return("");}

    for(var i = 0; i < input.length / 2; i++){
        var currentHex = parseInt(input.substr(i * 2, 2), 16);
            if(currentHex <= 0xFFFF){
                output += String.fromCharCode(currentHex - i);
            }else if(currentHex <= 0x10FFFF){
                currentHex -= 0x10000
                output += String.fromCharCode(0xD800 | (currentHex >> 10)) + String.fromCharCode(0xDC00 | (currentHex & 0x3FF) - i);
            }else{
                //Insert alert for below failure
                return(false);
        }
    }

    return(output);
}