October 2005 - Posts

• Why I won't be upgrading to Macromedia Studio 8

  Let me start off by stating that I love Dreamweaver, well, I *loved* it.  Frankly, I'm disappointed by Macromedia.  Frustrated by it's about face from the community and the apparent lack of concern about the effects it's mergers and acquisitions has had on it's image.  Turn on the wayback machine and I'll show you why: 1996 - Learn to hand code html a university departmental webiste and a national professional organization 1997 - Learn to use Gonet Communications GoLive (!) on a  Umax SuperMac (!!!) 1998 - Develop my first corporate website using FrontPage 98 and Liquid Motion (does anyone remember this app?)  Later after much resistance, make the switch to Macromedia Dreamweaver, Flash and Director. 1999 - Develop my first application in Elemental Drumbeat 2.0. 2000 - Make the switch to Drumbeat 2000  (all roads lead to Macromedia) 2000 thru 2003 - Avid, satisfied, and productive use of Macromedia studio. In 2001, Macromedia completed a merger with Allaire, the maker of Cold Fusion, and over the next couple of years, the synergy of the products became stronger.  This may have been good for developing the Cold Fusion market.  What also happened during the subsequent years was a continued effort to force users into the Cold Fusion camp.  All the while, Macromedia’s support site included fewer and fewer practical examples in PHP and ASP developers. So, in Internet years, it's fair to label me a long term, loyal customer.  I frequently recommend Macromedia to customers and integrated lots of sites with Contribute.  That said, somewhere along the line, Microsoft started to catch my attention again.  Mostly because the things I wanted to do weren't documented (although certainly possible) in the Macromedia Studio package. Then the Adobe announcement came out.  And designers and developers who have ideologically been at odds for YEARS will now buying software from the same company.  How does this bode for innovation and competition needless to say pricing?  In my opinion, since the Allaire merger, Macromedia has consistently been more aggressive with it's pricing model, selling developer toolkits and providing fewer and fewer free examples to customers. What really drew me to Macromedia was the extensive community support for their applications.  In my Director days, I frequently leveraged the newsgroups to get advice and code samples.  Community is what made Macromedia great, but looking at those newsgroups today, the community sounds like they are feeling like Macromedia has left them high and dry.  Now, I gave up on Macromedia Tech Support years ago, and it was chiefly because it cost me money to actually get help, and it rarely got me anywhere.  Rick Segal made a posting last week that encapsulates just how out of touch Macromedia is right now.  It's worth reading to see how treating your community poorly can be exacerbated by limiting your openness with and transparency to that community. At this point, I get what I need out of MX 2004, and until I see a compelling reason to upgrade, I won't.  Instead, I'll be looking a lot harder at the competition, which believe it or not could be Microsoft with the addition of Sparkle and Acrylic.  Visual Studio 2005 Express for Web Developers is also going to be a real player if Microsoft can do a better job at getting the word out.   Posted Oct 29 2005, 11:32 PM by gene with 4 comment(s) Filed under: web tech

• Wanna be more productive? Get a bigger monitor!

  There was a really interesting article in the New York Times last weekend, "Meet the Lifehackers", reporting on research in the area of "interruption science."  After studying people in office environments, they observed: That employees on average were spending 11 minutes on a project before being intereupted to do something else.  That within that 11 minutes, the time was fragmented into 3 minute tasks, like writing email, working on a document, etc That once interrupted it took on average another 25 minutes to return focus to what they were originally doing. That many of these distractions or interruptions are crucial to their jobs. [20 minutes pass] So what the heck was I just doing?  Oh yeah, I was looking for a quote from the article...  So some researchers at Microsoft did a test where they gave some subjects a 15 inch monitor to do some tasks and then sat them in front of a 42 inch screen to repeat the the tasks.  The results? On the bigger screen, people completed the tasks at least 10 percent more quickly - and some as much as 44 percent more quickly. They were also more likely to remember the seven-digit number, which showed that the multitasking was clearly less taxing on their brains. Some of the volunteers were so enthralled with the huge screen that they begged to take it home. In two decades of research, Czerwinski had never seen a single tweak to a computer system so significantly improve a user's productivity. The clearer your screen, she found, the calmer your mind. I've used dual monitors for several years, but recently got a 24" dell monitor and ditched my old CRTs.  In those days, it was nice to have two to throw something to the side to glance at while I worked in another application, but the problem was that I usually stuck with the left hand monitor for most of my tasks.  I couldn't really stretch out an application, because there was a big gap between my monitors.  With the single, large screen, I can have lots of apps open, and still position them so I can see things like my email in the background or a remote desktop session I'm working with.  I've heard arguments to get two smaller monitors in order to get more real estate, but I find that spanning windows is too distracting.    With prices coming down on monitors, it's definitely worth it to stop whatever you're doing and check out a new, bigger monitor.  You can't argue with science. Posted Oct 21 2005, 06:15 AM by gene with no comments

• Top 20 License-Free Fonts

  Everyone knows that finding decent free fonts can be frustrating.  Searching the Internet usually returns more garbage than gems.  I stumbled across this blog post recently and found it really helpful.  Maybe you will too.  I like #4. http://www.alvit.de/blog/article/20-best-license-free-official-fonts  Here's a couple of other interesting sites for free fonts. www.goodfonts.org www.fontleech.com  UPDATE: Found another great site (some fonts aren't license free).  There's a lot of good stuff here too: http://simplythebest.net/fonts/index.html Posted Oct 21 2005, 05:45 AM by gene with 1 comment(s)