Mike Potter

November 30, 2005

Standard troubles...

So, the opening of Microsoft's document format may not be all it was cracked up to be... Does anyone else see the similarity between this and their fight against the iPod? From that article, "It is important for the industry to create an open, industrywide standard for docking connectors that will give consumers greater access to the digital entertainment they have stored on devices," Jai Jaisimha, the lead program manager in Microsoft's Windows digital media division, said in a statement.

Change a few words in that paragraph, and you could easily get a similar statement for document access:
It is important for the industry to create an open, industry wide standard for [word processing documents] that will give consumers greater access to the digital [content] they have stored [anywhere].

November 24, 2005

Sudoku inside a PDF

While on the Adobe Developer Day tour two weeks ago, I was border and picked up the United in flight magazine. I started working on the Sudoku puzzle inside it, and was hooked immediately. Now I see that someone's put the game inside a PDF file. Anyone else with cool PDF games out there?

Adobe Developer Days - Recap

Well, the first set of Adobe Developer Days are done... I'm back home in Ottawa after a 3 week tour across North America meeting developer who were building some very cool stuff with Adobe LiveCycle. The tour started out in Seattle 2 weeks ago Tuesday. I didn't get to Seattle, and we had a few problems with the event (the rollups got stranded at the border for one!), but overall I think the event went very well. While the event was going on, I was flying to San Jose, getting ready for event number 2 at our home office. A quick trip to Kinkos solved the roll up problem, and we had a great session in San Jose. (Images here, here and here). I flew home on Thursday, back to Ottawa and curled all weekend. Then, on Monday, off to Boston for Developer Day #3.

Boston had a great turn out, as you can see here. The Mariott put on a great show, and Lori DeFurio enlightened everyone with her vast knowledge of PDF... Did you know that if you can put get variables on the end of a URL for PDF files, like /file.pdf?zoom=100&page=3 Lori will be posting a blog about this, but I thought that was a pretty cool feature. Then, from Boston, off to New Jersey... Well, we flew to New York, then took a cab to New Jersey. I would have thought the cab driver would have asked us where we were going before getting to the exit on the highway, but he didn't seem to have any problem with stopping right there, asking us where to go next. Then, a few minutes later, there we were, going backwards back down another highway. My first NYC cab ride, and it didn't disappoint.

The show in NJ was great. It had one of the lowest turn outs, which surprised me since we had a ton of people register for it, but the intimate setting was great. It was the most interactive session we had on the whole trip. The questions were great, and we were able to have more of a dialog, than a series of Adobe presentations. That was fun. After NJ, the Ensemble team went on to Chicago, and I went home to curl, again.

This week, we've just finished up our two events, one in Ottawa and one in Toronto. The turnout at both was fantastic. We were overflowing the chairs at the event in Ottawa, as we had a nearly 85% conversion rate (from registration), which is apparently unheard of for live events. Toronto went just as well yesterday.

In the next few days we'll put the finishing touches on the slides and post them to my blog. We modified them for pretty much every city, reacting to the profile information that people provided in their registration forms, so we've got a big mix of slides from all the shows.

As well, we're starting to plan out Adobe Developer Days 2. If you want us to hit a city near you, comment in this blog or send me an email at mpotter@adobe.com. We're also hoping to expand the events to Europe, likely in March of 06, so send us cities outside North America as well!

You can view photos of our event here, using Adobe's Kodak Gallery software. Allow me a few minutes to rant about my frustrations at getting the photos off my camera, and online. I've got Windows XP on this work laptop, and a Canon S100. One would think that I just plug in the camera, go to Photoshop 4.0, get the photos and I'd be done. Nope, sorry, out of luck. I had to try to install drivers from canon.com. No luck there either. I downloaded two sets of drivers, and neither worked. I did a search on Google for "windows xp canon s100 not recognized" and came across a help article from Toshiba that told me to go to Control Panel, System, Hardware, right click and select Update Driver. Well, I did that, and then it worked. Now, is it really any surprise that people are switching to a Mac? I remember the first time I plugged in that camera into my Mac... iPhoto popped open right away, and asked to import the files. How inovative... Having something that just works. That's why I love my Mac.

Oh, and the Kodak online gallery? How frustrating is that website (though I do like some of the DHTML that you're using.)? For instance, when I say "Share a photo", why do you assume that I want to email it to someone? I can't even find a link for each photo to put in my blog. And I'm not a big fan of the default "Make people register to see my photos" option when I'm posting photos. I just want to upload some photos and have a nice URL to send to people. Anyone got a Flickr plugin for Photoshop?

November 03, 2005

One last entry before hitting the road

Its been a while since I last put an entry in, and since we're hitting the road next week for our first set of Developer Days, I thought I should post before heading out. The response to the developer days has been great. We've got over 150 people registered, and I'm looking forward to meeting everyone in San Jose, Boston, New Jersey and Ottawa. Lori DeFurio will be attending the events in Seattle, San Jose, Boston and Chicago. Ben Watson will attend the events in Ottawa and Toronto.

Here are just a few random thoughts that I've had over the past few days:
1. On Tuesday night, a young man came to my door selling chocolates. Now, I didn't catch who he was selling them for, but I think they should work on their timing a bit... Selling chocolates door to door the day after Halloween? I don't think he got much response.

2. The next version of Yahoo maps is out in beta, and it uses Flash as a user interface. It still needs a bit of work (it didn't find any Italian restaurants near my house or ATM machines.) but I think I prefer Flash as an interface over AJAX. (This coming from someone who worked on a team and built an entire Linux based desktop with AJAX technologies about 5 years ago). I especially like the overlaying map in the top right of the UI that allows you to scroll across the continent quickly. Try zooming in and out quickly on that small map in the right hand corner.

3. TiVo is apparently available in Canada. TiVo, Christmas list... Christmas list, TiVo.

4. Firefox 1.5 RC 1 is a lot better than the last beta. Most of my plugins are working again, my favourite theme is active again, and I'm finding it faster and more stable.

5. The Rideau Canal here in Ottawa has been drained, and they're putting he little houses that sell refreshments up. If you haven't been to Ottawa, come in February for Winterlude, and be sure to get a Beavertail while skating on the canal.