Recently in Gadgets Category

Setting up a new Dreamweaver site project can be quite a chore. Sure, you have the FTP/SSH info for your host on hand, a URL you can hit in a browser, and a shrinking deadline (who doesn't these days?), but building robust sitewide designs and the directory structure that houses them can require a huge amount of preplanning and headwork to do well. Just getting that 'clickable site framework' up and live can be a major undertaking, especially with clients breathing down your neck.

Joe Lowery from WebAssist just gave me a demo of their newest solution to this problem- SiteAssist Professional (a ground-up rewrite of their popular SiteAssist Dreamweaver extension) - that can have you up and running with a robust, CSS-based framework for your site in roughly 8 mouse clicks (and probably a few keystrokes too, but who's counting) that will look great on any modern web browser. To get started with a new site project, the SiteAssist Pro wizard will step you through:

• Configuring your general site settings
• Selecting a layout option
• Configuring pages and navigation (essentially setting up the heirarchy and architecture of your site)
• Configuring the site footer
• Output options

... after which you should be up and live with a clickable, functional Dreamweaver site you can then flesh out and customize to the nth degree. If that 'blank canvas' problem faces you regularly with new client projects, SiteAssist looks to be a great way to kick out the logistical jams and get rolling fast.

Reusability is a key with SiteAssist- aside from the many great visual/functional/site-level presets available, you can easily save new custom site types (with their own specific collection of page types) as well as quickly apply new designs. Page types are great ways to save and encapsulate common page-specific functionality - like a detail page, a contact form, a video player page, etc - and then reuse them across all your projects in a design-neutral fashion. Clientside and server-side functionality can be partitioned off and saved this way- a real productivity boost if you're managing a lot of projects in Dreamweaver.

Layout and design is equally flexible- aside from shipping with 16 beautifully-designed native templates you can use to kickstart the process, SiteAssist Pro now works with your existing Dreamweaver templates- making it that much easier to integrate SiteAssist Pro into your existing site designs and workflows. SiteAssist Pro also supports exported layouts from their popular CSS Sculptor product (developed with CSS guru Eric Meyer) and custom page types that allow you to quickly define standard functionality and common design themes for your site. Interoperability appears to be a key feature of the release, it also works seamlessly with the WebAssist's CSS MenuWriter menu generation extension.

SiteAssist Pro is a commercial extension- $199.99 but available thru September 9th for a reduced $149.99 - and you can get more information on it at the WebAssist site:

http://www.webassist.com/professional/products/productdetails.asp?PID=241&utm_content=home_page_fma

Great stuff!

I'm freshly back in the house at Adobe after an amazing 6 weeks of parental leave, and wow, what a great time I had. I strongly recommend unplugging for a few weeks if you get the opportunity, it's a great chance to pull in some external perspective and pull up from the keys and mice a bit. My son Devin was born on June 1st, so I changed a lot of diapers, too. Cool kid. Aside from a grueling 38 hours of labor on my wife's part, parenthood has been very cool so far. Strongly recommended!

Aside from diaper detail and professional slacking, I spent much of my time off shooting pictures with my Nikon D80 and related glass (some topical shots up on my photostream, if you're interested), and putting Photoshop CS3 and Lightroom through their paces. Before switching to a RAW workflow, iPhoto covered most of my needs, but switching to a DSLR I had to dump it quickly for Lightroom, and will NEVER look back. Nitpickingly, my final reservation was not being able to use the wonderful Flickr Export plug in with Lightroom, but fortunately you can hook up Lightroom's Export Actions (a feature I'm growing to love) to pipe selected exported photos over to the Flickr Uploadr application (which subsequently maintains all your Lightroom-specified tags and metadata, all you have to do is delete the 'default' image title in Uploadr and you're golden).

I also spent a lot of time with the iPhone the latter part of my break. This little device is really shaking up my preconceptions of how and why I use a phone - not to mention my preconceptions of user design and interaction in web development. Quite possibly my only regret over the vacation was being on the road during iPhoneDevCamp (whurley, would have loved to buy you a beer - maybe next time?), which explored exactly these conundrums and hurdles in painful detail. Just my type of gathering. O' well, perhaps next time.

Anyway, I'm now back on the game as part of Dreamweaver's product management team along with Devin Fernandez, and there's a lot for us to get working on. I helped wrangle the AIR Extension for Dreamweaver release before going on break, but now the CS4 planning is ramping up and I'm working on demos and presos for the remainder of the year (including MAX), so it looks like there's no shortage of things to work on for now.

Good to be back!

Caught an interesting post at MacNN regarding a 'multipurpose device' patent filed by Apple recently, published today by the US Patent and Trade office. Sporting a 'chameleon' interface that can easily switch between UI/functionality such as telephony, GPS, gaming, PMP functionality (among many other possibilities), I have to wonder if this is what we'll hear about during Apple's rather cloak-and-dagger 'Showtime' event planned for September 12th (next Tuesday)? If so, cool! My 5G iPod took a digger on the pavement last month during a run, and has never been the same since, so I'm interested in upgrading at some point soon. If not, this is definitely an interesting patent to read through, and could be a sign of things to come in the not-so-distant future?

Nice! The viliv P1 PMP has a new site up where you can check out the specs and more screenshots (thanks to Scott Janousek for the link). Claiming to be the first PMP supporting Flash (wasn't that title claimed by the iRiver U10, which also supports Flash Lite 1.1 SWFs?), the viliv P1 has a much more PSP-esque form factor and display (480x272 resolution- which theoretically should have more detail/clarity than the PSP for flash-media based video files).

Further, the P1's 20/30 GB drive options (and CompactFlash slot) offer far more storage capacity and potential than the PSP at it's best (1 GB and 2 GB Memory Sticks being the current max for PSPs, with larger capacities coming soon), and a click-wheel interface more in line with the video iPods. 5.1 surround support is a nice touch too, for those times when you need the larger-screen experience. The P1 will support MPEG 1 L2, MPEG 2, OGG, MP3, WMA AC3 and AAC audio/video file formats. On first glance, this could be a deal-breaker for me, as there doesn't appear to be MPEG-4 support (which is the current 'common' codec I'm using to move vids between my PSP and video iPod).

Although it'll be hard to beat the gaming experience of the PSP with the Flash Lite 1.1 spec (despite my fondness for it), the added flexibility and ease of development will undoubtedly make gaming content much easier to generate (and re-generate from existing Flash content/games/etc), so this could end up being a non-issue.

All in all, a very nice PMP device- although there's precious little information up on development specs/Flash support specifics on the site (paging Bill Perry?), the P1 could become a serious contender for my pocket space in short order. Has anyone picked one of these up (prototype or not) and tried it in meatspace? If so, please drop some comments in below- I'm very interested in this device as yet another 'crossover' PMP for my arsenal!

I've been listening to Pandora a lot lately- it's a really cool front-end to the Music Genome Project, letting you choose a favorite artist or song, and then letting Pandora create a custom 'station' for you- streaming the music down to your browser/Flash Player. Nice way to explore musicspace on your own terms- check it out!

By way of CNet News- this interesting pairing of Yahoo and TiVo's back-end services could prove quite interesting in the months to come. If the recent Yahoo! Maps beta is any early indicator of what's in store for developers, I'm keeping my fingers crossed that a rich set of APIs will made available for this service. (Cause if so- I'll be mashing this up six ways from Sunday in very short order.)

Just caught this on Digg.com, one of my old favorite side-scroller gams - Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time - has been recreated in Flash. Check it out- a fun diversion for your MAX Sunday!

I must admit- the hype a few weeks back appears quite justified- Shaun Inman's new site analytical tool Mint is one of my favorite new toys- I've been using it to monitor a personal site for a few weeks now and am impressed well beyond my initial expectations. I haven't seen a more usable (not to mention aesthetically-pleasing) way to scan my current referrers, visits, page views and search terms to date. I really resisted the urge to post right after the release (as the Mint beta squad did a pretty thorough job of getting the message out on their own), but can't hold back any longer.

If you're located in the LA area, take a moment to enjoy legendary director David Lynch giving you the local weather each day. It's not really a web app (in fact just a QuickTime movie link), and I don't live in LA anymore- but I must admit I'll still probably check it out daily- just in case he breaks out an oxygen mask. Only thing missing is an eerie Angelo Badalamenti soundtrack droning in the background, if you ask me. :)
(stumbled upon via Xeni Jardin's post at Boing Boing)

Vermont developer Contois Music & Technology filed a suit against Apple Computer last week over the interface for Apple's iTunes- alleging that owner David Contois' demos of an early interface for 'controlling media playback' at trade events between '95 and '96 were hijacked by future Apple employees. Although this really seems a case of 'too little, too late' to me, one has to wonder how this could affect the future of the popular MP3 jukebox- which (as noted in this post by Eric Dolecki paraphrasing a recent Adam Curry podcast) seems poised to take on the podcasting wave by storm in short order.