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This one's been a lot of fun. Seriously.

Back at MAX 2008 we got to show off a project in it's early stages, code-named Meer Meer. It raised quite a bit of attention at the time, and was - as simply as I can put it - an earnest attempt on our parts to solve a problem that we'd been hearing about for quite some time from our professional web designers and developers - the challenge of cross-browser (and OS) design for the open web.

Web pros faced with supporting the wide variety of browsers and OSen their clients demanded were resorting to either physical or virtual test labs, or services that worked in a rather serial fashion - you'd type in a URL which would go into a queue with everyone else, and eventually return you a screenshot in a minute. Or five. Or far longer. No one wants to get blindsided with browser compatibility bugs at the critical endgame of a project, but the logistics of cross-browser testing often make it difficult to do early and often. We decided to address the problem with two principles - simplicity and speed.

Adobe BrowserLab is our simple, speedy solution.

BrowserLab runs in any Flash 10-enabled browser. That's it. No bulky downloads, no local installations (unless you want to enable direct Dreamweaver CS4 integration, which I strongly recommend), just you and an initial set of browsers on Windows and Mac to test your layouts against. The BrowserLab interface is simple, and uncluttered - one view to manage sets of browsers to both match project requirements and kick off 'batches' of screenshots easily, and one view to view, compare and examine your browser screenshots. You switch view modes with the 1, 2 and 3 key, and cycle through loaded browser screenshots with the up and down arrow. You can zoom into screenshots while overlaying two browsers together at your opacity of choice. A large part of BrowserLab's sweetness is its utter simplicity.

And if you're using Dreamweaver CS4, it's even sweeter. The biggest problem with existing 'screenshot' services is that you can't easily preview interactive content - rollovers, Ajax/JS widgets, dynamic data, basically anything that's loaded or 'triggered' in your page by user interaction. You're pretty much stuck with the default, loaded page that your URL produces. Dreamweaver CS4's new Live View - and it's ability to freeze JavaScript interactivity in place - lets you essentially 'drive' a page you're working on into a particular design "state", freeze it - and send that 'snapshot' directly to BrowserLab for review. The BrowserLab Dreamweaver panel gives you status of requests in the BrowserLab service so you aren't wasting time waiting, but concentrating on design - not collecting and compiling screenshots from test machines/virtual machines, or tapping your toes waiting for your turn in a screenshot queue. It's high time we were able to spend less time managing the logistical headaches of cross-browser proofing, and more time concentrating on design. Or code. Or whatever. :)

(next section updated occasionally as status changes, FYI)

As you read this, Adobe BrowserLab is live. However, we've already reached our initial beta capacity for the first round - we've let in roughly 3500 people or so this week on a first-come, first-served basis - as the first of several phases of rolling out the service. Experience is the key, so we're ramping up user capacity over time - if you didn't get in this week our apologies- we'll be extending to a wider, invitation-based program in early July to let everyone help us kick the wheels and polish the chrome for our first release. You can get all the info over in the BrowserLab section of Adobe Labs, and of course make sure to bookmark BrowserLab itself at browserlab.adobe.com.

On behalf of the entire BrowserLab team, enjoy!

Just a quick heads-up that this blog (and many others on the soon-to-be-former weblogs.macromedia.com server) will be migrating to a new Adobe server and updated version of Movable Type starting this evening thru the weekend. I'm going to see how things work with the upgraded server next week, and either stick with it, or migrate entirely off to my own WordPress site and merge this webblog in with my personal weblog on a new domain. I'm leaning towards the latter, but giving the new upgrade a chance first, for what it's worth. Not being able to hack the server/app framework is proving a bit restrictive, quite frankly.

More to come... and again, apologies for the slightly-extended interruption in my regular broadcasts. ;-)

Wow- where did 2008 go? Between CS4 development and release, the MAX conference (a virtual blur) and the general holiday-season craziness of recent weeks I seem to have blinked and lost a few months in the process. But while I've been preoccupied, Dreamweaver CS4 continues to get great reviews and feedback, definitely one of our biggest DW releases in years as Ross Greenburg at Computer World reports:

"As for me, I immediately updated to CS4 as soon as I could. The enhancements over earlier releases, including CS3, are too compelling to be ignored -- so I didn't. The upgrade price makes this an absolute no-brainer. There's a reason to consider this the latest and greatest version of CS4: Because it is."

Aw- thanks, Ross!

Another recent set of articles that cover Dreamweaver CS4 at SitePoint are definitely worth reading if you're still on the fence in picking up CS4- very well-balanced and even feedback on the release:

• Dreamweaver CS4: A Powerful Tool for an Imperfect World
• Unobtrusive JavaScript in Dreamweaver CS4

Good points in the last one - specifically the emerging best practice of putting <script> blocks before the closing </body> tag in order to prevent race conditions, i.e. when you may invoke JS on a element of your markup that hasn't yet loaded.

Anyway- hope you had a great holiday season, and an even better 2009. I'll try to be less infrequent in my postings over the next few months - honest - as I've got a lot of good DW tips/thoughts/etc to share in the New Year.

A few months back, I made a random Tweet about some internal screencasts I was working on, and got a private ping from Clearleft's user experience guru Andy Budd, asking a bit about what I was recording and what software I was using to do so. That's when I began suspecting that the Clearleft crew had some devious alchemy underway in their Brighton, UK headquarters.

The result of such mad science? Silverback- a Mac-based application for lightweight usability testing. All you need is a Mac laptop and Silverback to capture usability testing sessions on... well, anything that you can run on a Mac. Very cool.

As opposed to Morae, the 10-ton elephant of usability testing, Silverback is lean, mean and focused- and doesn't require you to lug around cameras, tripods and control machines to supplement the testing environment. And in contrast with bulkier screencast production tools like Captivate and ScreenFlow, Silverback focuses on the organizational and functional tools you need to perform quick, lightweight usability tests wherever you can find a subject and perch a laptop (or desktop) with both screen activity and iSight video captured for each user session.

As I'd expect from Andy, the Silverback interface is refreshingly straightforward and direct - with your initial view of the application helping ease new users quickly into the workflow:

I've had the opportunity to test Silverback over the last few weeks, and find it incredibly useful for exactly this type of testing. I can quickly drop my laptop on someone's desk, fire up Dreamweaver CS4 internal builds, and the workflow is great- just click record, center your subject within the iSight correctly, then hit record and step back to let your subject hit the spacebar, and start your test. Management of projects and test sessions is simple and effective- the projects pane on the left helping you navigate the test session list on the top right with your individual session details and annotations artfully presented beneath.

When you're ready to export a session to a more portable/distributable video file, just hit the "Export" button underneath the appropriate video thumbnail, pick a video format and destination, then let the encoding commence. As with all encoding processes this can take some time depending on the size of your session and codec/resolution of choice, but the resulting video will encapsulate both the screen capture and iSight video, along with microphone and computer audio- making it easy to share the results amongst your workgroup.

For a bit more on Silverback from the source, Andy's also put together a screencast to accompany the release- you can view it below to get a walk through the workflow:

Silverback screencast from Jeremy Keith on Vimeo.

A big tip of the hat to Clearleft for creating such a handy, simple tool in Silverback, and one that I'll use quite regularly. For the price ($49.95 USD after a 30-day free demo period- with 10% of your purchase going to the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund, no less!), it's a flat no-brainer to pick up right now if you do any type of usability work, and worth every penny.

(Oh, and to illustrate the attention to detail Andy and team have put into the app- just horizontally resize silverbackapp.com in your browser window and check out the sweet parallax effect with the hanging vines. Simply gorgeous.)

The annual Adobe MAX conference will be in our neighborhood this year - the Moscone Center/Marriott Hotel in San Francisco - from November 16-19th, and registration just opened today so you can reserve your seat ASAP. There's been a lot of work put in already towards making MAX 08 the event to remember in 2008, with a few late-breaking changes to note for this year's conference:

• A new 'Envision' track for movers and shakers evaluating the Adobe Platform roadmap
• 30% more hands-on lab sessions, including the new MEGA-LAB (holding 300!)
• 4 parallel 'unconferences' (2 for designers, 2 for developers)
• 250 sessions to choose from
• And of course, sneak peeks and surprises galore, as you'd expect.

I'll have plenty to show at MAX myself this year (Dreamweaver being a large part of that), and although the final session and track schedules haven't been announced yet, what I've seen of the content so far is absolutely mind-blowing. Hope to see you there!

I've been pretty hectic between travel and SxSW the last couple weeks, but a few cool items of note may have slipped past. Catching up now...

• Kuler just got an update today, with a feature I've been drooling over since I heard about it a few weeks back- color extraction! You can now upload an image, and have Kuler extract the dominant color theme from it. Simply awesome feature- saves me from my old "Posterize > sample colors to a swatch" workflow in Photoshop. Make sure and give the Kuler team your feedback, too.
• The Web Standards Project (WaSP) announced at SxSW last week that the Dreamweaver Task Force is being renamed and expanded to the Adobe Task Force, covering a wider range of our products. Don't fear, though- our historical cooperation with WaSP from the Dreamweaver team is alive and kicking as always, and will continue into the foreseeable future. I love those guys for keeping us honest over the years!
• Chris Charlton has been working overtime again and sneaked a peek at his upcoming DW extension for Drupal developers - the Dreamweaver Themer's Kit extension for Drupal. I swear that guy never sleeps, if you've been following his developer site xtnd.us you know exactly what I'm talking about. You can also check the Adobe Technologies group he manages out over at groups.drupal.org. Get some rest, Chris- we need you for the 4th quarter, man!

Anyway, since I didn't feel like posting yet another dissection of what went wrong in Sarah Lacy's interview of Facebook's Mark Zuckerburg last week (although I missed the beginning of the interview, I was drawn to the trainwreck ending like a moth to a flame), or general 'wish you were here' posts from SXSW, so I hope these tidbits are a little lighter on the fluff. If you want the blow-by-blow from last week in Austin, you can rewind my Twitter stream, after all.

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!

Just a heads-up that I'll be offline for about 6 weeks, and probably not posting much - if at all - on my Adobe weblog. My wife and I are expecting our first child at some time over the next day or so, and I'm taking the opportunity to enjoy a little time away from the keys and spend time with my soon-to-expand family.

I'll most likely be posting more to my personal weblog and Flickr photostream in the meantime, in case you're interested, curious, or just plain bored. ;-)

So with that- I'm signing off for a while. Hopefully I won't be incoherently tired and diaper-averse, but given the war stories I've been hearing lately I wouldn't rule either scenario out, either. Talk to you again here in a month.5!

::poof::

So much has occurred in the last 2 weeks it's hard to go into detail - SXSW, Apollo, Spry 1.5- egads! Hence, I'll just let the dam burst and convey what I've been thinking on all these subjects to catch up and get it all off my chest.

The Upcoming CS3 Launch
The big 'announcement of an announcement' event is planned for March 28th, at which time the details and date for the Creative Suite 3 release will be laid out bare for the world to see. Although I shared the same initial reaction to the recursive strategy as did Shaun Inman, I can say from an inside-the-walls perspective that there's been so much pent-up angst about this release (largely from Intel Mac early adopters) that I'm glad some information's getting out. I've been deluged at recent events with the inevitable when/how/what questions, and at least after March 28th I won't have to dodge them anymore. This release is going to be a huge one, and after using the alpha/beta applications within the Creative Suite 3 family for the last 6-8 months I can't fathom what it would be like going back to CS2/Studio 8. Hopefully you will share that opinion as well soon. ;-)

South by Southwest 2007
If I could only choose one event to attend each year, this would be the one. Hands down, no question. To be fair, I found many of the panels a bit substandard this year (for once, the sessions hosted by one or two 'panelists' seemed to have far more focus than the 'gang' sessions)- but the hallway conversations, offline debates and stellar events make SXSW a must-attend. Highlights for me were the Jason Santa Maria/Rob Weychert-delivered 'Beyond the Brief' session on design inspiration- those two guys are freakishly inspirational in their own right, and gave many fantastic examples of ways to live and breathe creativity. Jeremy summed it up quite well- technology deep-dives took a back seat this year to creative, applied uses of those technologies. And I think the event was overall much the better for it.

The response to my low-key SXSW day-stage demo of Spry (including a sneak peek at both the now-available Spry 1.5 updates, unobtrusive and progressively-enhanced usage of the framework, and Dreamweaver CS3 integration features) was also very positive. The Spry team is also doing a good job of 'blogging up what they're working on, it's good to see a bit more transparency around these subjects. See more below.

In short- I justify going to SXSW for the panels, but am driven to attend for the amazing attendees and conversations around those panels. 'Nuff said.

Spry 1.5
The Spry framework took early criticism on a number of points, but the team has listened and is doing a yeoman's job of adjusting and compromising to address many of those concerns. With the new features in Spry 1.5 (now available as a preview release) you can build progressively-enhanced sites much more easily. JSON support (including nested datasets) is now part-and-parcel of the data framework, along with the innovative new HTML Dataset feature- allowing you to, through strategically-placed classes and IDs, tag data in your HTML pages that is sucked up and turned into a live Spry dataset in browsers that support it. You can even point it to an external HTML file to suck up the data, making the possibilities quite vast. And of course, you can use this all unobtrusively by adding your Spry attributes at runtime via DOM scripting, which I highly recommend. Always best to keep your behaviors (Javascript) separate from your design (CSS) and data (HTML + server-side logic).

A preferred workflow in Spry 1.5- mock up your page/experience quickly using vanilla HTML, add descriptive classes/IDs to the HTML/CSS so it can be sucked into a live dataset via the HTML Dataset feature in Spry 1.5, then move all the inline event handlers to an external JS file and attach them at runtime. Unobtrusive AND progressively enhanced. Bing. Then we can move to only arguing about whether custom attributes are/are not following the intent of web standards as closely as they are the letter of the standards. ;-)
(Initiatives such as WAI ARIA spec suggest custom attributes are exactly for these purposes- extending XHTML in new directions. But feel free to disagree in comments if you're so inclined.)

Apollo Preview Release
Given that the hype and buzz around this has been pretty deafening over the last few days, I can only surmise if you have no idea what I'm talking about that you really need to get out more. Get the details and bits here on Adobe Labs - the much-speculated Apollo framework is now available for bit-twiddling and fiddling. Although it will eventually enable offline apps built with both Flash/Flex and HTML/JS, right now the former is supported, with Ajaxian goodness to join in the fun soon.

Okay, enough said. I'm back to attacking my burgeoning inbox and to-do lists after being distracted by all the above developments. If I've done my job, I've just passed down my distractions to you- and you find them as equally interesting as I did. ;-)

(note to self: update my Technorati profile.)

::fin::

I just noticed that Jeremy Keith announced his new book today - Bulletproof Ajax. Having greatly enjoyed DOM Scripting, his last labour of love, I'm sure this will be a great read as well- particularly as he notes writing it in a less programmer-heavy and more narrative-focused manner. I, for one, always appreciate a divergence from the expected monotony of dry technical tomes towards something a little more creative.

The book will be focused more on front-end developers than programmers per-se, which is also a nice twist on the expected Ajaxian tome of late. And it also shares an adjective and theme with Dan Cederholm's quite well-penned 'Bulletproof Web Design', becoming a nice extension of the 'Bulletproof' theme that carries Dan's seal of approval to boot.

The companion website for Bulletproof Ajax is now live as well, containing the intro, TOC and some code samples from the book (as well as links to preorder the book itself on the various Amazon regional sites)- so if this has piqued your interest you'll want to wander on over and check it out postehaste. Good stuff!