I’m currently at An Event Apart San Francisco, where I’ll be speaking this evening on Responsible Web Design, a meme I’ve been following for the last year or so without sharing the slides. Although it started as a ‘Cliffs Notes’ preso on web design and development best practices, it’s now started to incorporate some of the new features of Dreamweaver CS4 that support said practices. I’m all for closing loops, honestly.
As this will be the last time I give this particular presentation (I really mean it this time!), I’m uploading a PDF of the current deck for anyone who’s interested. It’s gone through several iterations, for what it’s worth, so I can’t guarantee it’s the same deck you saw beforehand. Feel free to ask questions here in comments if you have any?
You’re welcome to repurpose anything within as you’d like, all I ask is if you’d like to do that- please drop me a line here and tell me how you’ll be using it. However, the code/design assets I use in the DW sections can’t be shared yet (we’ll be using them for a new series of presentations I’m working on), so sorry about that- just slides this time.
It’s a historic quest of epic proportions- we’re trying to find the very first customer of Dreamweaver again after 10 years, and need your help. Check out Kush’s Adobe TV video embedded below for the details (link here if you’re reading via syndication), memorize that historic face, and help us find him, y’all!
The A List Apart staff just announced it’s second annual Survey For People Who Make Websites, and I strongly urge you to head over and take it. Last year’s Survey was a goldmine of information on our industry- who we are, where we live, our jobs and roles and backgrounds, and I for one am really interested in seeing how these metrics change over time. This isn’t just for web designers, mind you, but anyone working on web projects. From the ALA site:
Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide.
[From The Survey, 2008]
The survey (depending on your path through it) has up to 37 questions, but is very quick to rip through if you’re strapped for time. But please do- every response just helps make the results (which are always posted in both report and raw data formats) even more valid for the rest of us.
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:
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.)
It can be tough to stay on top of web standards and best practices when you’re churning away on projects- and god knows reading the W3C specs can be overwhelming. Recently Opera has taken a big step forward in releasing the Opera Web Standards Curriculum- a series of Creative Commons-licensed articles stepping through the breath of standards-based web development in an incredibly straightforward manner. Although they’ve planned around 50 such articles, the first 23 are now online for your educational pleasure.
Big shout-out and tip of the hat to Opera’s standards viking Chris Mills, who wrangled all of the editorial duties, coordinated with the Yahoo! developer network, and launched all of this curriculum right as he also welcomed his daughter Elva into the world – two major undertakings of extreme significance if you ask me. This type of open educational material has been long overdue, and the open way in which it’s being distributed will go a long way towards helping further the cause of web standards in both the professional market as well as the educational world – where curriculum can take an even slower path to adopt new and emerging standards.
I sat down a few weeks ago with Andre Charland and had a very candid discussion about the Dreamweaver public beta and how it relates to Ajax designers/developers, and it’s just been posted up on the InsideRIA site for your viewing/listening pleasure. We talked about a ton of things, including how I came to be a Dreamweaver product manager, the reasons I was ultra-skeptical of Dreamweaver before coming to Macromedia in 2000, as well as the vision behind the upcoming DW release and how it’s new features relate to front-end designers and developers alike. You can check it out below, or over at it’s home on the InsideRIA site.
WebAssist launched a very interesting new product for Dreamweaver today – Surveyor – that is focused on building site maps for your projects to assist in both search engine optimization (SEO) as well as navigation.
Not only does Surveyor scan your Dreamweaver site directories and build an XML site map for submission to popular search engines (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com, Live Search, etc), but it also allows you to generate a navigational HTML site map for visitors, and the icing on the cake- can remind you to come back every so often and update the site map so that your search result rankings stay fresh. And to close the loop – Surveyor will upload your site map to the correct engines with all the engine-specific metadata intact, making the process pretty painless.
If SEO is a constant nightmare for you and your projects, then Surveyor may be right up your alley. You can check it out here at the WebAssist site. Enjoy!
My favorite music browsing/listening service, Pandora, just released a beta desktop client… and it’s built using Adobe AIR. Sweet! Yet another example of how easily you can move from web to desktop using AIR. As Pandora was always Flash-based, it’s not a surprising move (and the design/look/feel is pretty much just like the site so not a huge jump forward in functionality), but a welcome move nonetheless- I’m not a fan of listening from my browser and much prefer the OS X dock controls the AIR desktop client provides. You can read more about the desktop beta at the Pandora team blog, and download/install the desktop beta here.
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!
Dreamweaver’s 10 years old this year, and to celebrate the decade we decided to make some big changes, and public ones at that. So we’re releasing a public beta of the current DW build (code named Stiletto), and letting you get your hands on it to see where things are headed.
Design is not static these days, but stateful, and dynamic. Forms proactively validate themselves in modern designs, and user interfaces intertwine dynamically-loaded data with application-like interaction models. Being born in a static age, Dreamweaver needed to come to parity with the way these types of immersive site experiences are designed and developed by today’s web pro. We met with a lot of designers and developers across the map after Dreamweaver CS3 was in the can, watched how they worked and tried to reflect the best of what we learned in Dreamweaver’s tools and workflow. The result is Stiletto.
Stiletto’s Live View lets you render the current page in Webkit – with JavaScript-driven interface elements and dynamic data from local servers in place – then freeze a particular page state and use the new Code Navigator and Related Files toolbar to directly navigate the asset files that combine to render a given element on the page. Quite frankly, there’s nothing quite like it in other design and development tools. Subversion support in the Files panel and extended, dynamic JavaScript code hinting help you be more effective with your site assets. Stiletto’s user interface has undergone work as well, now far less obtrusive, with auto-hiding and minimizing panels, a muted color scheme and horizontal/vertical split view options to maximize whatever display real-estate you’ve got at hand.
I’ll be posting thoughts, tips, suggestions and new tidbits of information about Stiletto from time to time, so if you’re new here, save a bookmark (or add my feed to your daily scoop) and check back once in a while.
