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August 29, 2007

An Event Apart San Francisco - Discount!

Interested in hitting An Event Apart San Francisco this October, but on a lean budget? You can trim a svelte $50 off the ticket price until September 7th (when the earlybird registration closes), and I strongly recommend ponying up and attending if you haven't been to an AEA conference yet. The An Event Apart conference series is one of my favorites - it hits most of the major metropolitan areas so you can usually find one close to you in a given year, and there's only one track/session schedule - so gone are worries of conflicting sessions or finding a good seat from room to room. Oh yeah - and the speakers are all stellar. Seriously.

If you're interested in getting that $50 discount, just use the promo code "AEAADOB" (sans quotes) during your registration. Enjoy!

Posted by sfegette at 12:15 PM | Comments (0)

August 28, 2007

Dreamweaver "Next"- What Won't Be In It

Dreamweaver's a big application. Huge, in fact. And the next release is going to be an equally huge one - I haven't seen the team this excited in years. But as they consider new features and proposals for downstream releases, it's a struggle to both innovate on features and architecture while also testing and maintaining all the legacy features in DW. So, after a lot of careful consideration and research, the DW team has arrived at a short list of features to be dropped (in releases after CS3) that both a) require a lot of release-to-release effort to maintain, and b) are frankly not being used with much, if any frequency by the DW community. You can read the details here.

Yes, this list will likely be controversial to some - particularly if you're relying on one or more of these features today. However, the team decided to publish this list early- to both help you prepare for the changes, evaluate other options and adjust your own workflows. Most all the deprecated features either have become more code-centric workflows in other dedicated IDEs/environments (JSP, .NET), or had visual user interfaces that enabled DW developers and designers to generate poorly-formed code in the back end (Layout Mode and Timelines, for example) - something the team takes very seriously.

My personal opinion is that this move will really free up resources to do a LOT in the next few releases of Dreamweaver, and start doing more 'revolutionary' feature and architectural work as opposed to strictly 'evolutionary' features and polish. If any of the features to be removed give you pause, post a note, and it's likely we can suggest alternatives for the post-CS3 era to help smooth the transition.

Personally- I hope that when we're able to talk more about what's being planned for the next version (or two) of Dreamweaver, the tradeoffs made here will be more than justified in your eyes. But that's a subject for a much later date with a lot more details- so keep posted. :)

Posted by sfegette at 10:26 AM | Comments (21)

August 23, 2007

Eric Meyer's CSS Sculptor for Dreamweaver

To quote Zeldman: "danged if Eric Meyer hasn't launched a product", and in collaboration with long-time Dreamweaver extensionology specialists WebAssist, no less.
Today WebAssist announced their new product "Eric Meyer's CSS Sculptor", a collaboration with Eric on a very well-concieved Dreamweaver extension that allows you to create drop-dead simple, standards-compliant CSS designs quickly and comprehensively. Quite a nice collaboration at that, if I do say so myself.

CSS Sculptor is an elegant Dreamweaver extension that helps you quickly build a customized CSS layout, starting with 30 of the most popular variants- elastic, liquid and fixed layouts, 1-3 column configurations, and much more. The interface doesn't just help you choose from a completely 'pre-canned' design, but gives you a clear starting point to help expose the CSS and attributes required to customize a layout for your specific project and design- helping educate users on CSS best practices as well as expedite their development. Win/win.

The community is taking notice, too- you can read Jeffrey Zeldman's aforementioned take on CSS Sculptor (great comment thread, too), articles from InfoWorld and Website Magazine, and of course Eric's own take on CSS Sculptor at his personal weblog. Don't forget to digg the news, as well. :)

Great product from two heavyweights in their respective spheres of influence, and yet another reason why Dreamweaver's such a rich product to work with- the extensibility/third-party developer community around Dreamweaver just plain rocks! Awesome job, guys.

(Side note: I feel compelled to put a little plug in here for the standards-compliant CSS Layouts that ship with Dreamweaver CS3 for the record - which are also great sources of education on CSS design/layout best practices - heavily commented, and coded for Dreamweaver by The Web Standards Project's Stephanie Sullivan.)

Posted by sfegette at 10:35 AM | Comments (1)

August 20, 2007

Configuring Dreamweaver CS3 for AIR Coding

If you're using Dreamweaver CS3 but hesitant to get started with AIR development, I put together a very quick one-off screencast showing how to configure DWCS3 for AIR previewing and deployment using the beta AIR Extension for Dreamweaver (available on Adobe Labs).

This screencast covers installation and general functionality of the extension, and should get you up and running quickly. From there, it should be a snap to start leveraging your existing XHTML/JS/Spry/CSS skills to write sweet desktop apps using the AIR runtime.
Enjoy!

Posted by sfegette at 04:09 PM | Comments (2)

August 14, 2007

Desktop RSS with AIR and Spry

Notorious Aussie rebel Andrew Muller has written up a great article on building an AIR RSS viewer using Adobe's Spry framework for the plumbing. Although he's using Aptana in the article, Dreamweaver users have it just as easy (if not a bit easier) following the same steps, as obviously Spry's much more integrated with DW CS3 than any other dev tool at the moment. You just need to grab the Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3, which you can pick up for free (in beta form) at Adobe Labs.

Minor modifications to use Andrew's article with DW CS3:

Simple, quick and easy! And great little article to get your feet wet with AIR and Spry. Make sure to give Andrew some props if you like the walkthrough.

Posted by sfegette at 09:51 AM | Comments (1)

August 13, 2007

Source Control and Dreamweaver

... do you use them together? If so (or even if you just use source control regularly with other web design/development tools), please jump in with your thoughts and observations at this post by Lori Hylan-Cho on the Dreamweaver team weblog - "Source Control: Do You Use It?". Lori's trying to gather feedback on how you use version control/source control systems like Subversion, CVS, Perforce (and others) in web-based projects, whether application, site or both. If you haven't used a source control system in the past but are interested in possibly doing so in the future, your comments and suggestions are also welcomed. So if this interests you even remotely, please hit that link and join the conversation. Thanks!

Posted by sfegette at 11:58 AM | Comments (0)

XRAY IE Beta Available

Again proving his boundless reserve of energy and innovation, John Allsopp has just announced an Internet Explorer beta of XRAY, his sweet little page instrospection bookmarklet I noted last week in it's initial Firefox-supported release. Just one more reason why you should run - not walk - to John's site and download this little gem postehaste. Just hit the first link above, drag the 'XRAY IE' link to your bookmarks toolbar in IE, then revel in your newfound page element wisdom.

Awesome stuff. Thanks again, John- XRAY kicks some major butt.

Posted by sfegette at 11:32 AM | Comments (0)

August 10, 2007

Be a Dreamweaver Video Star

Wanna get your mug up on the big screen at MAX this year? Enthusiasm about the CS3 launch has you warm and fuzzy, but anxious and jittery? Well, we've just the outlet for you hardcores to let off some steam.

Between August 24th and 28th Adobe will be shooting on-camera interviews of Adobe software enthusiasts, talking about the software and work they love, for a video to be shown at the MAX conference in Chicago. If selected, you'd only be needed for one of those days (individual shoots will range between 1 to 2 hours maximum, FYI). If you want to be considered for this big-screen appearance you just have to drop a note to 'adobecast@yahoo.com' providing:

If you've got an interesting story to tell - especially if you're using Dreamweaver, of course (as I'm biased that way) - drop a note to the production email account and get yourself in the running. I'm really looking forward to seeing the final piece, as well as the blooper reels... ;-)

Posted by sfegette at 05:49 PM | Comments (0)

Kuler API Now Available

Kuler, the Flex-based Adobe web app for exploring color space, has become quite the thriving nexus for colorists across the ether, allowing one to experiment quickly with color themes and share them with equal ease amongst the design community. Well, good news for mashup artists worldwide- you can now access a simple RESTful API to get Kuler color themes into your own application/mashup. Here's an example to get the wheels turning. Ready? You can get all the details over at Adobe Labs. Mash away!

Update: I was recently informed that the Kuler interface was actually built in Flash- not Flex. Apologies for the mixup!

Posted by sfegette at 03:14 PM | Comments (3)

My iTunes - Flash Widgets

Amidst all the new iMac/iLife/iWork iNews this week, I somehow missed this little tidbit (thanks to JD for the nod)- Apple's new 'My iTunes' site offers several downloadable/embeddable page widgets to share your iTunes prefs with the world- and said widgets are delivered in Flash format.

Widgets and code snippets like this aren't quite breaking news, but given all the chatter recently about what Apple ISN'T doing with Flash today (most notably the iPhone, of course), I found this a rather interesting example of some cool things Apple IS doing with Flash.

Posted by sfegette at 11:58 AM | Comments (3)

August 07, 2007

XRAY - Box Model Introspection

Does John Allsopp ever sleep? I swear, between developing Style Master, speaking at conferences, and general Microformats evangelism among his other pursuits that guy is so packed full of energy he makes me feel like a cardboard cutout of myself.

John and WestCIV's latest venture is XRAY- a small JS bookmarklet you can use to quickly introspect the box model for any element on a page. Whereas Firebug is the ten-ton-monster of site introspection, XRAY is light and easy to use (and just as handy)- just click the bookmarklet on any given page, and you're shown the entire CSS inheritance hierarchy for the clicked element, it's dimensions, etc. Beauty and simplicity in a small bookmarklet.

Right now XRAY is only supported in Safari 2/3 on OS X (with some caveats for Windows Safari), and all Mozilla-variant browsers on OS X and Windows (Firefox, Flock, Camino, etc). Howver, reportedly an IE version is also in the works. Any way you slice it, XRAY is a must-have utility for anyone doing serious browser-based work, and you should install it right now. Seriously. And make sure to give John some props/feedback while you're at it.

Still reading? What are you waiting for?

Posted by sfegette at 03:10 PM | Comments (2)

August 06, 2007

Twitter/AIR Tastiness

Twitter's popular these days, that's for sure. I'm hooked, at least - and have been for over a year now. And although there's many very cool third-party clients you can use to consume your tweets, two recently came to my attention that use Adobe technology to deliver your regular tweet fix - TwitterAIR and Spaz.AIR.

First, Aaron West's sweet TwitterAIR app gets the strong nod-and-wink for being the first AIR Twitter app I'd seen (and damn nicely done, too). Respect.

Secondly - but not least - Spaz.AIR uses both the AIR runtime as well as the free Spry framework from Adobe (along with some JQuery) to do it's magic. A double shot of Adobe technology in that little package, that's cool in and of itself.

Now to be perfectly honest- I primarily use the Iconfactory's Twitteriffic as it both integrates with my menu bar well, and Growl for system notification (mainly, I've been using it for so long it's just become part of my workflow), but were I to rethink it all - which I might - either Spaz or TwitterAIR would be my successors of choice. Boo ya!

Posted by sfegette at 05:01 PM | Comments (4)

Blueprint - a CSS framework

Frameworks.

That singular word alone can stir up heated, pseudo-religious debates in web dev circles, some finding coding frameworks a boon for rapid development, others decrying them far too bulky and overengineered in relation to hand-coded, specific solutions. I'm somewhat neutral- most of my exposure to frameworks has been straight-up coding frameworks like CakePHP, Fusebox, Spry, Prototype among others, and although I love a good hand-coded solution, when time's short a good framework like Spry or Cake can really save time. Howver, I was really intrigued to see that some enterprising design types have pulled together a framework for CSS - "Blueprint" - to better enable grid-based layouts in standards-compliant markup. Lead developer Olav Bjorkoy cites inspiration from many leading CSS and design gurus- Eric Meyer, Jeff Croft and Khoi Vinh amongst them (although they are not 'officially' part of the project).

Interesting. Although some 'designers' condemn Dreamweaver for it's visual design surface masking the code beneath and allowing less technical users to create flexible designs at the expense of optimized code, it's validating to see more design-centric coders acknowledge that standards-compliant designs could benefit from framework code. As the entire Blueprint framework - options and all - weighs in at ~40kb, it's not too draining on bandwidth as it could be, which is nice. Let's take a look at what Blueprint provides.

At the code level, Blueprint provides a screen stylesheet with three included files - reset.css (for 'resetting' browser defaults to provide a consistent starting point), typography.css (for type styles and effects), and the main brains behind the framework- grid.css (containing the rules and selectors for specifying grid-based layouts in CSS). There's also a print.css file to override certain styles for better print output, which is a nice touch.

Implementing Blueprint grid designs is reasonably simple, and should be very familiar to table-based webmonkeys who've been leaning on the old colspan/rowspan crutch for grid-based designs since Netscape 1.2 introduced 'em (you know who you are!). Just wrap your page in a container div, and then mark up the divs within to specify rows and columns appropriately. By default, the Blueprint grid is 960px wide (suitable for 1024x768 monitors, a good baseline), containing 14 columns of 50px apiece, with 20px margins between.

The 'first' and 'last' classes appear to control row content, marking the first and last columns in a given row. For example, this is a basic 3-column with header layout plucked from the Blueprint tutorial:

<div class="container">
  <div class="column span-14">
    Header
  </div>
  <div class="column span-3 first">
    Left sidebar
  </div>
  <div class="column span-8">
    Main content
  </div>
  <div class="column span-3 last">
    Right sidebar
  </div>
</div>

In the example above (see here for the original), the header DIV stretches the entire 14 columns, and the 'main content' row (containing three columns) uses span-X classes to define the widths of each column in the row (with the 'first' and 'last' classes determining the actual beginning and ending of the row).

Pretty simple- and the framework renders as you'd expect in Dreamweaver CS3 so you can get the best of both worlds- quick markup in code with nice integrity in design view should you want to work that way. On the best practices side of things, less technical designers looking to really deconstruct CSS to learn from it may have some problems wading through the framework's abstractions to get to the core techniques, but as the layouts I've tried so far validate well as XHTML/Transitional (my doctype of choice for most things) that's more a minor - and obvious - gripe than anything else.

All things told I'll probably stick with hand-coding my CSS layouts in my preferred Dreamweaver/BBEdit editing combo, but can't deny that for quick mockups and one-off projects Blueprint may be very handy for me indeed. Definitely worth checking out, regardless. Let me know what you think?

Posted by sfegette at 11:45 AM | Comments (2)