Subject to Change, Aviary, Flex4 and issuu.com

Posted on February 25, 2008 by Nuno Morgadinho

- A book by AdaptivePath called “Subject to Change” with the first chapter free to read here.

http://a.viary.com/ – These guys are developing multiple RIA’s in Flex/Flash that are really worth a look. Check the demo videos at their blog.

http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+4 – With the official release of Flex 3 comes the planning for Flex 4 – “..provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer.”

http://issuu.com – a very nice interface for reading e-books.

Programmers and Designers: The demand is there and increasing every day, let’s work together.

Posted on July 10, 2007 by Nuno Morgadinho

Via bittbox, an interesting article about the relations between programmers and designers. I totally agree with the author. When we understand what we can learn from others we get along a lot better, and that applies not just to software.

“When working together across both the design and programming disciplines, the best results and happiest clients are directly related to how well the (sometimes deceptive) design/programming companies work together. The best way to move forward and stay ahead of the game is to find a reliable partner, be it programmer or designer, that is willing to wear your hat and even go to meetings with you when needed. Once you develop a relationship, which most do eventually, it’s easy to get comfortable in your situation. This is one of the major reasons designers and programmers are so baffled by one another. No one interacts and shares knowledge, they just do their part and that’s it. This isn’t constructive enough to satisfy me, sorry.

Designers and programmers should be constantly looking into new ways to help each other out. And if you’re a small and growing company and have the demand, hire someone to compliment your team. Your designers will learn 100 times more information from an on-board programmer than emailing an outsourced “friend.” The same goes for programmers. Having one Graphic Designer on board could save you thousands in outsourcing, and teach your team priceless information about the layout in front of the code, and how the scripts manipulate what the user sees. Website interfaces should be designed for usability and accessibility, and that involves both what you see, and the programming that powers it. Make an effort to understand your complimentary discipline.”

Why software sucks..

Posted on July 9, 2007 by Nuno Morgadinho

Fast, good, cheap: choose two.

(from http://librenix.com/?inode=2068)

software that’s fun to write, easy to distribute, a pleasure to use, useful, and affordable

Posted on February 19, 2007 by Nuno Morgadinho

I must have learned something from the first chapter of The Pragmatic Programmer by Dave Thomas (who’s probably better known these days for his contributions to the Ruby community through his publishing company and must-have book Programming Ruby) when I read it long ago. In that chapter, Dave’s 8th tip is to, “Invest Regulary in Your Knowledge Portfolio”. One of the ways he suggests doing so is to learn one new language a year. Well, this year I seem to be making up for years gone by, because I’ve been spending a lot of my extra time working with several different languages and their frameworks. This year, I’ve been working with – in order as of today – haXe, Flash Lite 1.1, Ruby, ActionScript 3.0, XUL, and the Nullsoft Scriptable Install System. I’ve been working with their frameworks Ruby on Rails, Flex, and XULRunner.

All of these languages are tools to build the kind of software that I’m interested in building: software that’s fun to write, easy to distribute, a pleasure to use, useful, and affordable. For software to be distributed easily and a pleasure to use has to be universally available. And, to be universally available it needs to be truely cross-platform – cross-software and cross-hardware. It needs to work on win, mac, and nix and also in a browser, on a desktop, and on a palmtop. Today, the best format to make software universally available is the SWF format. It’s undeniable, more people have the Flash Player than any other piece of software .

It is, granted, worth noting that some feel like traditional Java, non-traditional Java, Python, Ruby, .NET, and the Mozilla Foundation’s XUL are also acceptable tools to make available software, and depending on the goal, they’re correct. In many cases, these technologies can even enhance a SWF’s funcionality. For example, it’s possible to use Mozilla’s XULRunner as a desktop wrapper for SWFs, or if you’re really smart, to do what Rich Kilmer did and write a SWF view to a Ruby controller and Berkeley DB model. Rich gave me and Luke a sneak peak at his indi product at RailsConf, and we were blown away. The product is a great idea, and it’s built on an extremely smart and interesting architecture. Get indi when it’s available.

Invest regularly in your knowledge portfolio.

in asserttrue.com

Mashups, MashupCamp

Posted on October 11, 2006 by Nuno Morgadinho

If you haven’t read or heird something about MashupCamp, here it goes:

“an unconference-style event that’s dedicated to bringing together the Internet software mashup community for a face-to-face collaborative meetup[..]”

Don’t get excited because it has happened already, in July 2006. Luckily, talk videos are available. But what are mashups anyway?

“Mashups (be they software or content-oriented) are most often characterized by the way they draw upon functionality and/or content from two or more sources (at least one of which is third-party to the developer) to produce a new creative work.”

Any examples?

“taking something like Yahoo Maps and mashing it together with your Salesforce.com data to come up with some cool new innovative Web-based application? Or, are you thinking of building something unique and interesting on top of the application programming interfaces (APIs) from Amazon.com and Eventful.com?”

A nice example of a mashup is blueOKapi.com that is mainly mashing up Google Maps, Flickr and YouTube all together using Ruby on Rails.

Other mashup examples are linked on their wiki together with interesting resources. Check them out if you’re interested :)

Note: ferodynamics.com has an article about the recent plane crash in Manhattan and how the “social” approach in sites like Digg didn’t quite work well this time: