Belated CF Objective Wrap Up

I'm finally starting to get my head back above water at work after returning from CF.Objective(), so I thought I'd share some of my experience. The conference was great! A huge improvement over last year, which itself was excellent, and what high quality content. I can't say enough.

The big topics at the conference this year were Scorpio and ColdSpring. Maybe I say ColdSpring because about half the sessions I attended at least mentioned it, or maybe because I was hanging out with Adam (ColdSpring's self-appointed agent) , Chris and Dave. But since I've been using ColdSpring and MG:Unity, without really understanding ColdSpring all that well, I thought I should get to know it a little better. Hey, I'm a designer - it takes me awhile to grasp these things!

And of course, what everyone wants to hear...what's coming with Scorpio? I'm really excited about several things that were announced

• AJAX tags - there are 12 new ones! Not just new UI widgets using the YUI library while wrapping it up into the ever-simple CF syntax; but also JSON serialization for CFCs, data binding, error handling, and a JavaScript debugger. A lot of the concepts seem to echo Flex, so if you've done any work with Flex these features will come very naturally. This is just one more step towards my life goal of never having to write JavaScript again :)
• PDF tags - not just improvements to , but which allows you to manipulate PDFs in dozens of ways (combining docs, watermarking, rotating pages, etc), and process Acrobat Forms. The functionality is taken from LiveCycle, and from what I hear, we should all be very appreciative of the power that's being added to CF at a fraction of what it would cost to get LiveCycle. A very SMALL fraction. A few people grumbled that you won't be able to create PDF forms with CF, but I say to those people, just wait and I think you will find out that you really don't need that functionality. If you need to create a dynamic form so badly, ever heard of...ahem...HTML? Or how about that thing they call Flex?
  
• Geek features - I didn't attend the Scorpio 1337 session (features only geeks could love) because there was something else on the schedule I wanted to see at the same time (although that seemed to happen every time slot, there were so many great topics). But there were promises of some very geeky features like Interfaces, the debugger, and well, I don't remember them all because I didn't attend this session, but I'm sure if you are a geek there will be lots of things for you to appreciate.
• The new CFAdmin interface and server monitoring features are sweet. You can drill down into every connection and request on your site, to see where the load is and what exactly is going on at any moment in time (right down to the values of variables in various scopes), along with completely customizable alerts (you can even write a CFC to do your own alert handling). It's really amazing that you can find out so much about what's happening on your server in such a simple way.
• There's lots more, but this post is getting long.

It's not common that I leave a conference with no complaints. In comparison to CFObjective, other conferences are too long (by the last day I'm not interested or up to seeing any more sessions), don't have enough good content (all three sessions I want to see will inevitably be at the same time, while there are entire afternoons full of nothing I want to see), have too many sales pitches, have crappy food (hey, details matter), have bouncers working the door at every session to ensure no unwanted guests get in (bad vibes), or cost too much (something you begin to question when you go to an extravagant social even that's actually kinda lame, and realize that half your registration fee went to pay for that one night). Great job Jared, Steven, Jim and team...I'm looking forward to next year!

New Google Analytics

A new version of Google Analytics is coming:

http://analytics.blogspot.com/2007/05/new-version-of-google-analytics.html

Google Analytics is already a great tool, but this new version seems to still be an improvement. The features being promised for the new GA are much needed - scheduled email of reports, custom dashboard, and better trends-over-time. I hope they can also get the Site Overlay feature working better on CSS-based layouts. Maybe it's not really that useful, but it sure looks cool!

The interface looks simpler also, to which I say "it's about time!" So many web analytics tools, for so long, have used such non-intuitive, cryptic menus and language for their interfaces. Granted, I've never been fortunate enough to use WebTrends, which I hear is great, but LiveStats, SmarterStats and Urchin/Google Analytics, despite improvement over the years, still don't quite give me the information I'm looking for, and they all require pulling multiple reports just to see what you'd think should be the same information every webmaster wants to see! Not only that, it's difficult to understand exactly what you're looking at, sometimes the explanations about the reports don't really provide any helpful information. Maybe that's why Mint gets such rave reviews, but I can't use it because it's LAMP. So, yay for better, more usable web analytics tools!

Adobe Stock Photos is teh kewl

I didn't really use Adobe stock photos before now, I pretty much used Getty and a couple alternates when I couldn't find what I need on Getty, and that was it. I somehow felt like I would not get as good a deal if I didn't go through the manufacturer.

However, over the past year or two, I've seen a lot of excellent new royalty-free stock photography houses blossoming. There's the trend towards all-you-can-download pricing (Shutterstock, LiquidLibrary), and the super-inexpensive, community-based sites (iStockPhoto). These have turned out to be a real boon for me when I needed simple, generic images. Need a picture of a plain old book? Or just a smiling dude? You'll find hundreds.

But when it comes to a large campaign with a 15000-piece print run, maybe you want something more unique. In those cases, I've moved away from the majors (Getty and Corbis) because they are not only expensive, but they are so popular there is a good chance that someone else will have used your image. Veer and Creatas are popular with a lot of designers, and they do tend to carry more unique images, but with a smaller selection.

After awhile, all this searching among several sites gets tedious. And some stock websites are considerably better than others - pricing at your fingertips, convenient comps and zoomed views, as well as how painful it is to page through 1100 images...the amenities vary widely from site to site. I find myself sometimes wishing one site had the xyz feature of another.

Enter Adobe Stock Photos. A convenient, robust, fast and slick interface that brings together the selection of dozens of stock houses, with fairly consistent and reasonable pricing. The only other thing I can ask for would be the ability to search for disks of images, or find the disk associated with an image if available (if I find one I really like, chances are there are others from the same photographer or shoot). And perhaps some additional "smart" search tools, but really when the interface works this well I don't mind looking through a few more images. I just bought my first three photos there, and I'm really pleased!

Off to CF.Objective!

I'm about to sign out and leave for the airport to head to Minneapolis for the 2nd ever CF.Objective() conference. From what I've heard about this year's conference so far, it sounds like it's going to be great and I'm excited! I'll try to blog some talks I attend if I'm not too distracted...if you're going too, see you there!

Grow up, web design field!

ALA is conducting a Web Design/Development Survey...I'm interested to see the results. In a small way, it's a sign of the industry (slowly) maturing, something ALA has done a great deal to push forward.

Upgrading to Creative Suite 3? Use caution!

Just a word of advice from someone who did this upgrade in a much more painful manner than necessary! Make sure you understand what you are buying!

Last summer, I started my job at my current company, and got an entirely new computer with all new software. Naturally I needed all my Adobe goodies. This was shortly after the completion of the Adobe/Macromedia merger, so I was able to get it all by purchasing the Creative Suite Web Bundle, which included Creative Suite 2 Premium and Studio 8 Pro.

When CS3 came out I was all in a tizzy about upgrading as quickly as possible, because I had been on the PhotoShop and Fireworks CS3 betas and was already addicted. I checked out all the new suite options, and decided that Master wasn't for me - I didn't need all the video apps. And Design Premium didn't include Fireworks or Contribute.

I bought Web Premium, which I thought had everything I needed. I failed to notice that InDesign was not part of Web Premium. I think it was a mixture of my hurry and excitement to purchase (bad idea), and my assumption that anything called "Creative Suite" would include InDesign because it always has. Again, "to assume just makes an ass of u and me"...

Well, as I was going through my installation woes with CS3 Web Premium, I discovered the missing InDesign upgrade, and went on Adobe's site to see what I missed. I looked at the cost of upgrading InDesign alone, and figured that's what I was going to have to do. The "upgrade eligibility" page on the site was ambiguous - it said I could upgrade if I owned InDesign CS2, which I do. I wasn't sure if that would be allowed, so I chatted online with a customer service rep who told me it would work. Cool. So I bought the inDesign upgrade, and installed it, but when it came time to register, it would not accept my previous serial number for the upgrade or locate my previous installation. Argh.

I called support for like the 10th time in the past 2 days and was told that in fact that upgrade could not be done, I couldn't upgrade twice off the same product. Yeah, I get it, I understand, I see their point when they put it that way. But think about it, I OWN the previous version! I have done nothing shady or illegal here, I just want the shiny new versions of everything that I've already bought!

So, now I'm in a position where none of the suite products allow me to upgrade my previous purchase in full without purchasing another product as a standalone.

I ended up having to return CS3 Web Premium to get CS3 Design Premium, and forego Fireworks, because it's not as essential to my workflow (I was looking forward to some of its Flex comping and skinning features...too bad) . I can't bring myself to pay full price for a full version of a product I don't use that much that I already own. CS3 is also very pricey, my company has put $1700 into this suite so far! I'm disappointed in this oversight of Adobe's, at the lack of clarity on the website, and at the lack of education of the customer service rep I chatted with online.

I'm sure a lot of this has to do with the merger. I know Adobe can't be expected support infinite variations of their suites. I'm probably an edge case. But I still feel a little shafted here.

On the flip side, the new versions of everything in CS3 are fantastic, you should buy them...just watch what you're doing before you do!

Adobe to Open Source Flex

Wow, this is big news! Adobe has just announced that they will be releasing Flex under the Mozilla Public License. If you think about it, it's not that big of a jump since the Flex SDK is already available for free, they are just releasing additional developer resources, docs and build information...and enabling outside developers to contribute.

The press release: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200704/042607Flex.html

FAQ:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Flex:Open_Source

This seems like a smart move to me for many reasons. First off, it's hugely positive PR. The public loves open source. Adobe has gotten a bad rap for the cost of some of their enterprise products, despite the fact that they have contributed to many open source products and released their own (Tamarin). This is a big step towards broad acceptance of Flex by the web development community, and it's going to have a great impact on the success of Apollo. If Adobe wants to rule the web, this is how they are going to do it.