A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

So much was written of the new flash player (version 10, code named “Astro”) and what it may do to the industry, it is indeed technologically inspiring, but from a freelance point of view (business wise) this even looks better.

Looking back to when I started working with flash (about ten years ago) and now, I can see a huge change in the weight of flash in projects out there.
Today, both the platform and the clients have matured, Flex has made a huge impact on technological companies perception of flash as the focus is shifting towards User Experience (anyone said RIA?) and OS compatibility and consistency, and the role flash plays in those is non comparable.

Up until recently I had to explain what I do, when refusing to take so many projects that were not related to my skills.. I guess because flash animators, designers, and coders were all considered the same in term of wages and availability.
Now, companies are looking for flash experts that can make charts like Google’s financial charts, and this is clearly a specialist job, since most of these companies don’t have the know-how in house, they call guys like me : )

The good news is that each improvement in flash adds to the appeal we have, and the demand for advanced flash programers is absolutely amazing.

I think this will be a great year.

The last Adobe Flash Player update, (Aug 21, codenamed “Moviestar”) integrates H.264 video and High Efficiency AAC audio codecs, as well as multi core support and full screen mode with hardware scaling.So flash will soon deliver HD quality videos, good news : )Flash is probably the best video platform today, as it combines the customizable interactivity of flash scripting and advanced streaming and playing abilities.The recently updated YouTube player is a great example, developing the video playing experience by improving the most difficult part – selecting the video out of the endless inventory without too much effort by the viewer. In the new player when the video you watched is over, relevant videos are offered, very aesthetically and in the same location, without visiting the flickr website or even leaving the page. nice.YouTube new player interface:

Few days ago John Grden released Papervision3D Component for Flash CS3.I wanted to try Papervision3D (actionscript 3D engine, check this out!) for some time now, and didnt have the time, with this cool shortcut I simply couldn’t resist..This component adds a panel for controlling properties of ‘Papervision3D COLLADA Scene’ component, properties such as the Source 3D file (collada = .dae), Camera settings and Model rotation or scale. The component also enable design-time rendering in Flash IDE, which is great! Flash and 3D are combined, in one native IDE. cool times.
check this vid out: (Sorry, the vid is no longer available)
Beside Flash components sweetness I still need the 3D modeling to be done on my Mac, I am not fluent in the 3D modeling world, but Blender is free and easily imports and exports Collada files, I guess it can give answer to my simple demands..

Scott Stevenson of Thecacao has a great point differentiating cross platform applications and native mac applications, another basic difference in the user experience between ported apps and native Mac apps is that Mac native applications enjoy core services such as Dictionary-Thesaurus, Speller, etc.. I rely on those services, and the consistency in keyboard shortcuts they bring to my working environment.For example take a look at Photoshop CS3 beta for Mac – it has a built in speller, the interface is primitive and not really attractive compared to the advanced docked palettes (see cap), surely less intuitive than the OS native speller.

confusing interface – what was checked? is that correct?

primitive interface – so many buttons, the default button is not aplying the change!

the good familiar mac dictionary – even look nice..
Skype provides the native mac Speller and Dictionary services, Firefox (and Camino) has no speller nor dictionary
Applications well ported to Mac should respect user habits, unless they really upgrade or improve the native OS service – they should not confuse the user by not providing those services or providing poor alternatives, for me it is not that different than the ability to copy & paste from one app to another.

For those who are not subscribed to the Adobe Edge newsletter, Adobe recently released Kuler – a really cool free on-line platform for creating & sharing Color schemes.Creating the color schemes is really easy & fun, colors can be defined in RGB, CMYK, LAB, HEX, making it applicable to all kind of implementation. Kuler provides predefined “Rules” which are actually preset relationships between colors, so you can change the range of your scheme on the spectrum and keep same relationship, really nice and cool!From designer point of view, these rules are replacing the “human touch” with technology. Enabling unexperienced users to reach good successful color schemes, and enjoy the experimental way.

The interface is simple & easy, however performance is not so great, every act that requires communication with the server (saving, searching, sharing) takes too long in my standards, I wanted to create few schemes to share with others, but after saving the first two I gave it up. The community features are also limited, currently only browsing and ranking, I found it painfully slow to browse other’s schemes as kuler displays 9 schemes each time and takes ages to load.