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

I am very happy with the K2 wordpress theme (you’re watching it right now), beside having some pretty amazing browsing enhancements (I did not enable them yet, features like search results that appear as you type your search phrase, timeline view of your posts) it also has a very nice and intuitive sidebar manager, that allows you to write and manage the widgets and snippets in your side bar.
You can edit, rearrange them by dragging – works the same on all browsers! that’s pretty cool.

Few days ago my good old 17″ Studio Display monitor died after almost 9 years of devoted service. It’s been about two years that my main computer is a MacBookPro, and the old G4 is nothing more than a file server & itunes jukebox.One thing that I wanted to change for a long time is the angle of the display when I am working with my portable Mac on a table. There are few professional solutions out there, mostly by Griffin, but I wanted something more practical, and yes, cheeper..Here I saw an opportunity – the cool stand from the CRT display, that was never equaled in any model by any brand (at least that I saw) can serve just this purpose, lifting the portable and making air flow easy for cooling the burning machine, tilt-able and even aesthetic.
If you want to try this at home, here’s a little tip: after disassembling the stand from the old monitor, you should change the spring direction, to support the portable weight which has the opposite direction from the CRT. to do that, remove the center screw, and the screw that holds the spring, remove the white anchor, and rotate the top of the stand, front to back.Put the white anchor back, and now the string will be facing the other side of the stand.
Now hook the spring on the plastic handle. that’s it – you’re done.

From time to time I get to work on someone else’s code, could be shared classes I download or a client that brings his own program for treatments, anyway it is something that nobody likes.The difficulties are obvious to anyone that deals with code this way or another, (hey, sometimes I have hard time understanding my own code from six months ago..) But there are also great advantages if you’re trying to improve, although the learning curve is often steep, it’s faster than learning from books.Sometimes, definitely not most of them, it can even lead to a real leap, in term of understanding new styles and patterns, I never stop learning new things : )At larger scales, translating ActionScript classes into UML would be a blast, making sense in a glimpse and not through lines of code.And an answer to this need (and more!) is about to be born – Saffron UML by Samuel Agesilas, built for AIR, has a cool UI design, and platform independent – you have to see it!Looks amazing ha?

Great things are happening recently! SWX is a new data exchange format for flash, by Aral Balkan, basically delivering the data in swf format, so the flash is actually using a native loadMovie() function to load the data.Passing data to and from flash has been evolving for a long time now, recently it seems like it even accelerated. I am really happy with this one, cause unlike other solutions, it took me about 10 minutes to figure out how to set it up (this means it is simple if you had doubts), and implementing this method looks simple enough to become very popular.I like the concept of passing data in swf format, but I wonder, are these data swf files cashed in users machines?I will keep track of this for sure.

Adobe announced in the 3GSM Congress that the next release of Flash Lite™ (Flash for mobile phones & devices) will support Flash Video (FLV), to be available in the first half of 2007 – that’s really soon!This means the same video we view with our browsers will soon be viewable with our smart phones, making the FLV a dominant standard for delivering streaming video content to all devices.This also means future potential in terms of the smart phone’s User Interface, giving another strong incentive for implementing Flash Lite in the phones, also holds a possible answer to Apple’s iPhone User Interface coolness factor, as flash also allows really cool stuff. hmm, good news for flash developers.