Do you have a backup plan? A Plan "B" you can fall back on if your first attempt fails? I'm a pilot. Backup plans are part of our DNA.
As we take to the runway and I advance the throttle, you're thinking, "It sure is loud in here!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just stop on the remaining runway". As I lift the nose and we take to the air, you're thinking, "Here we go!" I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll just land straight ahead". At some point you'll be able to pick out familiar landmarks in the city and you think "They look like doll houses!" while I'm thinking "If the engine quits now, I'll land on the freeway". An airplane may disappoint a good pilot, but it will never surprise him.
This week I stand in the eye of a storm of demands upon my time, talents and technology the like of which I have not seen in years. At home, my wife and I are trying to buy a house. We have arranged financing pre-approval and scouted about a dozen neighborhoods. We have reluctantly increased our budget by another ten percent or so and, finally, found a house we both like. We wrote an offer and it was accepted and now we need to move ahead and secure our financing (4.75%!) and start down the road of un-plugging everything from hovel-A and installing it into hovel-B at the appointed day and time.
At church, I have recently become president of our board of trustees. We're staring down a bunch of repairs and enhancements to our building and looking at a capital campaign of about a million dollars. Also, the fourth and fifth grade Sunday school kids would like to put on a little play. I'm going to be spending a lot of evenings at home on the telephone and in e-mail, rounding up support for this and that and making our case.
And here at work we are about to jump into a whole new paradigm on the Web. We are going to move away from a primarily HTML-based and Dreamweaver-based template program to leaning more on Drupal. Training for the older technologies and some of the gee-whiz features people have added over the last year and more will be moving more to a video on demand model. Here's how to install the Templates files. Here's how to install the image-swapper. That sort of thing.
So into this storm comes the first indication of just how brittle a lot of technology is, today. I have my computer wake up for me about five minutes before I arrive, every morning. Our Chancellor is all about saving money these days, and while it won't probably save a single job or graduate a single kid, I turn my computer off overnight since I was told to. Well, yesterday I came in to find that Things Were Not Quite Right. I had access to my Web browser, but couldn't open up my hard drive and edit a document there. I had access to any application in my Dock, but everything else was locked away from me. I could not even restart from the menu, because the menu was gone.
Last month I signed-up for our incremental backup service. It works hand-in-glove with the Apple TimeMachine backup service. Except when it doesn't. Since I have had my trouble, I have asked around and not found a single user who was happy with the integration of our scripts and Apple's software. When challenged, the script author admitted that there were problems when a Mac tried to go to sleep in the middle of a backup, etc.
So now, when I need to be able to guarantee access to my files, I may not always be able to. And I may not know it isn't working until I actually need it all to work.
So I'm spending this week re-thinking the whole process and working on bringing up reliability a few percent.
What is your Plan B, if what you're doing today fails?
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
Wednesday, April 14, 2010
The Fifth Creative Suite
Monday morning, Adobe unleashed upon a grateful nation Creative Suite 5, forcing Web professionals the world over to ponder once again whether or not they needed to upgrade.
Adobe, of course, actually released five versions of Creative Suite, for the many and various needs of the thinker-upper set. Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection, which I have always thought should be pronounced "Mahhh•stuh" in the style of the late John Houseman.
For our purposes, we are really only concerned with three of those boxes, the Design Premium, Web Premium and Master Collection are the only ones with the new Dreamweaver CS5 included. Design Premium also includes Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CSS, InDesign CSS, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional CSS, Dreamweaver CSS and Fireworks CSS. This is nice for a couple of reasons. Adobe used to devilishly carve up the market so Web professionals couldn't easily buy Dreamweaver and Photoshop or Dreamweaver and Flash without going to the high-bucks box. And also, early money said that Fireworks would not live long after the sale of Macromedia to Adobe, which would kill the program in favor of their own in-house Photoshop. So, yay.
The Web Premium box includes all that and Flash Builder 4 and Adobe Contribute. That's it.
Flash is having a tough time in the media, as Steve Jobs and Apple have once again passed it by with the new iPad, causing a bunch of Very Public Questions to be raised in the media, followed by some Very Public Answers and much chin-stroking. Some sites have very publicly abandoned Flash for other techniques (notably HTML5) that will work on iPhones and iPads. So you may wonder why and how Adobe have now filled out three product lines with Flash?
Flash Catalyst is Flash with another user interface. You can build (simple) Flash apps now, without knowing how to code or a lot of the in's and out's of the full program. You can more easily start with a Photoshop or Fireworks document and turn its constituent elements into buttons or scrollbars. The resulting output can then be handed off to real, hairy-chested Flash developers for further enhancing, or used as-is. Flash Catalyst is probably Adobe's way of making it harder for developers to decide to use HTML5 or JQuery.
Photoshop CSS is tuned-up again. CS4 brought content-aware resizing, where you could designate areas on the image that would keep their aspect ratios (wheels on a bus, for example, that was being stretched, would not appear egg-shaped). Content-aware Fill comes to Photoshop CSS. Select a background and paint-over page elements like trees, parking meters or power lines and Photoshop will stitch together a background intelligently, based on what it thinks you're looking for. You can remove tree branches and still keep that sky gradient behind them. Clip out an irregular sky from another image and square it up before placing it behind the foreground. Complex selections are made easier, too. Guy in red flannel standing in front of red brick wall? Lots of reds, lots of blacks, lots of lines. Photoshop can select just this lumberjack, or grunge singer, and paste him wherever you need, without fear of leaving sleeves behind, or packing along extra bricks. Puppet Warp lets you bend arms and legs around user-defined elbows and knees and a new Lens Correction Filter lets you compensate more easily for the effects of bending light through glass—an awful lot of attention has been paid to the needs of electronic photographers in the new Photoshop.
Dreamweaver gets new CSS layout templates, simplified Site setup (yay!) and support for php-based Content Management Systems. Code Hints can now be customized, beyond selecting which tips you want to see. CSS support is improved and BrowserLab approximates the view of your page in various browsers on various operating systems.
No, it's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the line. The crew that brings us Adobe Creative Suite CS5? They still have jobs. I would bet we see a Creative Suite CS6 in a couple of years. It's now up to each of us to look into these updates, and decide if they are worth the price and the learning curve. Good luck!
Adobe, of course, actually released five versions of Creative Suite, for the many and various needs of the thinker-upper set. Design Standard, Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium and the Master Collection, which I have always thought should be pronounced "Mahhh•stuh" in the style of the late John Houseman.
For our purposes, we are really only concerned with three of those boxes, the Design Premium, Web Premium and Master Collection are the only ones with the new Dreamweaver CS5 included. Design Premium also includes Photoshop CS5 Extended, Illustrator CSS, InDesign CSS, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional CSS, Dreamweaver CSS and Fireworks CSS. This is nice for a couple of reasons. Adobe used to devilishly carve up the market so Web professionals couldn't easily buy Dreamweaver and Photoshop or Dreamweaver and Flash without going to the high-bucks box. And also, early money said that Fireworks would not live long after the sale of Macromedia to Adobe, which would kill the program in favor of their own in-house Photoshop. So, yay.
The Web Premium box includes all that and Flash Builder 4 and Adobe Contribute. That's it.
Flash is having a tough time in the media, as Steve Jobs and Apple have once again passed it by with the new iPad, causing a bunch of Very Public Questions to be raised in the media, followed by some Very Public Answers and much chin-stroking. Some sites have very publicly abandoned Flash for other techniques (notably HTML5) that will work on iPhones and iPads. So you may wonder why and how Adobe have now filled out three product lines with Flash?
Flash Catalyst is Flash with another user interface. You can build (simple) Flash apps now, without knowing how to code or a lot of the in's and out's of the full program. You can more easily start with a Photoshop or Fireworks document and turn its constituent elements into buttons or scrollbars. The resulting output can then be handed off to real, hairy-chested Flash developers for further enhancing, or used as-is. Flash Catalyst is probably Adobe's way of making it harder for developers to decide to use HTML5 or JQuery.
Photoshop CSS is tuned-up again. CS4 brought content-aware resizing, where you could designate areas on the image that would keep their aspect ratios (wheels on a bus, for example, that was being stretched, would not appear egg-shaped). Content-aware Fill comes to Photoshop CSS. Select a background and paint-over page elements like trees, parking meters or power lines and Photoshop will stitch together a background intelligently, based on what it thinks you're looking for. You can remove tree branches and still keep that sky gradient behind them. Clip out an irregular sky from another image and square it up before placing it behind the foreground. Complex selections are made easier, too. Guy in red flannel standing in front of red brick wall? Lots of reds, lots of blacks, lots of lines. Photoshop can select just this lumberjack, or grunge singer, and paste him wherever you need, without fear of leaving sleeves behind, or packing along extra bricks. Puppet Warp lets you bend arms and legs around user-defined elbows and knees and a new Lens Correction Filter lets you compensate more easily for the effects of bending light through glass—an awful lot of attention has been paid to the needs of electronic photographers in the new Photoshop.
Dreamweaver gets new CSS layout templates, simplified Site setup (yay!) and support for php-based Content Management Systems. Code Hints can now be customized, beyond selecting which tips you want to see. CSS support is improved and BrowserLab approximates the view of your page in various browsers on various operating systems.
No, it's not the end of the world. It's not even the end of the line. The crew that brings us Adobe Creative Suite CS5? They still have jobs. I would bet we see a Creative Suite CS6 in a couple of years. It's now up to each of us to look into these updates, and decide if they are worth the price and the learning curve. Good luck!
Wednesday, April 7, 2010
The Persistence
Sometimes we have to do things we don't want to do. We're not into it. We don't feel we have the expertise. Maybe it's just boring, drudge work. The best way to handle something like this? Not to sell any shoes or anything, but Just do it. Make a start and get into it.
Years ago, I used to work with a lot of writers, online. Some published, others dreamers. I got quite a bit of work through a few of them and ended up as a freelance writer, myself, for about a dozen years. One of the most frequently asked questions we got was "How do you sit down and write a book?" And the answer to that is in the question, itself. You sit down and write a book.
But there's more to it than that, of course. We used to have techno-thriller author Tom Clancy in pretty regularly and if someone asked him that question, he'd respond "I just sat down and wrote the son-of-a-bitch!" which I always thought was a disservice to the questioner.
But he's right, in a way. You do have to do it, eventually. But nobody, not even the mighty Tom Clancy at the height of his powers, could sit down and knock out a whole book at a single setting. But what you can do is to split the project up, reduce it to a whole bunch of little, easily-accomplished, tasks. Make a giant list for yourself if you need to, put everything on it—then just cruise through the list, crossing things off as you go.
Name the hero? Check. Name his nemesis? Check. Sketch out a plot outline? Check. Research the geography of the setting? Check. Gather historical facts? Check. Figure out how many characters you'll need to tell the story? Check. Flesh out the details for everyone in the book, including details that inform the character that may not actually even make it into the book. Check. On and on it goes. Then just move through it all, one at a time, building on what's come before.
You cannot write a whole book. But you can write a word. And you can string a few words together and make a sentence. And with enough sentences you have a paragraph, and with enough paragraphs, you have a chapter. And at some point you will have told your story, and you'll have enough chapters. And there's your book.
You may have a bunch of things to do for your next Web project. Find some way to validate forms data before sending it along to a database. Store the information in the database in a way that's not-so-easily hackable. Find a way to get the data out of the database, again, with at least some security. And finally formatting the data. You look at a site like Amazon.com and it's intimidating because there is so much there, there. But it wasn't always like that. Check out the WayBack Machine some time and see how Amazon has grown and changed, sometimes in subtle ways. I'd hate to start from here, designing and building Amazon.com. But you could do it. There's nothing magical about it at all. You could make a list, and then just put one pixel in front of another. Eventually, you'd have a e-commerce site.
There are a lot of problems with an approach like this. One of the main ones is probably that you will quickly run into things you don't understand. Progress slows to a halt while you read a book, or work out an issue on a scratch page. But eventually, you'll get it.
Grandpa had it right, I think. "Yard by yard, it's mighty hard. But inch by inch, Life's a cinch!"
Years ago, I used to work with a lot of writers, online. Some published, others dreamers. I got quite a bit of work through a few of them and ended up as a freelance writer, myself, for about a dozen years. One of the most frequently asked questions we got was "How do you sit down and write a book?" And the answer to that is in the question, itself. You sit down and write a book.
But there's more to it than that, of course. We used to have techno-thriller author Tom Clancy in pretty regularly and if someone asked him that question, he'd respond "I just sat down and wrote the son-of-a-bitch!" which I always thought was a disservice to the questioner.
But he's right, in a way. You do have to do it, eventually. But nobody, not even the mighty Tom Clancy at the height of his powers, could sit down and knock out a whole book at a single setting. But what you can do is to split the project up, reduce it to a whole bunch of little, easily-accomplished, tasks. Make a giant list for yourself if you need to, put everything on it—then just cruise through the list, crossing things off as you go.
Name the hero? Check. Name his nemesis? Check. Sketch out a plot outline? Check. Research the geography of the setting? Check. Gather historical facts? Check. Figure out how many characters you'll need to tell the story? Check. Flesh out the details for everyone in the book, including details that inform the character that may not actually even make it into the book. Check. On and on it goes. Then just move through it all, one at a time, building on what's come before.
You cannot write a whole book. But you can write a word. And you can string a few words together and make a sentence. And with enough sentences you have a paragraph, and with enough paragraphs, you have a chapter. And at some point you will have told your story, and you'll have enough chapters. And there's your book.
You may have a bunch of things to do for your next Web project. Find some way to validate forms data before sending it along to a database. Store the information in the database in a way that's not-so-easily hackable. Find a way to get the data out of the database, again, with at least some security. And finally formatting the data. You look at a site like Amazon.com and it's intimidating because there is so much there, there. But it wasn't always like that. Check out the WayBack Machine some time and see how Amazon has grown and changed, sometimes in subtle ways. I'd hate to start from here, designing and building Amazon.com. But you could do it. There's nothing magical about it at all. You could make a list, and then just put one pixel in front of another. Eventually, you'd have a e-commerce site.
There are a lot of problems with an approach like this. One of the main ones is probably that you will quickly run into things you don't understand. Progress slows to a halt while you read a book, or work out an issue on a scratch page. But eventually, you'll get it.
Grandpa had it right, I think. "Yard by yard, it's mighty hard. But inch by inch, Life's a cinch!"
Thursday, April 1, 2010
The End of the World
I hope everything is okay with you, where ever you happen to be and what ever you happen to be doing. We have had several events in the last several days that many folks have hyped to the point that there must be people out there who are surprised to see that the sun came up, this morning.
Health care reform was one of the tenets of president Obama's candidacy. An awful lot of money was spent trying to keep it from happening. When it looked like that wasn't going to work, they just flat-out started telling lies about it, trying to confuse people, because when you are selling something, the confused mind always says "No".
I've never understood that kind of win-at-all-costs politics. If you have to steal an election, what does that say for your ideas and everyone's confidence in them? If you have to lie about reform in order to put people off, isn't it something that really ought to pass? But there you go….
Health care reform passed. And the sun came up the next morning.
A new version of Opera was released. That didn't even scare up the birds. Damnit, I wish that group had that special "It!" -factor that would bring them solidly into double-digits of market share. They are good people, doing good work on a good browser and they deserve better than they have gotten, for it. We are still waiting to see if Apple releases the Opera App for the iPhone and iPad, now.
Which of course brings us to the Apple iPad, which as this is being written is agonizingly only a few teasing hours from its official release. That said, it's already been on Tosh.0 on Comedy Central (they destroyed theirs) and an episode of ABC's Modern Family, last night. It's either going to be the missing link or the world's most expensive drink coaster. Either way, I am betting that the sun will rise again on Sunday, April 4th.
And in the harsh light of this new day, it may be well to look into the pages we have created to make sure that they are iPad ready. This shouldn't take a lot of work, of course, because we have been working on "Future-Proof" pages for a few years now, and the Apple iPad is precisely the kind of future technology we were planning on, even back then.
So the first thing to do is to make sure that your pages validate. The standard hasn't changed appreciably in more than a dozen years, so write to the standard and there should never be any question about how your pages will render in any browser. But there are other concerns.
Apple offer developers an iPad simulator, but Safari on the Apple iPad uses the familiar WebKit engine and displays in a screen just slightly bigger than that of the first Macintosh, back in 1984. Make sure you are using the real estate you have to best effect.
Be wary of plug-ins. Safari has always had limited support, which is why so much of the desktop alternative browser market now belongs to Mozilla Firefox. But Safari on the iPad (just like the iPhone) launches with no support for plug-ins, including the almighty Adobe Flash. If you need to embed audio or video, use the new HTML5 techniques, rather than depending upon plug-ins. On your desktop machine, un-check the Preference in the Security panel to Enable plug-ins and you can simulate the Safari-on-iPad/iPhone experience from a functionality standpoint.
If you have positioned page elements with CSS you may want to adjust those values.
Probably the biggest issue for most of us, though, is that iPad is yet another touch interfaced device. There is no pen involved in using an iPad. There is no keyboard. You drive this machine by means of pointing and touching things with your fingers. So, be mindful of hover-state CSS over links. These aren't going to work, since just like with the iPhone, there is no cursor to boss around with a mouse or keypad. Nothing is going to change, because nothing is recognized as a correct hover state. Also, keep in mind that closely situation links may be trouble for the differently-abled or for the overly-caffeinated. Don't stack links too closely, in other words. iPad does a great job with accessibility, so be sure to use alt= text and title= text when you can.
Apple have wrapped up all of these considerations and others in a Tech Note you will probably want to look over, just to make sure.
Unless you're thinking the sun won't rise, tomorrow.
Health care reform was one of the tenets of president Obama's candidacy. An awful lot of money was spent trying to keep it from happening. When it looked like that wasn't going to work, they just flat-out started telling lies about it, trying to confuse people, because when you are selling something, the confused mind always says "No".
I've never understood that kind of win-at-all-costs politics. If you have to steal an election, what does that say for your ideas and everyone's confidence in them? If you have to lie about reform in order to put people off, isn't it something that really ought to pass? But there you go….
Health care reform passed. And the sun came up the next morning.
A new version of Opera was released. That didn't even scare up the birds. Damnit, I wish that group had that special "It!" -factor that would bring them solidly into double-digits of market share. They are good people, doing good work on a good browser and they deserve better than they have gotten, for it. We are still waiting to see if Apple releases the Opera App for the iPhone and iPad, now.
Which of course brings us to the Apple iPad, which as this is being written is agonizingly only a few teasing hours from its official release. That said, it's already been on Tosh.0 on Comedy Central (they destroyed theirs) and an episode of ABC's Modern Family, last night. It's either going to be the missing link or the world's most expensive drink coaster. Either way, I am betting that the sun will rise again on Sunday, April 4th.
And in the harsh light of this new day, it may be well to look into the pages we have created to make sure that they are iPad ready. This shouldn't take a lot of work, of course, because we have been working on "Future-Proof" pages for a few years now, and the Apple iPad is precisely the kind of future technology we were planning on, even back then.
So the first thing to do is to make sure that your pages validate. The standard hasn't changed appreciably in more than a dozen years, so write to the standard and there should never be any question about how your pages will render in any browser. But there are other concerns.
Apple offer developers an iPad simulator, but Safari on the Apple iPad uses the familiar WebKit engine and displays in a screen just slightly bigger than that of the first Macintosh, back in 1984. Make sure you are using the real estate you have to best effect.
Be wary of plug-ins. Safari has always had limited support, which is why so much of the desktop alternative browser market now belongs to Mozilla Firefox. But Safari on the iPad (just like the iPhone) launches with no support for plug-ins, including the almighty Adobe Flash. If you need to embed audio or video, use the new HTML5 techniques, rather than depending upon plug-ins. On your desktop machine, un-check the Preference in the Security panel to Enable plug-ins and you can simulate the Safari-on-iPad/iPhone experience from a functionality standpoint.
If you have positioned page elements with CSS you may want to adjust those values.
Probably the biggest issue for most of us, though, is that iPad is yet another touch interfaced device. There is no pen involved in using an iPad. There is no keyboard. You drive this machine by means of pointing and touching things with your fingers. So, be mindful of hover-state CSS over links. These aren't going to work, since just like with the iPhone, there is no cursor to boss around with a mouse or keypad. Nothing is going to change, because nothing is recognized as a correct hover state. Also, keep in mind that closely situation links may be trouble for the differently-abled or for the overly-caffeinated. Don't stack links too closely, in other words. iPad does a great job with accessibility, so be sure to use alt= text and title= text when you can.
Apple have wrapped up all of these considerations and others in a Tech Note you will probably want to look over, just to make sure.
Unless you're thinking the sun won't rise, tomorrow.
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