jun :: realeyes

Well…the first Flexmaniacs is officially over. It was a very good conference.

I meant to blog about day 2 earlier in the week, but I got carried away with enjoying the sights DC had to offer…he he. By the way, off topic, but if you make your way out to DC, definitely check out the International Spy Museum!

Now without further ado…here’s my take on the day 2 sessions I attended:

Day 2 Keynote – Adobe Experience Design
(Sundermeyer & Hobbs)

Two guys – Mike Sundermeyer and Tom Hobbs from Adobe’s Experience Design (XD) gave the day 2 keynote. I was very impressed and interested in their presentation, most notably because it had to do with UI design theory and that’s something I don’t usually have time to think of at the detail they covered…usually by the time I work on a project, the UI has already be ironed out in Photoshop…

First off, the main point they made was most people use the same features in software over and over again. In other words when designing software, it’s better to filter out things so that users can get to what they need to.

Second, during their presentation they showed us a lot of demos and went into details on how they approached them from a UI theory perspective:

Experience Bank (Online banking tool)
- One UI driver was always knowing when your account was close to $0
- Another was knowing what bills were due soon
Amazon.com (Online merchant catalog)
- driver: searching without request/response white page
- driver: filtering out things in the UI you don’t have to look at (less busy)
- driver: using animation to create a mental model for the user to learn where things live in the application
YouTube Remixer (Online video editing tool)
- driver: both web and desktop functionality
- driver: drag and drop, research has show with the right visual cues – such as “drag item here” text – users figure out drag and dropâ€¦it’s natural

MetLife (Insurance Claim Tool)
- driver: people would call in and tie up a rep on the phone for 45 minutes to make one claimâ€¦need to figure out a way to do it online
- driver: redesigning how a site approaches online forms
- driver: using graphical form fields, describing damage to a car, or what happened in an accident can be hard to describe in form fields so do it graphicallyâ€¦

MetLife Mobile (Insurance Adjuster Tool)
- driver: filtering out unnecessary information
- driver: putting things where needed, for instance in the damage detail put “take picture here”
- driver: make sure it’s part of a complete ecosystem, iow, make sure it makes sense with the online tool

Tour Tracker (Online race tracking tool)
- driver: having an immersive spectator experience
- driver: real-time data (FDS, FMS) making people feel that they were there along the way

Third, they summarized some of the UI development myths and let us know what they felt about them:

More features = More value
- Actually value is simplicity and quality:
  - design for the 80%
  - show only the tools needed for the task
Chrome is cool
- Actually content is king:
  - design content not chrome
  - express things visually
Animation is gratuitous
- Actually, it has it’s place:
  - cinematic transitions to give the user a better understanding of the app
  - evoking emotion, focusing attention
Apps are sums of their parts
- Actually, the UI design is a whole
  - like a house one person or team should design
  - if features change significantly the whole must be reconsidered
One size will fit all
- Actually personality and community rule
  - community creates better content
  - users want different things in different ways
  - identity and brand matter

All in all the XD team had a very good presentation.

Managing Large Applications with Modules
(Jim Robson)

Jim is a developer at Eye Street Software he has been working with Flash and Flex for a good amount of time now. He had a very informative session on why you would want to use modules in a Flex app.

For me, the highlights were:

He provided good background information on how Flex utilizes frame streaming – Flex is two frame: preloader+frame with all code, assets, etcâ€¦frame can’t play until it’s completely downloaded – in other words, the larger the swf the longer it takes to load, and therefore why you should use modules if you can.
He gave a good example of bad practice – tightly coupled module – versus good practice – loosely coupled module – by making use of an Interface for the module

AS3 Performance Tuning
(Chotin)

Ted Patrick has been very busy dealing with MAX 2007 and the on AIR Bus Tour. I was really pumped to see him give this presentation since it’s his baby, however, Matt was an outstanding gentleman and filled in for Mr. Patrick. All in all he did a very good job and showed us some cool examples of optimized vs. non-optimized AS3…thanks Matt!

As far as this presentation I would go into some detail, but looks like Matt made the slides and code available for all.

However, the highlights for me were both when Matt went over how the Flash Player and JIT compiler work, and when he mentioned the new FB3 Profiler and how when using it, make sure to keep in mind that everything runs much slower than normal.

Sorting and Filtering Data in Flex 2
(Stroz)

Scott works at Alagad and has a good command of sorting, filtering, and paging data without having to use FDS. His presentation was well informed and had many good code examples. On a side note, Scott’s been working on a custom Pagable ArrayCollection class.

Under the Hood of an Advanced Flex Component
(Josh Tynjala)

Josh is a pretty bad-ass developer that built an awesome treemap component…among others. His presentation was very informative for those that need to build custom components.

It was an expert level presentation and went over topics such as:

Ifactory and ClassFactory
Caching your itemrenderers (Adding and removing a lot of objects from the display list is one of the most CPU intensive things you can do)
Using a cursor to request renderers from your cache

In addition he went over many tips he had learned along the way:

Exposing common properties (For instance with Lists, expose labels icons and toolTips)
Making use of Interfaces
Not forgetting to override commitProperties()
Using Static initializers to set styles on your advanced component

All in all a good presentation, and here’s the slides for those that are interested.