Lately I’ve been doing some reading on mobile apps. I came across a review for Cameron Moll’s Mobile Web Book on 456 Berea Street and then today I stumbled upon an article on “How to make any website a mobile site, with google. The results are pretty interesting! It’s interesting to see how the People’s Choice Awards site, which is very graphic and flash-intensive, came out [link here]. I was happy to see that the entire manifesto on the right was showing up in text — we used the SWFObject technique which had the content written to the screen and then replaced with the flash via javascript. Obviously, this mobile version doesn’t support javascript (or flash) but the content is still available. Nice!

We had had some questions about whether or not google would be able to access/index this information, but my impression based on the fact this came from google is that it is available to them. Good to know!

I am VERY excited to announce that the redesign of www.pcavote.com went live! This is the project I’ve been working on since starting at Resource at the end of June. I’ve learned so much through working on it, but I wanted to reserve comment until it went live. So here it is–

I really enjoyed working on this project, although there was a bit of a learning curve in some cases. I am a front-end developer but I don’t have the flash skills we needed to pull the site off, so we enlisted some fantastic flash designers/developers. It was interesting to see how we were able to put a stylish skin on a very data intensive site. Although I don’t ever see myself becoming a good flash-motion designer, I would really be interested to learn more about the development site of it.
We are using a CDN to serve up our images/flash/css and so I got to learn all about cross domain limitations. We actually had some really interesting flash bugs that cropped out purely as a side effect of how we were serving up our data, and I was in there mucking about the code to figure them out. Sure, I couldn’t FIX the problem once I found it, but it gave me a better idea of some of the intricacies of actionscript.

We also included a variety of different javascript libraries and snippets, and it was interesting to see how the played (or didn’t play) together. I had never actually worked with mootools before, but I dipped my feet in a little. A graphic designer suggested the use of curvy corners, and one of our developers improved modified it to integrate with mootools. Throw in swfobject, and we just had a ton going on! I learned about the difference of domready vs load (which safari doesn’t respect), and I think it all came together pretty well…

Before we start working on the next release, I have a few other smaller projects on my plate. I’m working on a microsite with a few other developers, which is great because I have the opportunity to see how they approach projects. I will admit, TM’s crazy chaining javascript was intimidating at first, but it was great to do some ‘peer programming’ with TM and BV, and find out their opinions and best practices.
I believe I’ve also already mentioned hackfight, which is a non-project flex prototype project a few of us are working on. The final presentations are next Wednesday. We have a pretty neat idea, I’ll be excited to see how the presentation/demo works out, and how the other teams fared. It’s a really neat concept: we dream it up and build it ourselves, outside the scope of actual client work.

If work weren’t keeping me occupied enough, I am also entrenched in my classwork. Both classes seem incredibly timely: “verification and testing” as we just went through a release cycle for PCA, and “distributed systems” as that’s really what we build As we went through testing for PCA, it was painfully apparent that there are challenges associated with testing for UI and RIA that haven’t really been fully met. Just this morning I stumbled upon some documentation on testing flex, that I am thinking about exploring for a project for my testing class.

I know that our affinity for a certain subject area can ebb and flow, and I am definitely in a space where I am open and engaged in all this technology/systems architecture mumbo-jumbo. There is so much to think about, so many connections between all these concepts and ideas - it is just about refining them all into a cohesive system..

As mentioned previously, I have been doing some simple email templates for our project. While we were in development, we could only send emails locally, so I was able to ensure outlook handled them properly. When we opened it up to web clients, however, we encountered several “idiosyncracies” we had to account for.

As I mentioned in my last post, I wanted to set the appropriate DOCTYPE. Yes, an admirable idea, but I completely ignored the fact that these emails were being rendered within an HTML page — hence, my DOCTYPE and html wrapper tags were stripped out. There went my doctype, along with my good old-fashioned attribute specifications for bgcolor, alink, vlink and text. So it was back to manually specifying stylistic information on every element (on the whole I’d done this already, it was the bgcolor for the entire email that was missed out on, so I had to add it to a table that was specified at 100% width and height.).

I also encountered some fun with these “smart” webclients trying to interpret the text. We have the typical disclaimer at the top of the page, “to continue to receive emails, please add XXX@mydomain.com to your address book”. Both yahoo and gmail tried to make links of things we didn’t intend, mucking with the overall look of the email. So now I am having to go back and change periods into . and at symbols into @.

Not that any of these are difficult tasks, but they were small stumbling blocks, so I wanted to be sure to capture them for next time–

I took the Java 2 Developers Exam back in 2003, the same month I finished my coursework for my Bachelor’s degree in Digital Communication. I’d taken several courses in java (the language itself as well as client-server programming), purchased a certification prep guide, and went for it! I passed, got my sheet of paper and have barely touched java since.

Now I have my sights set on the Flex 2 Developer Exam. As a newer technology, there aren’t all the online tests and prep guides that there were for java. I am enrolled in a training course now, but I don’t know that I will attend any further courses. This is obviously going to be a self-driven effort!

I am at the stage right now where with my Flex hammer, everything looks like a nail. I am looking for every opportunity to use flex, but I know I need to keep in mind its strengths and benefits. My portfolio is incredibly outdated (I created in during a 6 week course during that same undergrad program mentioned above), but I don’t know that it’s ‘rich’ enough to warrant developing in flex. I was also thinking about developing my own prep guide for the certification exam in flex, but before embarking on that, I want to ensure it really is an appropriate format. Certainly it would give me some more experience using flex, but I don’t know if a study guide is really a) an application, b) rich. I will have to think about this some more..

After a slow start, I am now well-immersed in flex training. Our instructor missed his flight into town the first morning, so started a good 2.5 hours late. However, we students in the class spent some time on our own discussing what we understood, and I think overall that was a valuable exercice. There is really nothing like explaining something to someone to see how well you understand it.

I enrolled in the “Developing Rich Internet Applications” but I think I may have been better off enrolling in a more advanced class. I had already done plenty of reading and playing around, as opposed to some students who had no knowledge of flex at all.

I have been doing some more research on Flex Certification and I expect I will be pursuing it. I managed to find a fair amount of information on Jun Heider’s blog. Although the timing isn’t ideal (I’m about to start two more courses for grad school this week!), I am going to work towards certification before the end of 2007.

• go through and make study notes based on the Flex2Blueprint Jun posted.
• subscribe to Lynda.com training for one month, watch the videos
• Ideally I’d like to take the “Programming the Visual Experience” training class, but I’m not sure if that will work out.

I will continue posting my progress on this as I go along–

I had some downtime at work so late last week I suggested they send me to training — I leave in a few hours for “Flex 2: Developing Rich Client Applications” training in Florida…