After seeing LordAlex and Jesse Warden post about being in the credits, I thought, what the heck… let’s just see…

That’s very very exciting to be in the credits under special thanks. The thanks definitely goes to Macromedia on this though. You guys took quite a bit of ranting from the Flash community after MX 2004, and instead of getting defensive about feature decisions, you took lots of notes, had numerous focus groups, and were so much more open about the beta process with sneak peeks at conferences and putting out a tremendous amount of material on the site a month before the ship date.

The result is a version of Flash that is a more significant feature leap from 3-4, and amazingly enough, even surpassed the 4-5 change. I’ve heard so many people say things like “this gives me so many new ideas” and “It is like the Flash 4 days where I can’t sleep, doing so many things in Flash at once.” Whoever was the mastermind behind the Studio 8 development/PR/Marketing process, you are worth your weight in gold.

BTW, the “woot” graphic above was completely made in Flash THEN brought into PhotoShop much like I found myself doing all of my vector stuff in Flash rather than illustrator or Freehand, I find myself actually using Flash as a way to produce some raster images. I like Flash’s controls, and I like the way it just works.

David Lawrence asked me on his show tonight to talk about my recent experiences with ADD treatment and lack thereof, and to generally talk about my experiences. It should be interesting. If you want to tune it, it is available on:

XM Satellite Radio - 152 Extreme
Sirius Satellite Radio - 148 TalkCentral
KBNP/Portland

Over the last 25 years I’ve gone back and forth on being open about my ADD and learning disabilities. Since I am going on the radio, I guess I am back in an open phase.

Well, sort of. Until my blog post I actually was pretty quiet about getting treatment. I was a bit surprised by the negative reaction I got from a fair number of friends when I mentioned I was even thinking about going on medication. If I was getting the reaction from friends I figured it would be better to keep it pretty quiet overall. After a week though I felt quite a bit better hearing comments like, “Ok, something is very different with you recently (in a good way), what gives?”

Before seeking a drug for ADD, I concentrated on behavioral changes to deal with it. This includes changing some of my techniques for getting things done, but also it is about creating a good environment that is more conducive to my needs. In a workplace though, creating a good environment often required asking for thing that you need changed at work, whether is your workspace or your work tasks. This is when it gets pretty sticky.

The sort of modifications that ADD folks need for their work space are things like privacy, quietness and no visual distractions. These needs make cube life very difficult. A private cube is better than a bullpen. A cube on the edge of a cube pool is better than one in the middle. An office trumps any sort of cube. Do you see the sticky spot? Things that help an ADD person are environmental elements that everyone wants, and are often granted by seniority or rank rather than need.

To get a better workspace based on need before you would have “earned” it in that passive aggressive office one-upmanship, marks you to your co-workers. Getting what you need means frequently damaging relationships with co-workers. Mentioning that you have a medical condition requiring it, will generally just make things worse with comments about how ADD is a fad condition, or that you must have some sort of unscrupulous doctor.

This is all to say that behavioral treatment can get you where you need with a lot of work, but often with a lot of social consequences. Taking a small pill once a day gets me to the same place or better without the need to “stand out” in uncomfortable ways. A more positive way of looking at it though is that Adderall gives me the ability to function in a variety of environments now, where before I was limited to working in optimal conditions. That flexibility is worth a lot to me.

My guess is that we will be talking all about this tonight 8-9PM PST.

I started writing this Flash Lite solitaire game, Aces High (right click and save target) on the plane on the way back from Flash Forward NYC being very energized by a good conference. I finished the programming pretty quickly, but I’ve been sitting on this file for a while because of design. I wanted to see how much control I have on colors and optimization, so I did some playing.

I was interested in doing a comparison of Vector v. Bitmap graphics. In then end I decided to go completely towards bitmaps. With such a small screen, every pixel counts. The numbers and suits on the cards really required snapping perfectly to the pixels. Even when using the pixel fonts I was getting some blurriness every once in a while. With all card details as bitmaps now, I never get blurriness on the phone. (For those wondering, As you can see, the file looks pretty nasty on the web. I probably need to make a loader shell and nudge it around a bit. It looks great on the phone though)

For the backgrounds, I am using a modified version of a pixel pattern found on K10K. If you haven’t already, definitely take a look at the patterns. They are excellent for using in Flash Lite applications. Most are fine for use in non-commercial applications, and can really inspire some fun ideas for the design of the rest of the application. On top of that, since they are times, you can have a complex background that fills the whole screen but is really a collection of manually placed tiles.

I then placed the game title as a transparent gif on top of the tiles to break the monotony. For the instructions screen, it is built much like an HTML table with corner and side gifs. This ended up being just three bitmaps which are rotated and reflected as needed to make the balloon.

The only downside to going with bitmaps is the fact that it looks pretty bad when not on the target device. On a Sony Erickson UIQ phone it would look pretty bad. Then again, with the jog wheel, I would need to alter the navigation to make it work better with an up/down navigation rather than a 5-way button, so I would have work to do anyways.

This is another application where I decided to add a desktop-like cursor. I think it simplifies the interaction and gives the user a clear focus for where their attention should be..

The Boston Macromedia Mobile User Group is having a Flash Lite Contest where you can win a copy of the shiny new Studio 8 (it is nice to be able to have Flash as a prize in a contest when everyone hasn’t necessarily already gotten it yet).

While the contest is cool, I think it is far more interesting that there is a MMUG specifically for mobile. I wouldn’t have guessed that there would be a critical mass yet for a group. It makes me wonder if there is interest in the San Francisco Bay area/Silicon Valley. If you are in the area and would like to meet up, post a comment. To get started, I was thinking that it would be good to just start by meeting up at the Mobile Monday meetings and socialize afterwords.

One of the more strange traditions at Yahoo! is Vendor Splendor, where the many companies that we interact with to come and set up tables and give us tchotchkes. If you want things like Avis squishy cars, stuffed animals, yo-yos, pens, underwear (thanks W hotel), and even Y! shaped bubble loops, this is the place for you.

Having gone to them in year past, I didn’t really go for the tchotchkes this year. Every winter they get tossed out anyways, but going to gawk is still fun. There actually are some pretty good deals at the tables in the past like discounts on Costco membership, discounts on wireless service, and the employee discount for Apple (10%).

While at the Apple table I got to play with the iPod Nano. It was pretty slick. It wasn’t terribly new or anything other than it would be smaller in my bag and no spinning hard drive. I would also be curious about battery life. It seems like it would use less power, but my 40 gig has a battery probably about the same size.

Get the SWF for your phone here (right mouse click and save target/link as…).

FlickrSearch allows you to enter a word which will then return images from Flickr related to that tag. The application goes out and gets the information needed to make the image URLs for up to 100 results, and then the images are displayed in a circular queue. You don’t get any navigation options, it is just a slide show, but you also won’t get any new network request permission dialogs. The swf is set up to constantly get images so that the connection never closes. I could queue the images, but I also decided that I didn’t want to let the memory get out of hand, so there are really ever the four images in memory at a time.

This is a collaborative project that I did with Jesse Wolfe, an engineer in the Yahoo! Prototyping group to work with the Flickr API available on the Yahoo! Developer Network. Jesse really did the heavy lifting on the project doing the PHP work to integrate with the Flickr API and convert the XML results to Flash variables.

We collaborated on the flow of the Flash Lite client application and what needs to be supplied to the server and what should be returned. While Jesse was working on the PHP for Flickr, I was working on getting the JPG2SWF code ready so that it could run on a later version of PHP (the Flickr code wasn’t really compatible with the old version of PHP that did support Flash Writer Toolkit).

We each had different needs for our clients, so this is where our implementations diverge. I’m using this in my hands-on sessions at Macromedia Max so I need a somewhat more streamlined version that reduces the overall complexity and code. Jesse is working on a more feature-rich version.

For those interested in the source, I will be giving it out at MAX, and on my blog after the conference.