Dx3 conference is a must for interactive designers!
Dx3 is a new conference that is being put on by the fine folks from Lynda.com. Lynda already produces the Flash Forward conference and film festival which has become the place to be in the Flash world. This new conference will not be limited to a single technology and will instead deliver sessions on a broad array of technologies and tools as they relate to interactive designers. The conference is being sponsored by both Microsoft and Adobe and both companies will be their trying to persuade us to use their technologies. It will be put up or shut up time as they both lay their technologies out on the table and let us make our own judgments. This conference should provide answers to the questions that everyone has been wondering about when it comes to Flash, Apollo, WPF, WPF/E, etc.
More important than the Microsoft-Adobe showdown is the impressive array of speakers and sessions. This list is continuing to grow but it includes speakers that I consider to be top of the food chain in the interactive design space. The list of speakers includes Brendan Dawes, Erik Natzke, Mario Klingemman, Beau Amber, Aral Balkan, Brad Becker, Darren David, Mike Downey, Grant Hinkson, Robby Ingebretsen, Joey Lott, Chris Orwig, Danny Patterson, Josh Ulm, and Eric Zocher. If you are familiar with the Flash and WPF communities then you will understand it when I say that this is the A-list! If you don’t know these names then you need to come and rub elbows with the best in the business.
Another reason that I think you should come to Dx3 is because I too will be presenting. Myself, Mark Ligameri, and Joshua Jacobson will be deconstructing the WPF Yahoo Messenger project and we will have lots of good information about real-world WPF development. You can find out more about our session here.
Stay tuned because there are more exciting announcements to come about Dx3!
See you in Boston!
Lee
Running Flash in the Vista Sidebar!
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We have been doing quite a bit of gadget work lately at frog. As an experiment, myself and Tim Wong, a Senior Visual Designer at frog, decided to create a frogblog RSS reader gadget. Since gadgets are essentially just HTML and JavaScript there is no reason that you can’t include other browser technologies such as Flash and Flex. In this gadget the Flash piece is handling all of the XML parsing and the actual list of news items. Since it is running locally there are no sandbox restrictions for reading in external XML which is nice. The arrows allow you smoothly scroll up and down through the items. There are a couple of caveats when using Flash in the sidebar. To re-position sidebar gadgets you click and drag them to their new position. But when you click on the Flash area, Flash captures the mouse input so you can’t drag the gadget around. We worked around that by making the chrome of the gadget out of a transparent PNG which you can use for moving the gadget around. Another interesting bug is that when you first click on an item in the Flash movie it doesn’t trigger the onRelease event of the MovieClip. After that, clicking on items opens the browser to view the news items. If anyone knows why this might be happening please let me know! |
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Having Flash in the sidebar opens up a TON of possibilities for cool gadgets like MP3 players and system monitors. Stay tuned for more!
If you are running Vista you can download the gadget here. Just save the ZIP file to your hard drive, rename it so that it has .gadget as the file extension and double-click to install.
Lee
Blend Beta Video Training Now Available!
My latest training title is now available over at Lynda.com. It is called Expression Blend Beta Preview and it covers all of the basics of using Blend to create WPF applications. At the end you put what you’ve learned to the test by creating a Flickr photo viewer. The full table of contents can be seen below the image. Go on over and check it out!
Lee
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