InsideRIA: RJ Owen Archives

Recently by RJ Owen

PhoneGap: my new favorite open-source project

RJ Owen
December 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (8)

The real problem with mobile development is that you need to learn a new language. Every platform currently has their own unique language for writing applications, and some of them are downright obtuse (I'm talking to you, Objective-C for iPhone.) With the number of mobile devices and mobile internet connections exponentially rising, it was only a number of time before someone made it easier. Enter PhoneGap.

Why Ribbit is a Big Deal

RJ Owen
December 22, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (3)

If you've been hiding under a rock for the last year or so, Ribbit is a platform for voice - a strong platform that allows developers to manage and process voice content in ways we couldn't before. Ribbit is well positioned to radically change the way we view voice communication, and if you're a developer you should probably dig into it. Besides learning a great technology, there's $100,000 in it for you if you can make something good. But I'm getting ahead of myself.

What makes a "User Experience expert"?

RJ Owen
December 17, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (18)

If you're like me, you've been hearing a lot about this amazing thing called User Experience. It's supposed to turn your normal, old, web 1.0 piece-of-garbage application into a shining beacon of hope in a world beleaguered by bad interfaces. If you're like me, you've been watching the explosion of User Experience from somewhere between the forefront and the sidelines, enjoying the arrival of the requisite acronyms (UX, XD, EX, UXD, etc.), and trying to figure out exactly where and what the forefront even is. If you're like me, you've been a little skeptical of this vague and magical term for a while now, and if you're anything at all like me, you've been wanting someone to clear things up.

An interview with Rombla creator Bob Lang

RJ Owen
December 15, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

If you missed my post last week, Rombla is a powerful WYSIWYG editor for Flash content. Built entirely in Flex, the application serves as both a powerful design tool and CMS. Rombla was built by Piria, a software company based in Louisville, Colorado. I recently caught up with Piria CEO Bob Lang. Bob was kind enough to agree to an interview about Rombla, and gave me some great insights into how they built such an excellent application in such a short time.

tags:
flex
piria
rombla

Herff Jones launches eDesign online yearbook editor

RJ Owen
December 10, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today Herff Jones announced the launch of a robust new RIA for creating and editing yearbooks online. The application is called eDesign, and it lets teachers and students collaborate in real time through a fully functional and very powerful layout and content creation tool. I took eDesign for a test drive recently and was really impressed by the sheer number of usable features the team was able to implement - imagine Adobe InDesign done specifically for yearbooks. In this entry I'll take you through the wide range of features eDesign has to offer.

Rombla: powerful, online, WYSIWYG Flash-site builder

RJ Owen
December 8, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (5)

In case you missed all the adjectives in the title, Rombla is a powerful online WYSIWYG flash-site building RIA. Created and hosted by the folks at Piria, the app is geared towards bridging the gap between web designers and their clients. In this entry, I'll talk about how Rombla works, some of it's cooler features, and give screen shots and links to a site I made with it.

tags:
adobe
flash
flex

Flex presentations at Adobe MAX

RJ Owen
November 12, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (2)

In this entry, I give you a list of my favorite Flex related presentations being given at the Adobe MAX conference this year, and a short description of why I think you should attend each and every one of them. :) Not attending MAX? Don't worry - they'll be available online sometime shortly after the conference is over.

tags:
adobe
flex
max

Attention MAX attendees: get a 33% discount on Adobe product certification

RJ Owen
November 6, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Certification for developers and Adobe product users of all kinds will be available at the Adobe MAX conference at a 33% discount. Certification will be going on all three days of the MAX conference Info can be found on this part of the MAX homepage if you scroll down to the 2nd item from the bottom. If you're interested in taking an exam, feel free to brush up on your skills with a free study guide from Adobe. A full list of the available exams and links to the study guide pdfs can be found here.

tags:
adobe

Bruce Temkin on the importance of UX

RJ Owen
October 31, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (1)

Bruce Temkin is a Customer Experience analyst with Forrester Research. I was recently forwarded one of Bruce's articles on the importance of user experience and decided to check out his blog. I was really surprised by the wealthy of insight Bruce provides for free here on the blog - he has thoughts about preserving your business through recession, tips for management in customer experience environments, the importance of UX, and how to create innovative UX in any vertical.

Nokia's "Music Almighty" Headset Competition

RJ Owen
October 29, 2008 | Permalink | Comments (0)

Nokia recently launched a new site that allows users to use their imaginations and create new visions for headphones of the future. The headphones users create are mostly fictional, adding some wildly expressive features like hot rod exhaust pipes, peacock feathers, missiles, etc. The site is part of a contest Nokia is launching around the configurator. Users are invited to create and submit their designs online, where they'll be voted on by other users. The top 10 users will get a free trip out to Nokia's headquarters in the UK, where their designs will be produced into real headsets and given to them to keep. I caught up with the development team who built the app and they were nice enough to give me an interview. Read this entry to see the full interview text as well as get some more information on the contest.

tags:
contest
flex
nokia

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FrameworkQuest 2008 Part 5: Mate, the Pure MXML Framework
Tony Hillerson

Let’s get this out of the way first thing. It’s Mah-tay, not M-eight. Like the drink, the creators of Mate, Nahuel Faronda and Laura Arguello, come from Argentina. If you’ve never tried Mate (the drink), you should - it’s tasty.... Continue Reading
FrameworkQuest 2008 Part 4: IoC With Swiz
Tony Hillerson

With a name like Swiz, it has to be good, right? Welcome back, friends, to part four of our ongoing effort to understand these four Flex frameworks. This time we’re going to look at Swiz, a relative newcomer, created by... Continue Reading
FrameworkQuest 2008 Part 3: Framework Agnostic Views with PureMVC
Tony Hillerson

Last week we took a look at how to clean up our Twitter client by using Cairngorm to separate the concerns according to the time honored MVC architectural pattern. Now we’re going to see how it feels to work with... Continue Reading
The Design of a Rich Spatial Flex Viewer for GeoWeb 2.0
Moxie Zhang

Despite all the movement toward Web 2.0, GeoWeb is still in the Web 1.0 age. In the quest to establish the Geospatial Web or GeoWeb 2.0, a rich spatial Flex Viewer has been created, and it’s free. All source code... Continue Reading