O’Reilly: Inside RIA

ILOG released another preview of the 2.0 version of their charting framework, Elixir, last week. The new release features, among other things:

• A new Gantt task chart that improves upon the existing 1.0 Gantt chart to cover new use cases.
• New heatmaps components
• New OLAP & pivot charts to mimic excel-like pivot charting.
• Improved flex calendar and numerical indicators components.

Back in July, the d'bug blog posted a great article up about 5 lessons every web developer should learn.

Good wisdom for those of us (read: most of us) who are predisposed to let our egos run wild.

Day 1 of 360Flex has come and gone. Here are some of the highlights from the sessions I was able to attend.

As of yesterday, 360Flex is on! Yesterday was a preliminary day of training classes and "how-to" sessions. Conference organizer John Wilker told me this year's preliminary day was the widest attended ever, with over 200 of the 400 attendees coming in early to learn a little Flex. The Flex 101 class was completely full, and Ben Stucki's intro to Open Flux was standing-room only. Today the conference swings into full speed with all of the regular speaking sessions. I'll be posting regular updates on the sessions I attend, so check back regularly if you're interested. We've got good weather so far out here in San Jose and it promises to be an exciting few days.

I was fortunate to be part of an interview with David Heinemeier Hansonn, or DHH, co-founder of 37Signals and inventor of the popular Ruby on Rails framework. The interview happened a few weeks ago for the User Interface Resource Center and covered a variety of topics - everything from simplicity to software development process to the best way to create custom experiences.

Adobe, EffectiveUI and Scalenine are teaming up to sponsor the "Skin to Win" challenge. Designers and Developers are challenged to create their best themes for Adobe Flex with tickets to Adobe MAX, a Macbook AIR, Adobe software and "other great prizes" on the line. Whether you're an experienced designer or someone looking to break into the industry, this conference is for you.

If you bought CS3, you might recall an extra CD of online video tutorials presented in an application called the Adobe Video Workshop. The application was built in Flex with all of the content graciously provided by the good folks at Lynda.com. Adobe reports now through the User Interface Resource Center that the online version of Adobe Video Workshop has facilitated over 5 million training sessions. That's a big number. Even without the disk-based users, that's a wildly successful application.

Lee Brimelow posted that Grant Skinner has posted a slide deck from a recent talk he gave on migrating from AS2 to AS3. Whether you're an old AS2 or flash developer or just new to the language, the slide deck is a great start for understanding the basics of AS3 development.

Late this week it was announced that eBay desktop reached 1 million downloads. Mike Potter from Adobe wrote a great summary of the achievement and it's significanceon his blog. Ryan Stewart also has a great post up, including an interivew with Alan Lewis, the application's project manager from eBay.

I was privileged to be a part of an interview with Kent Seki last week. Kent was the visualization and HUD effects supervisor for Iron Man, and our conversation with him was one of the most interesting and inspiring I've had for a long time. The full interview along with a few clips of the audio and some other cool stuff is up on the User Interface Resource Center, who arranged and sponsored the interview. In this entry I talk a little about the lessons we can learn from the movie as interface designers and developers, and a little more about why the interview was so inspiring to me.