I am the endlessly grumpy telecommunications customer. Last big woe, almost 2 years ago, was a $16,000 phone bill from Verizon Wireless and the infamous 'courtesy call' which delivered the news. Says me, "How much? How the $#*@ did I rack up that kinda bill and not get any kind of 'courtesy call' prior to that?". Says the 'courtesy caller', "I'm not sure, sir. I'm just letting you know the balance on your account, and I don't have any more information. You'll have to call 1-800-XXXX to get more information." Sweet.

This time around, it's Comcast ... two weeks deep in our residential contract (internet, cable, phone), we're bombarded with endless cold calls. Now, I would've figured there'd be a little lapse in timing here, but no. They sold the number within two days. One particular bastard is "Bank of Hawaii" calling at 20 minute intervals with an automated message. All this after they told us the wrong phone number when signing up (which we gave to all family members, both domestic and foreign -- sorry 'old' Comcast customer 338472 who got all those calls).

So, big ol' score for Comcast. I'm payin' $100 per month for this, how much are they getting?

By the way, when is someone gonna write about flex or flash again?

One of the most unique experiences in all of the 'fine arts' is the ability to be so close to the physical work of a painter who may have lived several hundred years ago and is a pillar of our culture and societal development. Seeing the brush strokes, the paint globs, the great skill and detail all manifested on a canvas and preserved for the ages. It's not rivaled by any other medium.

Well, oddly enough, a technology that's been around for over a century has come eerily close. Let's welcome back the player piano of the 21st century. Thanks to fiber optics and some high def technology, we're able to experience famous performances by great artists in a real, live environment. Kinda spooky to see those keys moving, though.

Please consider this a FORMAL INVITATION to an interview that the guys at The Thirsty Developer conducted with our dear friend and resident Know It All Mr. Ka Wai Cheung on the exhilirating topic of SOFTWARE FACTORIES. I think you'll find it titillating and informative...it will also get you SERIOUSLY HYPED for the upcoming beta release of X2O.

Here's a direct link to the interview.

Labels: interview, ka wai cheung, x2o

It shouldn't come as a surprise that Chicago's downtown served as the backdrop for many scenes from the latest Batman movie. Several Chicago affiliations have taken up the use of the Gotham typeface. It's used as the main font for all 2016 Summer Olympic bid collateral...
...as the signature typeface for Chicago-resident Barack Obama's Presidential Campaign...


...and for arguably Chicago's most aspiring affiliate for strength, hope, and change, our very own bits of corporate identity.


Chicago has become the new Gotham City.

Maybe it's an inside joke at Adobe, or just a strange coincidence, but it seems that whenever my Flex project builds—it hangs for a second or two at 69%. Because I've got an overly sophomoric sense of humor, this amuses me.



Despite the millisecond of amusement, waiting for a project to build is just the opposite—an irritation and time-eater. Most Flash / Flex folks are used to some amount of compile time, and there have been lots of work-around solutions to save time when compiling .swfs—namely decoupling code from graphic assets. On our latest project, this would have saved us a lot of time. I shudder to think how much time our 4 person development team spent over the past 5 months waiting for our respective workspaces to build, just to go back in, change a few lines, and do it all over again. It was by far the largest and most visually robust Flex app any of us had ever worked on, and of course there were many lessons learned.

Somewhere around the end of the project, perhaps a day or two before our code freeze, Mike found this article: "Slow Flex Builder compile and refresh solution - Modules" (thank you, Marc Hughes). I decided to give it a whirl, but by that point everything was too far along to 'properly' decouple graphic assets from the rest of the project.

After a successful project launch, we found ourselves with a bit of time for research and development (amazing!), so I decided to do a little experimentation. Since I'm the only Flash / Flex Designer on the team, I wanted to take some time to work out a few graphical / layout problems, and try out Marc's Module solution on a 'fresh' project. I took the time to do a fairly heavy design treatment in order to test this bad boy out.

Without launching into a detailed technical description, suffice it to say that the Module solution works swimmingly. I noticed a marked increase in build time when editing .mxml files, and launching the application. Whenever I added a new .swf graphic or .swc component, the build took longer—which was expected, but once 'cached' everything was cool.

Graphics Module Test
The content is purely nonsense, so don't get hung up on that. All of you developers out there—don't dog your boy over the code! As I mentioned, this is more of a graphical experiment than anything else.

Click the link below, when it opens—right click and choose 'view source' to take a look at what's going on here: Graphics Module Test

I'd also like to write more in depth about what I've learned regarding Flex skinning / graphics in general and I'll probably reuse this project as an example... more to come!

Labels: compile time, Flash, Flex, Flex graphics skinning, Slow Flex Builder

Hi! This is my first blog post on Sprout. I am the first non-developer and female addition to the We Are Mammoth team. The following story might seem unrelated to development - but hang in there.

I have a hobby. For the past 2 years, I have been canning pickles and preserves. One of my favorite things to do in the summer is to buy bulk fresh fruit and make homemade preserves. And I love peaches. And finding a fantastic peach is trickier than it sounds. In my opinion a great peach must come from a local farmer, the grocery store doesn't have anything that compares. And peaches are only in season for a couple weeks out of the year. After a poor peach season in 2007, my dad knew that I was on the hunt for peaches. I got a call from him a week ago, after a few taste tests; he bought a bushel of peaches from a local farmers market. The minute I walked into his house, I could smell the fragrant, ripe fruit. Yum. I waited for a week while the peaches continued to ripen. I searched the internet for the best low sugar peach preserve recipe. The one that caught my attention took 3 days to complete. No problem. I had the dedication. I had to prep the peaches overnight by cutting them and letting them soak in lemon juice and sugar. The next day, I heated the peach mixture for 45 minutes and let them soak overnight. Finally, I was ready for the canning process. Now keep in mind, making low sugar preserves requires a long process of simmering the ingredients until they reach a temperate of 220-degrees and start to jell. After a week of anticipation, I was just a short evening away from peach preserves. Around 9 PM, I started to get impatient. The liquid was only 180-degrees. The liquid was far from jelling and I was tired. In the name of time, I turned up the heat. I figured I would give the process a jump start - I didn't have all night. Imagine my disappointment when I realized that I started burning the preserves. In the vibrant orange mixture, I could see bits of scalded peaches rising to the surface. What was I thinking? After all of this time and effort, in the final hours I was going to compromise the process by trying to compress time.

On Monday, I was given an assignment by Craig - post a blog entry by the end of the week. What could I possibly contribute to a blog about development? Craig suggested I write about my Project Management class, my hobbies, or learning HTML. This week my mind has been on canning, specifically, my peach preserves. I have been thinking a lot about how I nearly ruined the preserves just because I wanted to save some time. In an attempt to compose a blog post, I started to reflect on patience in relation to the development process. A quote that I read in a project management class kept on coming to my mind - "Time is not considered a cost nor a resource since the project manager cannot control the rate at which it is expended." I needed a project manager in my kitchen for my peach preserves project. I would have appreciated a reminder about the concept of the project management triangle. Each side of the triangle is represented by a traditional project constraint - scope, time, and cost. They are all dependent and one side cannot be changed without affecting the other. The sides must stay equal or it will affect project quality. Of course! I am an expert in change orders - this makes perfect sense. If your specs and cost stay the same and you attempt to compress time, as a result you will compromise quality. After all of the effort and care that I had put into the initial steps of the project, I would have rethought the arbitrary deadline that I created for my peach preserves. In retrospect, time seems likes a small price to pay for excellent preserves. I wish that I would have taken some time to explicitly consider this concept at 9 PM in my kitchen this week. Can anyone recommend a good project manager?

Spacin' out on the tube last night, I saw a commercial about some ultra-quiet washing machines. The husband, trying his damndest to concentrate amid the 'quiet', exclaims "Honey, I can't work with all that quiet!". Awesome.

Now. Our new office has noise issues. Lots of 'em. There's a personal trainer (a gym) above us. They do wind sprints. Every afternoon around 3, the excitement begins. Weights dropping, humans engaging themselves with various silly activities all in the name of shedding a few.

This delight (moving into this new environment unaware of our neighbor's business model) coincided with us wrapping up the largest application we've built. Security, hypersensitive data, math, all things which need extra-high focus. Now, throw in time-based releases everyday at 5 pm and a pinch of Richard Simmons frolicking above, and you got yourself a software sitcom.

Funny thing around our shop, though, was the utter lack of any noise (from any of us, at least), aura of stress, or any other indicator that we were in full production mode, heading for one of the most important dates our small shop's had. I'll note, this is in sharp contrast to some of the other projects we've been involved with.

So, whats wrong here? Doesn't sweat+blood=glory? Arbeit macht frei?

Well, for this project, we weren't tied to an advertising campaign with millions of dollars tied up in ad space targeted for one specific (and unreasonable) date. We had the luxury of an organic progression of events dictating the date of public launch.

What the hell does that mean? Well, it wasn't until all documents were in, all logic determined, all design elements finalized, etc. that we, as engineers, finalized a date which defined an proper amount of time for implementation, testing, refactoring, and release.

During that 'deliverable' phase, we all continually evaluated the 'truth' of the project's status. Expectations and desires aside, where are we really in this project?

Sooner or later, you have to pick a date of course, lest we fall into an eternal spiral of revisions. But, this was a good example of how letting that real world gut check guide a real world timeline which in the end worked out swimmingly. So swimmingly, in fact, that every person here walked in the day after launch and started working merrily on some project take-away or side project.

No psycho-therapy needed, unlike that moron in the washing machine commercial.