MAX Volume presentation is live

My presentation at MAX 2010 with Juan Sanchez and Leonard Souza is up now on AdobeTV. We presented on MAX Volume - a multi-screen experience we built for the desktop and mobile phone using Adobe tools.

Doug McCune Is Not Dead

Doug McCune is not really dead, but I gave his eulogy this morning as part of a prank that Nate Beck organized, produced and masterminded this morning at 360|Flex. Nate and Doug have had something of a prank war going in their sessions at 360|Flex over the past year and this was Nate's latest salvo, based on my April Fools Day post "RIP Doug McCune" earlier this year.

Here's the full text of the eulogy. It was immediately followed by this video that Nate posted to weheartdoug.org, which was in turn followed by Doug himself, giving his part of the keynote here at 360 | Flex.

Friends and honored guests, members of the Flex community. I stand before you today to with a message of sadness. Our once merry and mirthful friend, Douglas Quincy McCune, passed away last week and so will be unable to give the keynote here this morning. I know that Doug was a good friend to many of you and an honored member of the Flex community, remembered for the fanciful (if occassionally inappropriate) titles he gave to his sessions and frequent exhibitionism. There is no doubt that Doug will be sorely missed this weekend.

Though details of Doug's demise and the real reason for his passing are not available at his time, I would ask that we all honor his memory by thinking more about the happy times we had with him than the surely tragic and unfortunate events that surround his shuffling off of the mortal coil. For myself, the thing I remember most about Doug was the way he filled a room - how his presence permeated the place. Though I know Doug has passed on, in a weird six-sense sort of way I can still feel that presence, that warmth, that joy of his here with us know - as if he were sitting right in the front row.

Many of you know that Doug and Nate Beck had a prank war going. It started when Nate threw rubber balls at Doug during a session. Doug retailiated by having a man dressed as marilyn monroe sing happy birthday to Nate in the middle of his session at the last 360 Flex. Nate Beck was planning a masterful rebuttal; an epic final stroke to end the war by escalating it so far that Doug couldn't possibly respond. He'd hired a troupe of dancers to can-can out during this very keynote. They were to be lead by Michael Labriola who, contrary to common misperception, is quite a nimble ballerina. But due to Doug's passing Nate immediately dropped the prank plans and focused all of his efforts on rallying the Flex community in memorial with Doug. He's prepared a short memorial video, which we will watch together now.

We <3 Doug - In Memoriam from Nate Beck on Vimeo.

Installing new Flash Player in Chrome

The illustrious Kevin Suttle turned me on to a fix for an issue I've been having with Flash Player and Google's Chrome browser, which is my favorite browser by far.

My flash player debugger had simply stopped working in Chrome without warning. It turns out that Flash Player comes bundled as a plugin with Chrome now and you have to visit chrome://plugins to disable it. The only way to install a new Flash Player version for Chrome is to disable the old one, shut down chrome, run the Flash Player installer, and then restart Chrome.



When you're done, check out this Flash Player version test page from Adobe to make sure everything worked.

Making a site specific browser for Campfire using Fluid

I tried making a site specific browser for Campfire today using Fluid. It was a bit painful at first, until I got a little help from my friends out on the internet.

Step 1: Make the new fluid isntance. Grab the high-res image for Campfire from 37Signals here.

Step 2: Add *launchpad.37signals.com* to your list of allowed URLs for browsing (thanks Steve Sanderson)

Step 3: Add scripts to to do things like growl notifications when someone says your name.

Step 4: FUN

EffectiveUI book released

The EffectiveUI book by various people here at EUI and published by O'Reilly was released to the wild yesterday. Here's the official statement we put out:

"As the gap between the high-quality experiences users expect from software and the mediocre ones companies actually deliver continues to expand, there's no greater time to drive home the importance of building better UX for software.

Delivering on UX potential involves more than just innovative ideas and technologies. Building software centered on UX quality requires that the design, engineering, staffing and business considerations — as well as the overall art of software project management and development — be centered on users' needs and grounded in the practical realities that underlie innovative developments.

At EffectiveUI, we apply UX development and technology each day for custom Web, mobile and desktop applications. Over the years, we’ve learned through success and error what does and doesn’t work. Through these lessons, we have reached an approach that truly maximizes UX strategies for both the consumer and the developer.

We are incredibly fortunate to have a new book published by O’Reilly Media that will help answer many outstanding questions, or questions not yet pondered, for those embarking on better UX. We only wish we’d had this book a few times throughout projects in the past.

“Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software” is written as a complete roadmap of how to successfully develop groundbreaking software when the quality of the user experience is critical. The book will help:

• business and product managers trying to build and fund innovative products successfully.
• software professionals who want to more easily advance the cause of better UX in their companies and with their clients.
• anyone striving to advocate and deliver on the promise of higher quality software.

“Effective UI: The Art of Building Great User Experience in Software” covers all aspects of how to create superior UX, from the initial concept to deployment. It also explores the business, project management, design, and engineering considerations that must work in tandem along the way. By presenting real UX projects that EffectiveUI undertook with National Geographic and Herff Jones, the book demonstrates how the principles discussed can be applied to overcome UX challenges and to meet UX opportunities.

Authored by Jonathan Anderson and John McRee of EffectiveUI, in conjunction with Robb Wilson, “EffectiveUI” joins O’Reilly’s animal series of books and features a Rainbow Lorikeet on its cover.

The book costs $44.99 and is available at major retailers such as Amazon.com (www.tinyurl.com/effectiveui) and through O’Reilly Media at oreilly.com. It is also available on iTunes for $4.99."