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."

"Flash" package missing, code hinting lost

Earlier today I started getting some ridiculous behavior out of Flex Builder. All code completion revolving around the Flash package, especially events, just quit. Then it started flagging the word "flash" itself as an error:

1120: Access of undefined property flash.

After a while hitting up the bug database and searching the googleverse I found this great tip from Garth Somerville - make a new workspace.

It's kind of a pain, but it worked!

Update:
WHEN THIS FAILS: When this fails, as Andrew T pointed out in the comments, re-install the SDK

AND WHEN THAT FAILS: Re-intsall Flex Builder. After re-building my workspace 5 times with no luck, reinstalling the SDK, and fighting with this for hours, I finally just scrapped all of that and re-installed Flex Builder. It all works fine now - old workspaces and all.

CFUnited Speaker Questionnaire

Recently CFUnited sent out a speaker questionnaire. Since this whole thing was too long to twitter, I thought I'd share it with you, gentle reader, here on my weblog page.

1. Have you spoken at CFUnited in the past? What would you tell someone who hasn't been to CFUnited before?

I have never, even once, spoken at CFUnited. Last year I was sworn to silence. I would tell someone, it's okay - you can get through this.

2. Why should people attend your session(s)?

People should attend my session if they want to learn about what's new in Flex 4, or how they can use Flex to build some sweet UI's onto the hearty back-ends they're used to building in CF.

3. Do you have any projects in the works that you will be revealing at CFUnited?

[mysterious]If I did, I most certainly wouldn't reveal them on the internet. You'll just have to come and see for yourself.[/mysterious]

4. Besides your topic, what other sessions are you looking forward to?

I'm looking forward to Jun's session and David Tucker's session. They both know a lot about a lot of things, and I like learning things from people who know them.

5. What are some of the hot topics you'd like to see at RoundTable discussions?

I'd really enjoy listening to two gentlemen (or ladies) diplomatically argue the merits of the multi-party system of government favored in Europe compared to our rather intransigent tradition of only two.

6. Where can people find you at CFUnited? (At the bar, networking, working, in your room, etc.)

I will most likely be in the pool, trying to see how long I can hold my breath.

7. What's the latest news with you? Has anything changed since last CFUnited?

Well, Liz, I'm glad you asked. Last week we watched our friends' dog. It's a pretty nice dog, so it went well, generally, but it yipped a lot at night, and I'm a light sleeper, so that was a little rough. You know what, why don't we just catch up at the conference?

8. What is unique about CFUnited?

It's the last great bastion of hope for a dying world in need of a hero. There are a few mediocre bastions around, but you won't find any other great ones. Especially not around WADC.

9. When you are not working what do you like to do in your free time?

When I'm not working, I like reading, playing video games, and occasionally playing sports in my free time. When I'm working, I prefer to spend my free time playing scrabble over a nice glass of 2% milk.

10. How do you feel about Law and Order?

It is my firm belief that there are too many crime dramas on evening television, but of those crime dramas, Law and Order is pretty good, I guess.

New offices - EUI Upstairs!

Back in the summer of 2006, we (EffectiveUI) purchased a really big warehouse in down town Denver and moved in. In the early days we didn't have bathrooms or lights or conference rooms, and it was a real shack. That was quickly rectified, but as our numbers were still small we only built out the bottom floor of the building.

Since then we've grown considerably and our space started to constrain us - we couldn't physically fit enough desks in the office to house our Denver crew. Late last year we got serious about finishing the upstairs of the office, and today is the glorious day in which we've finally moved upstairs. Our design, development and PM teams moved upstairs, while account management and sales (the noisy people) stayed on the ground floor. It's nice and quiet up here. :)

Here are a few pictures, for anyone interested. It's still got a good industrial feel but is far nicer and more workable than the raw warehouse was.

The view from my desk of our "developer pit" area:


This is the designer "pit", separated by a half wall for us developers. The wall is there to make sense of the difference in floor height - not to keep them out (or us in (I think.))


Front couches upstairs - a good place to take phone calls. :)


The front stair case leading up to our new digs, with some of the art we're going to hang on the walls soon. I think Todd Hebenstreit made that one. All of the art we're using to decorate upstairs was done by EUI employees. I spray painted a smiley face myself, but it's not here. :)


View of the pits from the staircase:



We made Andy McIntosh sit with the designers to help him appreciate Flex Builder more: