Sam-I-Am's Builder Blog

Work type stuff - handy urls and notes on the trials and tribulations of a web builder.

Monday, April 18, 2005

Adobe / Macromedia

Well, this is some kind of news. I'm at a loss to see how anyone but possibly some shareholders will benefit though? This is not a sector that really needs consolidation, and (assuming product lines merge) I think most designers and developers will miss the Macromedia alternative.

Does it matter who makes Flash? Dunno. Dreamweaver vs. GoLive? I'd take DW, but I'm not going to pitch my tent outside Adobe's offices to petition for its continued development. Homesite? I'm still using Allaire's version. And the silver lining - I guess I can take Fireworks off my must-learn-more-about list.

Tuesday, April 12, 2005

User defined colors (CSS property values)

I learned something new today... font-family: menu. This should serve (me) as a reminder to go read the specs a little more often (or buy books, or both) as none of this is news. Anyhow, thanks for bringing them all together on one page .jeff

Monday, April 04, 2005

DotML

I just saw Dot in action here at work the other day - generating flow charts in SVG on the fly from a database of screen specs and interactions/workflows. Interesting and positively plump with possibilities. Generating and maintaining these kind of documents has been an irritation for me for years - particularly as the information they capture is essentially locked up and only accessible visually.

Implementing a workflow has always meant essentially starting over - with the document serving as a reference only. By flipping this on its head and making your flows *output*, rather than input, your application logic can stay fluid and be developed independantly. Ideally you would be able to round-trip - so you could model an interaction or workflow in a tool like Visio or Omnigraffle - export or merge into your XML that captures the application logic in its entirety, test, tune, and re-output to a Visio/Omnigraffle importable format for futher refinement. As I understand it this capability exists...

Any opportunity to defer the permanent entanglement of application, business, presentation logic allows for more testing, refinement and interation, at less cost. We don't necessarily need DotML to do this, but it will help. Once it becomes XML, half the work is already done for me.