I am currently preparing for my session at FITC San Francisco where I will talk about all of the change that is currently happening in our industry. When I say industry I am not talking solely about Flash, but rather web development as a whole. The mobile explosion is providing us with lots of exciting new opportunities, but at the same time it is making things a whole lot more complicated. Moving forward, the mark of a true web professional will be knowing when it is appropriate to employ the power of Flash and when a different technology might be more appropriate. This means you will need to start educating yourself on these alternative technologies if you are not already doing so.

In reality, the situations where using Flash is appropriate have not changed all that much. What has changed is that we can no longer get away with misusing Flash anymore. I’m sure lots of us, myself included, have been guilty of that over the years. When people do this it actually hurts Flash as a technology and makes it much harder for us to convince people about its real benefits.

Flash has always been there to allow you to go beyond the functionality that the browser enables and this will continue to be the case. Video is a great example of this. Once all browsers can support HTML5 video it makes perfect sense for simple video playback to done outside of Flash. But if you want more advanced video features then you will choose Flash. On that note, we are working on some video stuff right now that will blow your mind. More details on that soon.

So why am I saying all this? Well I am planning on providing some tutorials and blog posts that focus on situations where using Flash might be a mistake. For instance, I am planning a tutorial showing how to do a basic photo slideshow using jQuery. Two photos fading into one another is a good example of where using Flash would be overkill. You will be much more successful in your career if you are someone who simply uses the best tool for the job. It’s really that simple. Sometimes that tool will be Flash and sometimes not.

If you want to hear more come to FITC San Francisco as it has the best lineup of speakers I have ever seen at one event. FITC is generously providing readers of this blog with a special $200 discount. Just use the discount code theflashblog when registering.

By: theFlashBlog

I just uploaded a new tutorial that shows you how to create a mobile-optimized website using HTML and CSS. The tutorial also highlights the new multi-screen development features of Dreamweaver CS5. It is important to have a strong grasp on standard web technologies as only then can you make an informed decision about when to use Flash.

By: theFlashBlog

The Wall Street Journal recently put out an article describing how the demand for Flash developers has been increasing as of late. While this is no surprise to most of us in the community, it is a refreshing reminder that those who have marked Flash as a dying technology are quite wrong indeed. The article states that the increase in online Flash gaming is a large reason for the spike. I’m guessing that it also has something to do with all of the anticipation surrounding Flash on mobile devices.

The article also includes a quote about the salaries that top Flash developers are getting these days:

Top full-time Flash engineers can now command more than $150,000 a year in salary, says Stuart Liroff, a headhunter at GreeneSearch recruiting firm. That compares with $50,000 to $80,000 a year three years ago.

By: theFlashBlog

Ofoto began life as an online photography service based in Berkeley, California. The service provided three basic features:

• It let people upload JPEG images so that others could view them by simply visiting the website.
• It let people create photo albums and share them online with friends.
• It enabled users to purchase prints online.

This feature was supposed to be the foundation for Ofoto’s business model, which was based on the premise that people would want traditional, printed photographs.
Ofoto later added a 35mm online film processing service and an online frame store, as well as some other services, but its core pattern still embraced a core model of static publishing. In May 2001, Eastman Kodak purchased Ofoto, and the Ofoto Web Service was rebranded in 2005 as the Kodak EasyShare Gallery. Flickr is another photo-sharing platform, but it was built with the online community in mind, rather than the idea of selling prints. Flickr made it simple for people to tag or comment on each other’s images, and for developers to incorporate Flickr into their own applications. Flickr is properly a community platform and is justifiably seen as one of the exemplars of the Web 2.0 movement. The site’s design and even the dropped e in the company name are now firmly established in Web 2.0’s vernacular.

Applicable Web 2.0 Patterns

This comparison involves the following patterns:

• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Participation-Collaboration
• Mashup
• Rich User Experience
• The Synchronized Web
• Collaborative Tagging
• Declarative Living and Tag Gardening
• Persistent Rights Management

Collaboration and Tagging

Flickr is often used as an information source for other Web 2.0 platforms or mechanisms. It offers simple application programming interfaces (APIs) for accessing its content, enabling third parties to present images in new contexts and to access and use Flickr’s services in their own mashups or other applications. Bloggers commonly use it as an online photo repository that they can easily connect to their own sites, but the APIs offer much more opportunity than that. Programmers can create applications that can perform almost any function available on the Flickr website. The list of possible operations is vast and covers most of the normal graphical user interface’s capabilities.

Web 2.0 Architectures
by James Governor, Dion Hinchcliffe, and Duane Nickull

Before we compare these two companies, we must point out that DoubleClick has vastly enhanced its platform since it was formed; so much so, in fact, that Google acquired DoubleClick in 2007 to further broaden its media advertising ambitions.* Therefore, instead of specifically illustrating DoubleClick’s original ad model, we’ll illustrate the generic pattern of banner ad impression sales that many online advertising companies used in the late 1990s.

Applicable Web 2.0 Patterns

Watch for illustrations of the following patterns in this discussion:
• Software as a Service (SaaS)
• Mashup
• Rich User Experience
• Semantic Web Grounding
• Asynchronous Particle Update

Advertising in Context

Banner ad placement originally operated on a simplistic model whereby advertisers purchased banner ads in lots (typically of 1,000 or more), and the banners were then placed on websites. The placement of these banner ads was often billed based solely on impressions, regardless of whether anyone actually clicked on the banners. This online advertising model clearly had room for improvement.

Initially, one of the main issues facing advertisers was the lack of any guarantee that the ads were effective; however, this problem was mitigated by the use of tracking software and new business models that charged based on the number of click-throughs. Another issue concerned the fact that some larger companies offering such services asked webmasters to place code in their sites and then served up ads whenever someone issued a request for a page containing that code. It was therefore quite possible that ads aimed at golfers, for example, might appear on fishing or other websites not concerned with golf.

In contrast, Google AdSense is a paid ad service that serves contextually specific ads on web pages and tracks the number of clicks on each ad by visitors to those pages. This form of ad delivery uses a simple yet effective pattern of contextual targeting. Rather than just advertising blindly, AdSense attempts to quantify the context of a user’s experience based on a keyword score within the web pages containing the ads. AdSense then cross-references the keywords with a list of potential target ads that might be of interest to the user of that web resource. As a result, visitors to a web page on golfing will typically see golf-related advertisements rather than completely random content.

AdSense also lets web page owners filter out competitors’ ads. For example, a golf club manufacturer could block competing companies’ ads from being displayed on its website. This is a highly useful pattern for preventing competitors from targeting a website owner’s customers.

Silverlight lays out user interface elements in Panels with various capabilities ranging from fixed, pixel-based layout through to flexible, fluid designs. You can make use of the existing layout mechanisms or build your own Panels to supplement what’s available. Let’s take a look at what’s involved..

In this video, we’ll examine the Panels available and the various properties around alignment and sizing that come into play when you’re laying out elements for Silverlight UI.

What’s Covered?

Here’s a quick look at some of the subjects covered in this screencast:

• Element properties
• Panel types
• Dragging and dropping
• Fixed and fluid layouts

In creating our serious games, we follow the rigors that we learned when designing educational material for Disney. The studio insisted we never even think creatively until we understood the content completely. One step before creativity took over was to study the project goals and look for the goal behaviors that we could simulate in our game. Is the core behavior finding objects, making decisions, recognizing situations or similarities? We identified that activity and placed it at the heart of the gameplay. Then it was time to focus on creative approaches.

In our chapter on game design, we enhanced our experience with input from some of the top game designers in the consumer games business. We wanted them to give us their creative secrets, and they did—even if they had to stay undercover for contractual reasons. Once the initial brainstorming has been done—and a creative approach and concept have been defined and the documentation on those elements has begun—the concept should be field-tested. We offer some tips and techniques to maximize the value of this step.

Let there be no doubt: the creative part of development is clearly the most fun.

Via Phil Franks comes an interesting HTML5/CSS3 site for There Studio, which is a kind of coworking space in London:

The site itself has a number of circles with information bouncing on the screen that respond to mouse clicks and moves.
View Source Tutorial

As indicated previously, social media is a great equalizer: big brands can be outsmarted without making huge investments, and small brands can make big names for themselves.
Blendtec was a relatively unknown company selling $400 high-performance blenders. After seeing CEO Tom Dickson testing the machines by blending two-by-fours, Marketing Director George Wright had a brilliant idea for a series of viral videos. He started to blend everyday objects—glow sticks, iPhones, Rubik’s Cubes, and television remote controls—and posted the videos to media-sharing sites such as YouTube. The videos have now been watched more than 100 million times and have garnered the company a ton of press and buzz.

A small specialty baker in New Jersey, Pink Cake Box, leverages nearly every type of social media that exists to build a substantial brand. Employees write a blog that features images and videos of their unique cakes. They post the photos to Flickr and the videos to the company’s YouTube channel. Pink Cake Box has more than 1,300 followers on Twitter, and more than 1,400 fans on Facebook. The software startup I work for, HubSpot, has invested a lot of energy in social media marketing with some success. Our blog has more than 19,000 subscribers (fueled by appearances on Digg, Reddit, and StumbleUpon), our company Twitter account has more than 16,000 followers, our LinkedIn group has more than 34,000 members, and our Facebook page has more than 6,000 fans. We’ve launched a marketing forum, and have a lot of fun making amusing (and sometimes serious) videos for YouTube.

Social Media and You

Whether you are part of a small, medium, or giant business, or are an individual entrepreneur, your customers are using social media, and there’s no reason you shouldn’t be, too. It costs almost nothing, it’s easy to get started, and it can have an enormous financial impact on your business. This book will teach you everything you need to know to pick the right tools and get started. While writing this book, I spoke with some of the most brilliant social media pioneers, including people from Flickr, Yelp, Mashable, WebmasterWorld, Second Life, and Scout Labs. They shared their wisdom on how you can—and should—be working with social media.

Your customers and your competition are already involved in social media. Why aren’t you?

The Social Media Marketing Book
by Dan Zarrella

IBM owns more than 100 different blogs, a dozen islands in the virtual world of Second Life, several official Twitter accounts, and a popular forum called developerWorks. It publishes a machinima series (a cartoon video made in Second Life) on YouTube, and several employees upload presentations to the media-sharing site SlideShare.

Dell has tapped the power of social media with its hugely popular IdeaStorm website, where users add ideas for new product lines and enhancements, vote them up or down, and comment on submissions. Because of the site, Dell has started to ship computers with Linux installed, and has added community support. Starbucks has also started to use this model to some success with its My Starbucks Idea site. Burger King has made headlines time and time again with its innovative viral and social marketing campaigns, most recently with the “Whopper Sacrifice.” The burger chain offered Facebook users a free Whopper coupon if they would “unfriend” 10 of their social network connections Cable giant Comcast has begun to salvage its tarnished reputation with a customer service outpost on Twitter led by Frank Eliason, Comcast’s “Director of Digital Care,” and his @comcastcares account.

Whenever someone tweets negatively about the company—and that happens a lot—Frank jumps in to offer whatever help he can. This has led to some of the only positive press the brand has gotten in a long time. The shoe retailer Zappos, which most people already love, also has an awesome customer service presence on Twitter. U.S. President Barack Obama has been called the first social media president, and a strong argument could be made for the label. As a candidate, he had one of the most popular Twitter accounts and Facebook pages, and his website contained a social media section where his supporters could create profiles and connect with each other. The campaign was also present on YouTube, Flickr, LinkedIn,
MySpace, and Second Life. Big brands have also faced embarrassment on social media. In another example, two Domino’s Pizza employees posted a video to YouTube showing them defiling food that was to be delivered to customers. That video was watched more than 1 million times in the first few days, and was the subject of thousands of tweets.

Motrin released a commercial that offered its product as a solution to the pain women experience when carrying babies in harnesses attached to their torsos. A day later, a small but vocal group of mommy bloggers had made the commercial the most discussed topic on Twitter, mostly expressing outrage. These moms made critical videos and blog posts and called for a boycott of Motrin. Eventually, the company apologized and withdrew the commercial.

The Social Media Marketing Book
by Dan Zarrella