01 Aug

Welcome, Adobe® Edge; Goodbye Flash?

Earlier today Adobe® Labs broke the silence and allowed Developers and fellow Lab members first look at the latest from the workshop: Adobe® Edge. A new web motion and interaction design tool that allows designers to bring animated content to websites, using web standards like HTML5, JavaScript, and CSS3. It’s a nifty application still in it’s infancy phase with lots of potential.

Features

Intuitive user Interface

The user interface is based on a stage, timeline, and panels for elements and properties. It’s influenced by the adobe user community’s favorite features and functionality in class-leading tools like After Effects and Flash Professional, but innovates in its ease of use. Animations and timing can be controlled on a WebKit-based stage, or via precise property adjustments directly on the timeline. You can also make quick edits on individual or multiple objects.

Visually author animated content

Create new compositions from scratch using basic HTML building blocks, text, and imported web graphics. Manipulate objects with an array of transformation and styling options which Edge natively applies to our jQuery-based animation framework.

Add …

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22 May
JS Hint Service

JS Hint

This nifty webapp is a scripting godsend! Personally, I do a lot of work with JavaScript and when it comes time to subcontract work out if I need to manage a workload or a project’s timeline I need to be able to trust in whom I’ve picked to help and in their ability and logical markup. Obviously I would be doing a screening, but I know what happends deep into projects, many hours and lines of code from the starting point. Those perfect semantics you handed in at the interview time arn’t looking as pretty now, and rather then make sure I just drop what they give through my own personal “vaildator”. Enter: JSHint.

“JSHint is a community-driven tool to detect errors and potential problems in JavaScript code and to enforce your team’s coding conventions. It is very flexible so you can easily adjust it to your particular coding guidelines and the environment you expect your code to execute in.”

JSHint is an open-source project that is supported and maintained by the JavaScript developer community. The source code …

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19 May

Microsoft’s IDE for the win?

WebMatrix

This is one monster of an IDE. I thought Aptana Studio was beastly, but in compairison not so much anymore. Within WebMatrix lies the tools you need to dabble with databases and frameworks, pick between open source and .NET coding environments and works as a live site monitor for you published projects including a SEO back-end!

First you get what looks simlar to a windows-update type platform which you pick the options you wish to install alongside your WebMatrix environment. Once you setup your required platforms you wish to develop on you’re good to go and ready to work.

Although fully featured, there’s a bit of a limited developer user-base for this monster IDE because it’s PC only for people working on ASP to PHP and back. WebMatrix gives you a solid foundation to start all your projects in one, well organized and maintained, place.

The WebMatrix interface is pretty (at least from my preference) but the whole IDE feels sluggsh and takes way to long to preform some routine tasks.

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18 May
Umbraco

The CMS Uber Guide: Licensed

How do you pick the right CMS for the job?

When I first started web design I thought that using a content management system was a type of cheating. I didn’t believe in the quality of the systems out their that offered everything you need in a box. It was also a bit concerning, just starting in this field, that I could be replaced by an out-of-the-box solution. Even worse, what if I used the system only to have something break on me and not work as planned?

It was this type of mindset that started me to lean towards making your CMS from the ground up for each project that required it. Although satisfying when complete, way to many countless hours, sleepless nights and energy drinks were wasted crafting these systems. The icing on the cake happened when clients wanted custom modifications and rather than enhance the functionality, they just broke the system even more making them a maintenance disaster.

Thankfully I’ve learned much since then and over the last couple of years have grown to become very familiar …

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