I’ll get right to the point: I don’t get it. The premise of this application is that somebody at Adobe sat down and said “Hey wouldn’t it be cool if you could design a web site without having to write a single line of code?” In fact, the humorous part of all this is that it wasn’t 2…or 3….or 10 guys sitting down saying this…just one. There’s a fine line between a stroke of genius and an idea that belongs crumpled up in a waste basket…oops, sorry…recycle bin. So this guy has a dream. He dreamed of a world with no code – so what did he do? He spent the next 16 months writing code. And after 16 months of coding…what do we have? A BETA application. So, he’s going to have to write some more code. And if he wants this application to be successful I imagine there will be a few patch releases or version increments, maybe a service pack – so that’s going to mean more code.

Ok, so – before you read any more of this post, you have to watch the “trailer” for this dream within a dream. And I apologize if you have to watch a 10 second commercial for NVidia graphics cards before you watch the trailer. I mean COME ON Adobe! Are you serious? You’re actually going to monetize on announcing your software release. Oy vay!

The sound bites from this little ditty range from clueless, to troubling. Here are a few of my favorites (and I use that term loosely):

“…They are someone who just wants to focus on design…” – Ummm, ok – then focus on design. Leave the development to the developers.

“…Revolutionize how a designer creates websites…” - Not hardly, you basically took two or three of your high end, expensive apps and dumbed it down to something that you’ll probably charge $199 for. But in all honesty, the real pros will just stick with the high end apps because they don’t want to learn your new Kindergarten tool. You’ll trick a few people into buying this, or you’ll just end up giving it away as a door prize at the next 3 or 4 Adobe events.

“…They don’t have to know what CSS is, javascript, anything like that…” – Dang, too late! They already do, so what’s the point? I seriously know dozens of designers that handle client-side code just fine. How do you think they’ve survived this long? So now what’s your point again for making this app?

“…In 5 or 10 years, I don’t think very many people will be coding in order to design web sites…” - Are you kidding me? I don’t even know how to respond to this. Apparently, Muse will just jump out of the box and make your website for you in 5 or 10 years. I guess they’ve already figured out how to work with databases, XML, APIs, cloud computing, and it can handle secure connections so you’ll probably develop your next large scale eCommerce solution with just the click of a mouse. Oh wait! You don’t even need a mouse any more? It can just read your mind!!!

Ok, sorry for that last one. I got carried away. Adobe needs to focus on what makes it successful – and I don’t think this fits that mold. This is a solution looking for a problem. Designers and developers work together and are successful because of each other, not in spite of each other. For decades, we’ve all gone to see a specialist instead of a General Practitioner for our medical needs. We’ve learned that specializing in a field leads to greater success. Adobe Muse is a step in the wrong direction. I wonder how long it will take before they realize that.

http://www.queness.com/post/8784/12-killer-tips-and-tricks-for-building-html-email

Web-based mail like GMail, Yahoo, and Hotmail have certainly established themselves in today’s market, but they certainly aren’t the only one’s being used. In fact, it takes very little effort to write your own email client…and so, many have and many of them are convenient, free, and work pretty well. Don’t even get me started on smartphones and their mail clients.

So, as you can see, if you are going to send an HTML email. The old adage of K.I.S.S. (keep it simple stupid) should be firmly planted in your frontal cortex. You’re going to have to use a minimal amount of HTML because there is just a minimal amount that you can depend on to display the same across so many email clients.

Although it isn’t covered in the article above (and I understand why because this kinda’ defeats the purpose), the method that I prefer is to use large images as sections of an email body and let the user click on a section to take them to your website if they’re interested. So as you can see, it doesn’t get more minimal than that…so it’s not really in the spirit of the article. I’ve had clients balk at such a notion and insist that they want pure HTML emails. After so many experiences and also watching my own habits as a user (and looking at the marketing emails I get each day) those seem to be the easiest to read, understand, and respond to. So that’s my opinion.

It was just about a year ago that Steve Jobs (CEO of Apple) pretty much dissed Flash as (see Thoughts on Flash, April 2010) being propreitary, a closed system, and to put it bluntly…behind the times.

Steve Jobs

Of course Adobe responded to these claims to defend themselves and their bread and butter application. There was a lot of talk about these two letters for about a month and then it pretty much got swept under the rug. However, over the past 12 months HTML5 has really started to gain in popularity.

So, what’s the big deal? Well, HTML5 allows developers to develop…designers to design…and there’s some happy wiggle room in the middle for either party to get their hands dirty. You don’t have to be a dyed-in-the-wool developer to see and understand how some design elements are being animated/manipulated/etc. And you don’t have to be a macchiato sipping, NPR listening, IKEA shopping designer to see how you can make “code changes” under the hood.  So there’s this middle ground where the two camps can see each other, agree on a development approach, and in a pinch…help each other out.

Adobe releasing Edge seems to be a bit of humble pie for them. It kinda’…sorta’….does all the same stuff that Flash does, it just does it in a standards-compliant, open-platform approach. I’m going to download the preview and play around with it this weekend. I’ll post a screencast or two when I’m done and let you know what I think.

Even though the release of Edge is interesting, I’ve been less than impressed with a lot of these tools lately. I think it lets a complete amateur get in and make some fun designs, but when it comes to meeting the needs of a client…you have to understand what’s going on underneath the hood or you’ll soon paint yourself into a corner.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/edge/

Check out Mashable.com’s take on this announcement here -> http://mashable.com/2011/08/01/adobe-edge/

Mashable.com writes about Features Update page for Google+.

I was hardly excited about another social media site when I first heard about Google+. However, I figured if anyone could take the basic framework of Facebook (which, let’s be honest is the most successful social network on the planet) and shave off all the junk that we don’t like about it….it has to be Google. So, as the rumors and sightings of Google+ began to crescendo, my interests did as well. A friend of mine was able to invite me into his circle and that’s how I got on.

It’s still in its infancy, so if you are lucky enough to get an invite…don’t be alarmed by the rolling tumbleweeds or the shortness of your stream (analogous to your Facebook Wall). These things take time, but I think you’ll quickly see that this is a cleaned up, streamlined social media site that lets you do exactly what you want – stalk people you don’t really care for. No wait, that’s what Facebook is for. I mean, stay in touch with people you actually like.

Great article on two popular methods in jQuery and how they stack up. I was actually surprised by the results!

I can remember being a young developer just starting out in one of my first I.T. jobs and I met another developer who was many years ahead of me in our field. He was a very well read and talented developer. In fact, I think his title was “Architect” because he was always the most Sr. Developer on any project. We had a discussion one day about which method in the .NET Framework (StringBuilder or just concatenating two strings) used these least amount of memory space and also the fastest to implement. Of course, we’re talking minuscule amounts of data and time measured in nanoseconds (well, practically). He argued that StringBuilder was faster. I didn’t even know that people cared about methods that executed 20 milliseconds faster than other methods. I hadn’t researched it…I didn’t even care – but I stuck to my guns that concatenation was faster. He laughed at me because (mostly) he knew I was a junior in the industry and so therefore must be wrong.

He actually went home and spent 3 hours of testing only to come to the conclusion that I was right. I was absolutely blown away…I couldn’t believe he spent 3 hours on something so ridiculous. Well, here I am…years later, and now I see the light. 20 milliseconds may seem like nothing. And to the human eye, and human brain, it is nothing. But if we’re talking about bandwidth, and CPU usage, and a big beefy server that has to execute the same computation 10s of thousands of times an hour then it starts to matter.