iPhone - “Your activation requires additional time to complete”

The waiting for the iPhone turned out to be the easy part, all of five hours. The activation process, however, is the real test. We’re now at T-plus 16 hours since I received the message during iPhone activation that “your activation requires additional time to complete.” Based on the message traffic across many blogs I’m not alone. We sit and wait…

Waiting in Line for the iPhone

The wait for the iPhone wasn’t bad at all. I headed over to The Apple Store at Alderwood Mall in Lynnwood, WA around 1pm, having spent the morning knocking out a bunch of work and client requests. I was shocked to find I was only 34 deep in line. I even had time to run to REI, pickup a camping chair, and reclaim my spot in line — no one else showed up during my short shopping trip.

By the 6pm door opening event about 150 people were in line. Apple Store employees handed out free bottles of water and took Starbucks orders. Even though the doors opened at 6pm it still took me 45 minutes to make it into the store to purchase my two iPhones.

Now I’m all set for iPhoneDevCamp this week!

iPhone a Launch Pad for RIAs

Okay, so the only thing more exciting than getting my iPhones tomorrow (employee #2 needs one as well), is attending the very first ever iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco July 6-8, 2007. I’m all set to go and it promises to be very exciting — I was attendee #103 on the registration list and it’s already grown to about 200, not to mention those that will be participating virtually.

Unlike the vast majority of the tech-addicted public who will be clamoring to get the iPhone for its obvious aesthetic appeal (oh yeah, and that stuff about it being a wide screen video iPod, phone, and revolutionary Internet device), I can’t wait to get my hands on one so I can develop for it. I know, the experience will be fraught with highs and lows as I discover what renders well and what doesn’t, but being on that lead ship into the “fog of tech” will be exhilarating. I plan on posting my hourly discoveries here… it will be a ride so stay tuned.

WebORB Supercharges the Move into RIAs

The events of the past two weeks have left me in one of those situations where I question “is this coincidence or fate?” No, I don’t purport to have survived a plane crash into a remote and mysterious South Pacific island a la “Lost”; rather, in the past two weeks I’ve attended two separate Adobe Flex events on separate ends of the country and the common thread between them both was WebORB, a truly exciting offering put out by Mark Pillar and team at The Midnight Coders, LLC.

The first time I heard about WebORB was just a week ago at a Seattle Flex User Group Meeting held at Adobe’s Fremont Campus. I was one of a whopping four guys in attendance and there was a great deal of talk about WebORB. Then, just this week while attending the Flexmaniacs 2007 Conference in Washington, DC I happen into a session presented by who else than Mark Pillar himself!

So what is this WebORB you ask? Well, if you’re an old ASP coder (no, not ASP.NET…ASP) you’ll appreciate this more than some others I imagine. WebORB sits on your server, you tell it what data source you want to connect up to your RIA and it objectifies your entire database. As if that weren’t enough, it provides out of the box CRUD (create, read, update, and delete) functions and even has the ability for self-describing functions that you can create on-the-fly (no need for prior declaration).

I attended a hands-on session Mark Pillar hosted using PHP and Flex using his baby, WebORB. Mark is a guy that talks a million words a minute, but if you’re of like mind you’ll love this guy and will love the stuff his company is cranking out even more. The field has some similar (alas not easier to use) tools under the GPL or similar open source licensing, bad news for The Midnight Coders bottom line, but good for developers. However, the future looks bright for these guys and I for one will be one supporting them financially whenever I can as they will surely ease the pain on many projects to come. Try out WebORB and I think you’ll be sold as well.

Flexmaniacs 2007 Summary

All in all the Flexmaniacs 2007 Conference was worthwhile. Fig Leaf Software put on a well-organized conference with a really top-notch list of speakers — for $249 it’s a hard deal to beat.

The downtown Washington, DC location worked well — my only recommendation would be to hold it in the Spring or Fall. Washington, DC summers are brutal (I know from having lived there for 25 years)!

Flexmaniacs 2007 Day Two

Well here we are, Day Two of the Flexmaniacs 2007 Conference hosted by Fig Leaf Software. The highlight of the day was clearly the keynote delivered by Mike Sundermeyer and Tom Hobbs from Adobe’s Experience Design Team (XD Team). Mike and Tom told a story about how they first conceived Flex some six years ago. According to Mike and Tom the prototype was a little BabelFish translator front-end. They demo’d it to the president of Adobe. His response: “this is great, but can’t you do all this with DHTML already?”

Much of the keynote, however, focused on the Adobe XD Team’s design philosophy. They shared an interesting analogy from the car world; people buy cars because of the way they look and feel and this is Adobe’s take on how people choose and use applications. It was at this point that they showed a slide of the first “horseless carriage.”

The overwhelming majority of apps today are still designed like the first car — all the thinking is on the engineering, not on the user experience. Adobe is trying to change this and they’re calling it the “The Experience Revolution.” Adobe thinks we are in the midst of a change about what people expect from their user experiences.

From here the Adobe XD Team launched into demos of five RIAs they believe live this promise:

1. Bank of America internet banking app (would love to show it to you and if you are a BofA customer you probably are familiar with it). Apparently, the VP of User Experience at BofA attended a presentation by the Adobe XD Team and afterwards begged them for help with overhauling BofA’s internet banking app. Originally, BofA wanted to segregate the app from the content (e.g. users’ banking data) and Adobe said “Stop — we don’t do UIs. Content is part of the experience.” So the VP gathered up a few years of banking data on himself and provided it to the XD Team for fodder as they re-evaluated the experience and went to work overhauling the app. A valuable lesson from the BofA experience was that animation is not gratuitous, but cues users into the fact that data has updated in realtime and helps orient them.
2. Amazon.com’s Electronics section. A good example of real-time filtering.
3. YouTube Remixer, an online video editing RIA. The important thing the XD Team learned from this engagement was that drag and drop tested, surprisingly, as very intuitive behavior with users.
4. Progressive Insurance Claims Reporting. I’m not sure if this RIA is in production yet. I’ve seen it a few time already demo’d at various conference by Adobe. Anyhow, it allows a user to visually describe an accident by drawing, with tools provided on-screen, damage to their vehicle, the series of events leading to the accident, etc. A slick RIA and one Adobe should rightly be proud of.
5. Amgen Tour of California Tracker, a RIA that provided near real-time coverage of the Tour of California bicycle race. The amount of on-the-ground coordination (e.g. special GPS devices, videographers/photographers on the course, etc.) was astounding, not to mention the data scrubbing that had to be done with Yahoo! Maps (another Flex RIA incidentally) so that cyclists appeared on the roads properly rather than off in the brush.

Tom and Mike from the Adobe XD Team then distilled for the audience some myths:

Myth: More Features = More Value
Adobe’s Thinking: Value = Simplicity + Quality
Design for the 80% of users and features.
Show only tools needed for the task.
Do more where you are.
Let content breathe. Content is king. Chrome is just a barrier to content.
Design content, not chrome.
Express things visually.
Interact deeply.

Myth: Animation is gratuitous.
Adobe’s Thinking: Animation is a strategic tool.
Use cinematic transitions to evoke emotion and focus attention.

Myth: Apps are the sum of their parts.
Adobe’s Thinking: Treat app design like home design.
The whole of the app must be considered including the content (UIs cannot be content-agnostic). If changes must be made then the whole must be reconsidered. App designers cannot be afraid of throwing away work — otherwise the design will ultimately be compromised.

Myth: One size fits all.
Adobe’s Thinking: Personality and Community Rule.
Communities create better content.
Users want different things to use in different ways.
Identity and brand matter.
Personaility in apps will be transformative.

Adobe XD Team Rule: Build to Think. Make things people love to use.

Flexmaniacs 2007 Day One

I’m in Washington, DC this week for Fig Leaf Software’s Flexmaniacs 2007 Conference. Turnout appears respectable with around 200 attendees. For the $249 conference fee, one can’t beat the amount of training available — only the recent Salesforce.com developers conference had a better pricetag ($0). Day One at Flexmaniacs 2007 offered more than two dozen topics. My day got off to a fairly good start with “Component Development in the Flex World” hosted by Chafic Kazoun, co-author of “Flex 2 Programming” from O’Reilly. Kazoun provided fairly clear but brisk code samples with plenty of background.

Next was “Memory Management for Flex Developers” by Jun Heider. It was an informative although high level discussion of memory management strategies when developing and deploying Flex apps. Heider provided a nice distillation of the Flash player memory management/garbage collection algorithm, but the session was a bit short on practical ways in code to affect memory management — the strategies really boiled down the usual list of suspects familiar from other development technologies (e.g. clean up after yourself when opening connections, etc.). All in all, however, a useful session.

I ended the morning with “Flex Data Services Push Tech. w/Legacy Systems” presented by Michael Labriola, a brilliant engineer with a fascinating background (he used to be a reverse engineer). At the start he stated that he’d rather cover the breadth of the topic instead of necessarily going for a deep dive, but honestly I don’t think he achieved either. From my chair it seemed most of the audience was lost 15 minutes into the lecture.

Fortunately, the rest of the day really was a delight courtesy of two sessions by Mark Pillar, CEO of Midnight Coders, LLC. Mark covered “Flex without Java” and “Flex and PHP.” Mark’s style is easy and he explained things in a way respectful of the spectrum of experience in the audience — never talking over our head or spoon feeding us either. While he took every opportunity to show off his company’s WebORB product, it was well worth it because what Midnight Coders has put together is fabulous. I had first heard about Midnight Coders and WebORB only a week earlier at a Flex User Group meeting back in Seattle and was delighted to see Mark was presenting. The hype I’d heard from the user group lived up entirely to its billing.

The day ended with a discourse of the “Managing Complexity with Cairngorm” by Jim Robison. Although he’s only been developing in Flex for a little over a year, he has a good command of Cairngorm and tried his best to bring life to a pretty boring topic for the casual Flex developer, but a real necessity for anyone wishing to keep their sanity with large Flex projects