I spent many hours in the mall in Columbia, Maryland (http://www.themallincolumbia.com), this weekend, trying to buy a pair of prescription eyeglasses. I started with the Oakley store, where I picked out the frames I wanted. I had actually decided from your web site which frames I wanted, but the Oakley store didn’t carry those frames in the color I wanted – they said their selection was very limited because they didn’t sell the prescription frames very well. I soon found out why.

Once I decided on a pair they did have that I liked, they told me that I would have to take the frames to an authorized Oakley dealer, of which there were three in that mall. They said they were no longer allowed to send the frames in themselves to get the prescription filled (I had my prescription with me) because they had gotten in trouble for that, apparently something to do with not having a doctor in their store.

So then I went to Pearle Vision. At Pearle Vision, they wanted to sell me their lenses instead of sending the frames in to Oakley. When I insisted on Oakley lenses, they made a show of calling Oakley (I have my doubts as to whether or not they actually spoke with Oakley on the phone, for the reasons I will illustrate shortly), and then they informed me that for the frames I had chosen, my prescription index was too high. The sales person claimed that Oakley told him that the frames only supported up to a total power of 5. They said they could put their own lenses in, but Oakley would not put in lenses at that prescription.

So then I went back to the Oakley store and told them what happened at Pearle Vision. The gentleman who had helped me looked up the frames in your catalog and found that Oakley supported up to a total power of 7 on those frames, not 5 as Pearle Vision claimed. They suggested that I try the other two vendors in the mall, Lens Crafters and Sterling Optical. They suggested I go to Lens Crafters first, because ‘sterling optical had lost their trust’. When I asked why that was the case, they told me that Sterling Optical had ripped off many of their customers who ordered Oakley lenses, substituting their own lenses instead and reselling the Oakley lenses for additional profit.

So then I went to Lenscrafters, where I faced a similar situation as I had at Pearle Vision. Only this time the sales representative wouldn’t even call Oakley – he said they would not send the frames to Oakley because Oakley would not fulfill my prescription. He was eager to sell me Lenscrafters lenses in my Oakley frames, however. He quoted me a price which turned out to be much higher than the price if I had gotten genuine Oakley lenses.

Finally I went to Sterling Optical. I told the sales lady what had happened to me at the other stores and I asked to her to check her Oakley catalog and call Oakley to confirm whether they would fulfill my prescription. She did that and she said that Oakley would indeed fulfill my prescription. She calculated the total power of my prescription to be sure – and indeed it was under 7, which is the limit Oakley set for those frames. She then proceeded to write up my order, which came out to $408 JUST FOR THE LENSES. Now, luckily I had done a little homework – I did notice on your website that you advertise a single online retailer. Through that retailer (Sports Vision Bend), comparable Oakley lenses are $189 plus $60 for the anti-reflective coating. So, Sterling Optical wasn’t going to rip me off by keeping my Oakley lenses for themselves (the sales lady made a point of telling me that I could tell the lenses were genuine because of the Oakley logo on the lens), but instead they were going to rip me off by charging DOUBLE the price of my Oakley lenses.

Why didn’t I just buy my glasses from the online retailer to start with? Because they only offer ONE of your vast selection of half-rim frames. That’s right – after I spent the time browsing through your great selection of frames online, I found that NOBODY actually sells them. I can’t order them direct from Oakley, I can’t buy them from the Oakley store in the mall, and even if I do find an alternate frame I’m happy with in the Oakley store, I then have to go to another retailer who is supposed to be a partner with Oakley, only to find that they really just want to sell me their own lenses (which void the Oakley warranty of-course, cost more, and don’t have any of the great technological benefits of genuine Oakley lenses), to the point that they will lie and cheat about it. I honestly felt like I was shopping for a used car rather than for glasses – such a dirty feeling. The sales person at the Oakley store seemed to think what these other stores was doing was illegal and in violation of their agreements with Oakley.

Do you see something terribly wrong here? What’s the point of having a great selection of frames on your web site, if they aren’t actually available for purchase, either online or in a retail store anywhere? What’s the point of having ‘authorized dealers’ if those dealers don’t actually want to sell your product, and just want to use your name to pull a bait and switch scheme? You really ought to allow your customers to send you their eye prescriptions directly, and order directly from your web site. You certainly won’t be hurting your partnerships with these so-called dealers since they aren’t selling your lenses, anyway.

In the end, I bought my Oakley frames and lenses from the online retailer – but I REALLY wish they would bother to carry more of a selection of your frames. Furthermore, Sports Vision Bend seems like a really small operation – I mean come one, they don’t even have their own domain name!

UPDATE: Sports Vision Bend actually contacted me, they were extremely courteous and professional, and it turns out they do indeed have a much wider selection of lenses than I originally thought – they just could use some uxd / nav improvements on their web site. Here’s a link to their full Oakley selection. Furthermore, they offered to check if the Oakley lab had a specific color they didn’t list on their site, but was listed on Oakley’s site.

Assumptions / Background:
-you’re using Subversion (SVN) for version control
-you’re using Flash Builder (same applies for Flex Builder, but this tutorial is specific to Flash Builder) with the Subclipse plugin

Sometimes you want to tell svn not to update or commit certain files in your local project, such as .project, so you don’t have to remember not to check them in when you do a check-in at root level. You could try telling your team to just not check those files in, but not only is that a pain to remember to do, but most likely in the end they will wind up getting checked in, anyway. The common solution to this is to use svn:ignore, which tells svn to ignore those files and not check them in. To get to that option normally would be easy – just right-click on the file or directory in Flash Builder and choose Team->Add to svn:ignore. However, most likely if you are trying to ignore files or directories that start with a dot ‘.’ then you aren’t seeing them in Flash Builder at all, are you? The dot is the naming syntax for hidden files in unix/linux, and Flash Builder / Eclipse respects this. OK, so to see the files within Flash Builder, first of all, switch from the Package Explorer (new to Flash Builder) to the Navigator (more like what we were used to in Flex 3 and prior):
Navigate to Window->Other Views and then select the Navigator. Now you should see your project by the file structure rather than package structure. Next, select the drop down menu from within the Navigator and choose Filters, and uncheck whatever types of files you want to see.

OK, so now you see the file you want to ignore…but if the file was already added to svn, that option to svn:ignore it is grayed out.

When a file has been added to svn already, the option to ignore it is disabled

1. Delete the file from the repository (make a backup first!)
2. Recreate it in Eclipse
3. Set svn:ignore on it via Team->Add to svn:ignore

Hopefully now you’re good to go, and your Flex team is still alive and breathing!

Conference / Organization
What, no name tag?
I guess this is an area where stuff I had been taking for granted, from my experiences at MAX, and now 360 Flex, kind of stood out. We might tend to think of name tags as a bother, but part of the reason we attend conferences is to network. There seemed to have been no thought given to the networking aspect at all at Capital Flash Camp. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need fancy lanyards and stuff – a simple sticker you write your own name on would have been sufficient. Then again, I guess that forces folks to try and open their mouths and actually ask each others names…not such a bad thing, eh? So, was this an oversight or actually a clever, well designed ploy to encourage folks to get out of the closet and actually develop social skills? Either way, it did get my attention.

There was also no swag…not at the registration desk, anyway…kind of a disappointment. I don’t count Adobe pens and stickers left over from 360 Flex as swag, sorry…aren’t conference shirts a defacto standard?

Attendance wise, I was actually pretty disappointed. The conference was held in a relatively small area, with all the talks being held in a single, small auditorium with a huge curved screen. However, the number of attendees might have made the place look vast. There were maybe only fifty attendees in the beginning, and for some reason as the conference progressed that number continuously dwindled. I left early myself, with two sessions and the giveaways still pending, but at that time there might have only been twenty or so folks left.

Speakers / Presentations

I walked into the conference in the middle of @jefftapper ‘s presentation Flex 4 for Flex 3 Developers. Jeff’s presentation was excellent, and I definitely plan to go download his lecture notes since we are at the beginnings of a flex 3 -> flex 4 migration, ourselves. Of particular interest is the list of mx components that were not ported to the spark space at all, such as DataGrid and ViewStack. One of the first questions I posed on twitter as we started migrating our code to the spark space was, ‘are we supposed to mix mx and spark components by design?’ I got a bunch of tweets in response referring either to custom components folks had built in the spark space or on how to mix mx and spark components. Jeff’s response was that he felt that Adobe hadn’t done this themselves yet due to time constraints. Ah…

Next up was @queencodemonkey on Greenthreading in Flex. I already saw her presentation at 360 Flex, but as I told her, it was one of the best presentations I had attended, with regards to stuff I was able to take back to my team and say, ‘hey, this is something we should look into with regards to what we’re currently doing’. So it was enjoyable to see it again, and a good review of the concepts and applications. I also made a note to go and read an article she referred to by @ jesterxl on loading massive amounts of data in the Flash player, and they both were kind enough to tweet the link to the article.

Next was The Art of Storytelling by @christiansaylor. It was a nice change of pace from the technical presentations, and indeed, he is a great story teller himself. I kept thinking that his presentation style was highly reminiscent of Steve Jobs, and when one of his slides was a huge photo of The Evil One (as one audience member called out, lol) it pretty much cinched it in my mind that was a source of influence for him. In a good way…

Christian also convinced me to take a closer look at Audi…

Towards the middle to end of the presentation, I kind of felt like it was tending towards a sales plug for Universal mind, but then again, they sponsored and organized the event, half the speakers were from their company – so what could you expect? In the least, at least this presentation was pertinent and well done, unlike the eBay sponsor presentation at 360 Flex, which had me wondering if anyone, really, ANYONE in the entire audience cared an iota about what the speaker had to say or if what he spoke on had anything at all to do with real business problems faced by anyone in the audience.

next was lunch…

The Food
What can I say, without getting too insulting? Meh. Not a highlight of the conference. At 360 Flex, they had good food, but it would run out before you could actually get any. For some reason, I found that more appealing than food you got but didn’t find appetizing.

More Great Speakers
@carlsmith spoke on the importance of listening to your audience in It’s a Matter of Trust. Frankly this was by far the most entertaining session, hands down. The volume and amount of laughter in the audience was a clear indication of that. He brought up twitter a lot in examples of customers complaining about the service of companies, and the successes and failures of companies leveraging twitter to satisfy customers. The bottom line of his presentation: treat your audience as people, not as statistics.

The last session I attended before ditching was Introduction to Flash Catalyst by @adnaanahmad. Adnaan’s presentation was great, especially considering it was his first conference presentation, ever. I think the audience was hungry for more on his demo side; the background info etc. is all good and well, but that’s stuff folks can read about later or have already done so, the demo is what really engaged us. He also made a pretty good case considering there was only one designer left in the audience at that point and the rest were developers.

You can find a small slideshow of the photos I took at the conference here.

By now Adobe has announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR for Android at the Mobile World Congress (funny, we just completed a web redesign for a client who is a sponsor of MWC, centered around the event, but I had no idea about Adobe’s role there). This demo of using Adobe Connect on the Droid by Kevin Hoyt says something totally contrary.

Here we have a real business case scenario that Mobile Safari can’t compete with. Sure, maybe they will make something comparable to the iChat capability of screen sharing available on iPhone one day, but here it is, Adobe Connect, running on a Droid, now.

Personally, I have always been of the opinion that Apple will allow Flash on their mobile devices when, and only when, it will make them more money. Currently they have pretty tight control (jail-breaking aside) over what can be run on their devices, and all money to be made from application development flows through Apple’s iTunes store. Would having AIR on the iPhone totally upset that? Of course. Until, and unless, Apple perceives they are losing economic ground due to competing platforms, they aren’t going to change their stance.

Overall, I think Apple’s stance is actually very healthy for the market. It has driven Adobe to work really hard to improve the full version of the Flash player (as opposed to Flash Lite), which is great for developers who don’t want to have to develop a separate code base just to support their applications in the mobile world (having to revert to ActionScript 2, which is pretty much a different language altogether, when you have been living in the AS3 world, is uninviting to say the least). By improving Flash, they have made it more viable for running on mobile devices as well as for application development. It has also given an opening to every other maker of mobile devices to step up to the plate and compete with Apple by offering what Apple doesn’t, on their devices.

I think Steve Job’s demo at the January unveiling of iPad said it all…throughout the demo, he kept hitting those blue lego boxes due to lack of Flash support, and you can hear the audience laughing out loud every time. I couldn’t resist putting together a few screen shots.

So here’s a list of some solutions for client-side PDF generation from AS3:

Some items of very specific interest to mobile developers:

-Flash Player 10.1 was announced, which has been greatly optimized for running on mobile devices – no more flash lite, we are talking about the full flash player on mobile phones, and quite a few of the leading mobile phone manufacturers have joined the Open Screen initiative as well as announced phones that are being released with Flash Player 10.1
-Flash CS5 was announced with compiling direct to iPhone native applications. Flash CS5 will be available for public beta later this year on Adobe Labs
-several games are already on iTunes store that were developed with Flash CS5, including these free ones:

-Shibuya try and buy service was announced, which, to me, seems like a big, big potential competitor to Apple’s iTunes store, and from all the complaining we’ve heard from the iPhone developer crowd, it seems a LOT more developer friendly than the iTunes model

-this talk goes into depth on using the newly announced Flex mobile framework to develop mobile applications with Flex (yes, for iPhone, too):

Whew…iPhone development with Adobe Flex…something we have been asking for, dreaming about, and eagerly wishing for (all the while thinking the only way to get native apps on the iPhone would be to code in Objective C)…now it looks like it is a reality. There is a ton more that could be said on this topic, and definitely on Adobe MAX ’09 in general, but you can dive into the above links for plenty of that first hand. One last thing…the Max ’09 Flickr group

Back to the topic of Balsamiq – one feature I found I would have really liked would be the ability to create my own components – currently you can only use the ones that are given by Balsamiq – or even to have more control of the customization of the existing components. To their benefit, though, they do offer to make more if the use is general enough, if you just ask, and they say they update the application (which is an Adobe AIR app, btw) on a weekly basis. I think I would have also liked a freehand draw tool – I use a Wacom and would have liked the luxury of being able to write on top of the mockup as I wished. On the other hand, Balsamiq exports and saves to an XML format – so I can see the need to limit components to a pre-defined set of components. You can also re-use user defined components, which are really just Balsamiq Mockups themselves. The place to get those is Mockups to Go. I’m not sure if it was just the time I happened to be trying to access that site, but it seemed incredibly slow to me. Three of the ‘portlets’ on the right side of my wireframe are sourced from there…that definitely saved me a bit of time.

The best intro to Balsamiq I can recommend is to watch the intro video on their site, where they quickly make a mockup of iTunes. There is also an application called Napkee that lets you turn your Balsamiq Mockups into an interactive flex app – I guess that would kind of be on par with Catalyst, except you wouldn’t get the kind of round tripping you get between the CS4 suites and Catalyst. I didn’t play with Napkee but I get the impression it can’t export to the FXP format that is standard in Catalyst, Flex 4 and CS4.

Other features I would like to see implemented in Balsamiq:
-double-clicking on a group should let me edit the group. I guess that’s something I’m used to seeing from some of the Adobe apps such as Flash. A little irritating to me to find that doesn’t work here
-ugh! that purple color when I select a group – is there a way to customize the color prefs? It hurts my eyes…
-I would like the ability to zoom in and out of the mockup. There are no resolution settings, rulers, or guides. So you can imagine that a wireframe done quickly on a 30″ cinema display doesn’t always make for easy viewing on a 15″ MPB screen…or in an Adobe Connect Session, for that matter, where everyone’s got a different screen resolution
-’icon’ assets in Balsamiq can’t be resized by dragging resize handles – they can only be set to one of a few preset sizes (L, M, S, XS…). This really breaks when an icon is in a group – if you resize the group, the icon doesn’t resize with it.

Finally, I found this review of Balsamiq was also helpful. Coincidentally I reviewed iPlotz a while back here

Recently I started working on a project using Flex 4 Gumbo, the Adobe MAX preview version. One of the first things I noticed was that in Flex 4 there is now an option to create either a ‘new folder’ or a ‘new package’, whereas in Flex 3 the only option was to create a ‘new folder’. In both versions there is a little symbol consisting of a square with crosshairs through it. In Flex 3 that used to appear in the corner of some folders while in Flex 4 that is the symbol used to represent some packages and symbols (I’m still not clear on the usage of this symbol).

So what’s the difference between a package and a folder in Gumbo? Flex 3 never made such a distinction, although it seems the option was there in Eclipse. They seem like the same thing to me but there are distinct menu options for it now. No one I’ve asked so far really seems to know. I read in the Gumbo migration doc about the Flex File Browser being replaced with the Flex Package Explorer, and the new option for hierarchical display vs. logical flat view, but still don’t see the significance of a package vs. a folder besides terminology…

Sometime after MAX ’08 I decided to get Juan Sanchez’s flex book, Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0. Juan’s background is in User Experience Design (UXD), so it was refreshing to get a flex book with some UXD perspective for a change – so many of the flex community are ex-Java guys, and no offense guys (some of our best Flex developers came from the Java world), but the Java perspective can get a bit, ahem, dry after a while. As far as the content of the book goes, Appendix A, Skinning and Styling Diagrams, by itself is valuable enough to make this book a must-have reference on any flex developer’s bookshelf. Juan mentioned somewhere (his blog?) that a lot of folks were requesting posters to be made of these diagrams and that he was in fact planning to make these available. (What I want to know is, can I get mine framed?)

The level and approach of this book is the epitome of what a lot of us wish the Flex docs from Adobe would be closer to. Having this book about thirty projects ago would really have made our lives easier in quite a few places. Then again, when has there ever been a comprehensive resource for an alpha product? That’s where we found ourselves when we made the transition from developing RIA’s in Flash to developing them in Flex. According to the team handling the Adobe documentation for Flex, they have been short-handed, and understandably so as flex developers are still in incredible demand yet very short supply. At least, that’s what they told me in ’07; I have to wonder what the status of the situation is after the massive layoffs by Adobe in between MAX events. Regardless, even after having to learn a lot of these things the hard way in Flex, there was still quite a lot of good information in this book even for advanced developers. Animation, easing, skinning – just a few of the topics that are covered in depth.

Juan and Andy also took care to include lots of colorful images in their book, which they make heavy reference and use of. Ahem. The book is printed in BLACK AND WHITE. Not a drop of color anwhere, except for some sickening purple tint on the front cover. Almost every chapter, I found myself grimacing as the authors write, for example, “…in this case, red projects a negative relation…”. Red? Where? It seemed like they had no clue from the publisher that their book was going to be published in B&W, and, after asking Juan about it over Twitter, that was indeed confirmed – they only found out at the last minute. Oh, sure, they offer a free TRIAL subscription to the book on Safari when you buy the hard copy, and supposedly in the e-version on Safari the images are in color. If I wanted to read it online, I wouldn’t have bought the hard copy! I’ve done the Safari trial run before when I got a year subscription for purchasing Komodo for my perl development needs. Honestly the model of paying continuous rent for my books, especially in this case where I’ve already paid for the book in full, just doesn’t jive with me.

At the end of the day, the content of the book makes it a worthwhile buy, despite my feelings of being ripped off by the publisher. But this kind of experience definitely gives good argument for self publishing. I bought the book because of who the authors were – I would have still bought it, at the same price or even more, had they self-published….
With all the media coverage on the downfall of the newspaper industry, and the publishing industry in general, I feel companies like Blurb are well positioned while companies like Addison Wesley are doomed to failure as long as their only concern seems to be maximizing their profit margin whilst ignoring the needs of their consumers.

update: According to sources at Adobe, they’ve been having issues with the MXNA feed aggregator not automatically updating feeds. This update is a test to see if updating the blog entry is enough to force an update to MXNA using the ping URL mechanism…
And, apparently using the ping URL works.