The Flexiss Toolbox

Viewing websites on Mobile Devices

Posted on May 18, 2009 by scott

The other day I was watching TV and saw a commercial for a nation wide real estate company. They were showing search results of properties on a mobile phone. It wasn’t simple text but had nice images of the properties in a nice format. I wanted to research the status of this technology today. What technologies do we have today to deliver content to mobile devices? I’m going to discuss the Flash Lite plug-in by Adobe since I am a Flash/Flex developer. There are other technologies that developers use like Java’s JME technology which I won’t discuss here since Flash is a very comparable format. Flash Lite is an optimized version of the Flash Player for mobile devices and has shipped on more than one billion devices worldwide. As of 2008, 40% of all new mobile devices shipped with Flash Lite. That number will increase dramatically – which I will discuss shortly.

Mobile devices is a very large growing market. They basically become a “Third Screen” to most users today and many companies are developing sites to cater to this audience. Mobile devices are not just for phone calls anymore. They are everywhere, many people have more than one and more people are getting them. Texting is the most common use (if you have teenagers you know this already), but it is becoming more of a peer-peer content sharing device, infotainment, and is also becoming the jukebox, radio, TV and gaming device. Now that network speeds are increasing, we are using our mobile devices for current news, stocks, scores, weather and email.

The downside to this technology is there is little standardization. It’s comparable to the standardization to the personal computer of 10 years ago. It’s a consistently evolving platform. The mobile device has limited horsepower – the CPU is comparable to early personal computers and has limited memory. They have small screens, limited size, colors and limited content. Mobile devices have been a somewhat closed system or some have called a “Walled Garden”. The carrier is basically the gate keeper but other parties are now getting involved like device manufactures. We are seeing the carrier’s concern over the network stability, security and the possibility of a negative experience of an end user and what it can do to their brand has motivated the stock holders to look for some sort of standardization.

So how do we get around this “Walled Garden”? There is new technique emerging called “Side Loading” which is basically a way to download and transfer content to a mobile device. That leads us to the Flash Lite player. Now you can develop in one program and deliver to many platforms. It has rich multimedia features, and a great development language. It has a small footprint – player size is small (below 1 MB) and the memory usage is small as well.

Looking Forward

This is the current tool set we have to get your website onto a portable device but we are beginning to see an exciting direction for the Flash Lite player. Adobe is calling this project “Open Screen Project“. Adobe stated “We are seeing basically three undeniable market trends. First we are seeing an explosion in Internet content, applications, and video. This isn’t just for personal computers but there is also a demand for mobile devices as well as television. The increased growth in number of devices and these companies are now embracing a more open model to deliver this information. The major request is the demand for a seamless experience across multiple devices. Adobe is working with various partners to deliver a consistent running environment for all these devices using the Flash player and Adobe Air applications. The key players like device manufactures, carriers, chip set vendors and the content providers are all on board. Adobe is working with Intel to deliver an optimized Flash player on Intel processors to enable web content on TV and portable devices. Adobe is also working closely with ARM to optimize the Flash player and Adobe Air for ARM powered devices. QUALCOMM released their BREW Mobile Platform SDK that integrates Flash.”

We will begin to see better standardization on all mobile devices and it appears that Adobe’s Flash Lite will lead the way.

Posted in Flex - Flash, Website Design | Comments Off on Viewing websites on Mobile Devices

Improving Client Communications

Posted on April 8, 2009 by scott

We at FLEXISS are always searching for ways to make our clients lives easier, as well as our own.  One thing that continually comes up as a problem, no matter what the arena, is communication.  What is it that makes communicating so difficult sometimes?  Ok, besides, email lost in cyberspace, busy phone lines and bad breath, sometimes you just can’t explain a technical problem – you have to show it.  We, being a technology focused company, have a lot of experiences like this.

A couple weeks ago, we had a client that we had setup a file managment system for.  This was an easy job that didn’t take a long time, as the whole project was centered around FTP.  The client needed to move many dozens of files back and forth from one user to another through ftp on a daily basis.  This is simple stuff for a web company.  However, an end user that looks at the web from the other end of the stick may not find this quite as easy a proposition.  To make the training of the client a bit more difficult, the end users of this project were spread all across the western US, including Hawaii.  While I thought it would be a great idea to fly over to train the user in Kailua-Kona, Ross frowned quite heavily on the prospect.  Enter video screen captures.

Flexiss is not new to video production.  We have a number of Flash demos under our belt.  Todd and our in house design team have worked together to create some really great, dynamic presentations for a number of clients.  However, what I was working on didn’t really garner a whole team to design, script, choreograph, score, produce, record and publish.  I need a simple “this is how you install FileZilla” video.  I spent some time trying out a few various tools that, to be honest, flopped.  I’ll not mention their names, just to protect those who are trying hard, but not quite able to fill my needs.  Then I found Jing.

Jing is a free product from TechSmith.  This handy little application is a baby brother to the well known application Camtasia.  Camtasia is an application that allows you to capture, in video form, all your actions on your screen.  Additionally, it allows you to narrate and explain what you are doing.  Nice!  $300 price tag.  Not so nice.  Don’t get me wrong, Camtasia is well worth the money, but I’m thinking that it might be overkill for my FileZilla demo.  Here is where Jing comes in.  Jing didn’t cost a thing.  Jing does limit your videos to 5 minutes, but it adds an online account at screencast.com.  This nifty account houses all your screen captures and allows you to quickly take a screen capture – either a still image or video – and upload it to the web, then send a link to that capture via chat or email.  All in a matter of seconds.  If you decide to capture a still image, you have a number of annotation tools to mark up the image to explain yourself.

So, call me an evangelist, but I’ve found a great tool to help us communicate with our clients, and for them to communicate with us as well.  If you find yourself having difficulties with something on your website, try Jing.  Send us a snapshot of the issue, or a video explaining your question, and perhaps we can overcome some of the communication barriers that a telephone or email creates.  Check out the sample video below!

Cheers!

Scott

Posted in Miscellaneous | Comments Off on Improving Client Communications

Spam – The Scourge of E-Mail

Posted on March 25, 2009 by scott

Spam.  I cannot say how I really feel about spam.  It would be impolite to use such verbiage on the web.  Spam is such an invasive, pervasive, often perverted and always unwelcome arrival in my inbox.  Spam is such a horrible disease in the www.world that it has affected  not only our inbox, but our outbox as well.

spam

About every other month or so, we have to deal with “Spam Buster” services who block our users e-mails because those e-mails come from a web server that they deem (according to various standards) is a source of spam.  I’m sure that their services are benefitting the e-mail world in general.  However, these services are blocking e-mail for EVERYBODY on the server, not just the guilty party.  To make a long story short, spam has become such a problem on the web that everyone will be punished for the actions of those nefarious low lifes pedaling viagra and get rich quick schemes.

So, how can we as everyday web users combat this common enemy?  Are there steps we can take to reduce the spread of this contagion?  Yes, yes there is!  The suggestions below are a few different prescriptions for some powerful anti-spam medicines.  These will not only help prevent you from catching spam in your inbox, but will help those you communicate with, as well.

  1. First off – Never reply to spam.  Never!  All this does is confirm to the spammer that this is a real e-mail address with a real person attached to it.  This is like running through the lions cage at the zoo, wrapped in pork-chops.  If you reply to a spam message, you have confirmed your address.  Spammers then sell “confirmed e-mail” lists to one another.  So, one confirmed spam message can become dozens – if not hundreds of spam messages.  Another trick, never click links in a spam message.  This does the same thing as #1 – it confirms that you received the message, and that your address is a keeper.
  2. If possible, disguise your e-mail address on your website.  FLEXISS has a a handy little script that we use to make e-mail addresses appear as normal to human visitors, but hides them from spam bots – programs that crawl around on the web harvesting e-mail addresses.  Other tricks would be to type out your address in a human readable way, that spam bots are not looking for, such as: myname at yafoo dot net.
  3. Opt out.  You are on the web ordering flowers for you sick aunt.  You have to use your e-mail address at most sites now-a-days, so you put your e-mail address.  Instead of getting 3 messages a week from flowersforsickaunts.com for the rest of your life, most reputable sites will have an option to opt out of their e-mailing lists.  While legitimate marketing e-mails may or may not classify as spam, they sure fill up the inbox.  However, some sites may sell your e-mail to other agencies.  I would classify this as spam.  It may be worth checking their privacy policy.
  4. Cover your mouth when you sneeze.  Let me rephrase that – if you need to forward something that has been forwarded 97 bazillion times, clean out all the junk and all the other e-mail addresses.  We’ve all seen the forwards that have been around the globe multiple times, and contains more e-mail addresses than you would want to count.  This is unknowingly feeding spammers.  Don’t feed them!
  5. Use a spam filter.  There a a number of relatively usefull spam filters out there.  Some are more user-friendly than others.  Here is a suggestion – select a spam filter that alerts your sender that they have been flagged as spam – or that they need to be confirmed as a friendly e-mailer.  It is rather frustrating to wait and wait for a response for a critical e-mail, only to learn much later that your message never hit the recipients inbox due to a filter.

If you are interested in combating spam, FLEXISS has a number of spam attack plans that we can implement on your FLEXISS website.  Give us a call, and we can discuss some options to help prevent your inbox from becoming a spam filled nightmare.

Cheers!

Scott

Posted in E-Mail Musings | Comments Off on Spam – The Scourge of E-Mail