Peter Moelgaard's Blog

The Midnightcoders has taken the consequence of a lot of clients requesting integrated PDF generation and build it into WebORB (initially only for .NET, but soon to come for Java and PHP).

It comes fully functional with a Server Extension and a Client library making usage of it really simple. It eventually does what we have been forced to in numerous occasions… (1) dump a component to bitmap, (2) parse it into an image, (3) post the image to the server, (4) convert the image to PDF and save it to disk, (5) respond an URL back to the Client, (5) have the client request the URL from the server triggering a download prompt, (6) delete the PDF on the server…

Now we get this rather cumbersome and all else being equal non-trivial task, integrated into the Application Server…

(Ref. http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/pdfgen/dotnet/index.htm)

Once installed and configured correctly, creating the PDF is as simple as this code-snippet…

<mx:Script>
  <![CDATA[
    import com.tmc.weborb.pdf.PDFGenerator;

    public
function createPDF():void
    {
      var template:MyTemplate = new MyTemplate();
      var pdfgen:PDFGenerator = new PDFGenerator( this );
      pdfgen.generatePDF( template );
    }
  ]]>
</mx:Script>

 (Ref. http://www.themidnightcoders.com/fileadmin/docs/pdfgen/dotnet/quickstart/flex_and_pdf_quickstart.htm)

However, is customized rendering necessary, there is full access to the functionality of the PDF generator through the API and SDK that comes along allowing for what seems to cover most needs… quick glances has a tendency not to reveal shortcomings, but Mark Piller and The Midnightcoders are generally quite clever about this so there is some reason to believe that they have thought of most scenarios that at least I will encounter.

Anyways… check it out…
http://www.themidnightcoders.com/products/pdf-generator/overview.html

From a software development company to an interactive agency, there is quite a large difference in the perspective on systems development.

Agencies tend to be shortsighted in their operation, which is probably due to their tight bonds with market trends; they tend to focus on differences more than similarities, perhaps due to their business model which is typically about assisting a client with differentiating themselves from the general market.

Combine this with the profile of the average agency developer who typically comes from a designer world moving into development because of the need to do some advanced UI interaction and animation. Compare this profile to the average developer with a basis in Computer Science and Software Engineering and an obvious difference in optics between the two types of developers appear.

The part-time developer having emerged from the trade of visual and animation design, typically knows nothing or little about Code Design Patterns and typically even less about Architectural Patterns, they will often fail to see similarities between applications and solutions to problems. This can be resolved pretty easy by mere information to a certain point, seeing that most of these developers know about the General Responsibility Assignment Software Patterns and the basic Code Design patterns through the use of misc. API’s, though they often have this knowledge often without knowing about the fact that they have been using patterns all along (seeing that most API’s uses misc. patterns extensively).

Now, when the time comes to define the architecture for an agency software project, most often the emphasis on patterns will be small at the most but typically it will be non-existing and all emphasis will be about covering as much horizontal ground as possible at the cost of the vertical axis. This is a well-known practice for Software Engineers as it’s the architecture used for throw-away prototypes and very simple systems with no requirements to maintainability. However, it’s obvious that the cost of this architecture is that maintainability is low and the systems internal logic is non-transparent and therefore not suitable for distributed systems.

A clever guy once said that the natural development of an organization is to go from an Expanding Organization to be Learning Organization, in this light Hello Group is about ready to become a learning organization since we are now…

1. Responsive and adaptive to our external environment and the interactive agency eco-system.
2. Keep capability enhancement continuously on every agenda in every department in our organization.
3. Develop collective as well as individual learning programs.
4. Using the results of our learning to achieve better results.

By pointing to the build-in discrepancy in perceptions from the traditional agency developer and the mind and thinking of the typical software engineer, I intend to draw up the differences in the definitions of system quality and therefore one of the 4 cardinal project parameters and objectives.

Following the great Adobe MAX successes in 2008, Adobe is inviting the community to actively join in and help shape the future of Adobe’s events.

They are doing this under the umbrella of the Adobe MAX Open Working Group. It’s a group open to any member of Adobe Groups and there are no constraints on the kind of input we, the community, can bring…

Check it out…
http://groups.adobe.com/groups/2e392db6e9/summary

According to Ted Patrick, Adobe will be scaling Adobe MAX up and they will introduce a couple of new concepts, among which we most likely are going to see a couple of free events and probably a lot of free community driven events with a strong local flavor corresponding to where its taking place.

Read more about it in Ted’s blog-post about it…
http://onflash.org/ted/2008/12/growth-in-community-and-events.php

Among some of the points Ted makes, another one is that we are going to see interest from Adobe in expanding the eco-system in regards to number of experts and they are already supporting drastic increase in the number of groups and invites has been sent to the community experts about recommending others to join the Expert program.

I think it’s a good thing to have more experts filling into the community so the ACE program will have more impact in the respective industries and we hopefully can find a practices of executing our knowhow… Great stuff.

There are a lot of business models within and surrounding the Web 2.0 ecosystem… However, looking a bit into the business models of 2009 some of Google’s many initiatives might be some of the ones requiring a second look. They could use a second look both due to their prospects for future business models, but also in regards to some of their lesser positive implications.

There is not silver bullet right now, but looking at some of the prospects for 2009 things might change.

According to IEEE’s Spectrum, there are 3 patents in particular which deserves a bit more attention…

• Open Profile Content Identification
• Custodian Based Content Identification
• Related Entity Content Identification

Now, all three of these patents which Google according to IEEE have recently filed for are related to identification across what until now could have been considered logical boundaries and therefore certainly some initiatives to spark off debate when put into service. They all rely on language processing and other techniques to search for patterns in data.

Just taking the example of the Related Entity patent, it involves sharing information from a user’s list of friends or groups, somewhat similar to the FriendRank algorithm published by the company SocialMedia Networks. The Open Profile and Custodian patents would relate data between different social networks and match patterns across networks.

The financial prospects are obviously large, however so are the implications in regards to conserving privacy… nevertheless, interesting stuff to watch out for in one way or the other.

The big question these days is how to capitalize on Web 2.0, the social web. Among the traditional models are user payment for extended features and ad revenues, however in the complex web ecosystem it just doesn’t cut it.

Introducing Pointster Systems…
the website is still only in Danish, however perhaps an English version might follow soon…

Pointster Systems is an enterprise product enabling web-entrepreneurs to create Point based solutions. A point site is a web site where users are awarded virtual points for their participation in ad-campaigns, e.g. by submitting questionnaires or signing up for newsletters. The users can exchange their earned points for actual products in the form of physical products or services when they have earned a certain amount. The point site itself earns its profits by awarding a slightly lower amount to its users than the organization paying for the products the users deliver…

Pointster Systems has created some great introductory material describing the concept and how someone interested can get started.

If you are interested in learning more, you can go through Pointster Systems’s 16 step guide describing the concept…
http://www.pointster.dk/da/koncept/1

Check out Pointster Sytems’s website…
http://www.pointster.dk/

Are you a blogging MAC user, then you might want to check out Blogo from Brainjuice…

It’s got some pretty cool features, even some of the features that we don’t see in Adobe Contribute and the other “larger” blog management applications…

Check it out…
http://www.drinkbrainjuice.com/blogo

Everywhere we turn these days, we are either faced with people talking about the problems relating to the lack of a smooth Developer / Designer Workflow… or perhaps we see some of the many people having the solutions to all hither known problems in that respect… This post is neither…

This picture was taken at the Microsoft Developer TechEd in Barcelona… besides the picture being a slightly interesting in itself, it also reveals something slightly interesting (however coincidental some people would want it to be)…

In their session, Felix, Richard and Ian described how a traditional application should be build… throughout the session referring to it as a workflow with the Developer first and the Designer last… where as Adobe has the opposite practice, namely referring to it as the Design / Developer Workflow and hence perhaps revealing who “owns” the application initiative… I know it’s a weak basis for concluding anything and not submittable as evidence in the court of practices in the case of best vs. worst practices… however, hand on the heart: could there be some truth to this !? Microsoft Developers considers design and experience as “smacking some lipstick on the pig” once the application is finished and providing all its value, not really regarding the user-experience as valuable and the designer-work as value-adding. I shall be honest, when I was mostly a .NET, I would have this bottom up approach to development and the results I made were never great user experiences despite their featureset.

The illustration below depicts how Adobe perceives the application initiative as belonging to the designers, and hence perhaps focusing on the experience more than the data and thus perhaps giving a more user-centric product in comparison to the more data-centric product most Microsoft developers tend to spawn uot these days…

Ref. http://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/workflow/

Cynergy Systems has cornered this approach as the “Look First” approach which is based exactly on what it claims… leaving it to the Designers to define the application, leaving it to the developers to “merely” program it… it does make sense seeing that mose clients I have had the pleasure working with have found it much much more easy to understand and reflect on a flat horizontal low-fidelity prototype (referred to in these modern times as a “Wireframe”) than reading Use Case Models, Long Sequence Diagrams, Interpret ORM Diagrams and following User Stories… No bad things to say about either practice, because we still need something such as Use Cases or Stories to drive the development, but the user interface designs are the first requirement document that in my experience makes it possible to get substantial enough feedback from clients to take on feature-altering levels.

I’m not trying to claim anything (yet), but this is one of the many many small indications that there is some truth to the statement:

Microsoft Technologies are great for creating applications – Adobe Technologies are great for creating experiences…

I suppose it’s alright to have a certain amount of 404’s and 500’s (referring to HTTP Status Codes) seeing that even Lufthansa has them at the gate to the San Francisco flight in Frankfurt…

Notice the contents of the top display… on this particular departure it showed the 404 error page from Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Sometimes you have got to admit… that something impresses you which you perhaps had thought would never impress you.

I don’t really watch television, I don’t really go that often to the movies, so the amount of electronic non-internet based advertising is probably smaller than most, and therefore I might be out of sync and/or easy to impress… however, I’ve got admit this one impressed me…

Check it out…
http://www.whoppervirgins.com/

Perhaps I am a bit biased seeing that I actually do think a Whopper is a good fast meal which I relentlessly have adopted as my preferred airport-departure-meal seeing that almost every well-assorted airport has a Whopper-outlet…

Thanks to Tania Grønvald and Morten Hoffman for pointing me to this great online-ad…
http://www.weloveplanning.com/?p=139

Cut&Paste presents the Digital Design Tournament 2009, bringing live-action competitive design to 16 cities around the world.

Among the cities are Amsterdam, Barcelona, London, Berlin and Milan, the first European event takes place on the 2^nd of April 2009.

The 2009 tournament features three onstage competitions in 2D, 3D, and motion design, as well as a global Audience Design Contest and a new process-driven speaker series titled Show&Tell.

The finalists from all 16 cities will be invited to the final New York City for one final heat in its first-ever Global Championship.

In each competition, 5 designers jump onstage and are given 15 minutes to display their work in real-time on large screen projections, as our audience watches and analyzes their technique, speed, and skills.

300 competitors. 48 winners. 3 global champions… check it out…
http://www.cutandpaste.com/

…another F.I.T.C. production…