I have been using Flex Builder for a while now as my main Actionscript IDE for both Flex and Actionscript projects. Of course in the latter, I have been very sensitive to not using even an iota of the Fx library. However traditionally I had always used the [Embed] metatag to embed graphic symbols into my Swfs. What I did not realize was that the Embed tag brought in Flex code into my project. I only discovered that as I was getting a build of OpenPyro ready for a release (its going to be 0.4, isnt out yet, but probably early next week).

I was trying to build the OpenPyro swc that users could be imported into projects. However running the compc command resulted in the following error screen:

Apparently, using the Embed metatag was causing the graphic to be imported but then converted to an instance of the Flex SpriteAsset class. WTF, this was definitely not what I wanted. Googling (at 2 am, so I may not have used the best queries) did not bring in any meaningful results. However a friend of mine recently switched from Flex Builder to FDT and I remembered him showing me how he did it, so here are the steps:

1) Create MovieClip symbols in the Fla and export them for Runtime Sharing with appropriate class names.
2) Generate the SWC from the Fla
3) Place the SWC in the classpath of the Actionscript project.
4) Use the exported symbol’s class name to reference the graphic symbol

So this worked. I was pretty aware that the Bindable tag was Flex specific but I didnt know that Embed tag did as well. Adobe really needs to differentiate the Flex specific metatags like Bindable and Embed with the pure AS3 ones like Event. My one big complaint with Flex Builder was that it never complained considering I was in a pure Actionscript project.

I hope Gumbo fixes this.

I had a pretty interested conversation with JPToto yesterday, on Facebook no less, on Facebook’s new features and their impact on Twitter. JP posted his thoughts on the coming twit-pocalypse on his blog today. I am posting my conversation with JP below. However the very fact that I cant actually link to it is the main reason I am less of the opinion that Facebook can devour Twitter completely.

Twitter is definitely a fascinating beast ( and being a twittaholic, my opinions here may be biased. Follow me on http://twitter.com/arpit). People use it in very different ways. I definitely use it to keep tabs on my close friends and share a link every once in a while. In that respect, yes I dont care if I get that information from Facebook or Twitter.

However the real value I get out of twitter is a cursory connection with the people who I have the highest admiration for, the big names in Flash, Flex, Silverlight, Java world, guys who are running companies I respect or have opinions I think are valid. The connection isn’t always two way. I follow more people whom I dont know personally than those I do. Twitter is now my main source of personalized news and I dont see Facebook becoming that.

And what about services getting on Twitter that are really useful. The utilitarian awesomeness of things like @comcastcares is just hard to translate to Facebook metaphors.

The Facebook redesign is interesting, though I wonder if they were completely influenced my the more vocal but smaller fraction of their user base. My friends who aren’t into Twitter dont like the design much but they’ll learn to live with it. It may make them more active over the next few years (maybe) but I dont see it changing the way people who have invested time on building a group on Twitter leaving it for Facebook, unless they change their entire security system allowing follows with limited privileges.

Whats really going to start getting annoying to me is the fragmentation of conversation again (its already a headache if you are trying to follow blog comments/conversations). My status update will now be duplicated as will my friends’ and I have no idea where to respond for whom, and lack of the reply API on Facebook’s apis makes it even more irritating.

It will be interesting to see how it goes but I am not giving up my Twitter profile anytime soon.

Of late I have been involved in a lot of conversations around user experience, especially since the last few months the sessions at the RefreshPhilly group that I am involved in have had quite a number of speakers on that topic. Speakers on UX usually come from a design background which isn’t surprising. The opinion I sometimes find prevalent and which I strongly disagree with though is that user experience is solely a design concern.

A while back, after a rather frustrating day with Javascript, trying (unsuccessfully) to create a rather simple transition effect that would orient the user to a change in state of the application, I vented on twitter on the choice of Javascript for the application given Flash’s general penetration. My main gripe was that while the application would be functional in Javascript, Flash would let me do really interesting transitions and effects, adding a layer of richness to the application. Remember this was an application that didnt have any SEO requirement and the application in that design would be completely unusable from a hand held device (the wont work for iphone argument carries a lot of weight these days).

A friend of mine (whom I hope doesn’t mind being cited here ) from the creative side of the biz responded:

This is what I feel is one of the biggest misconceptions in our industry. Recently, Grant Skinner, one of my favorite Flash developers, gave a talk at the FITC Amsterdam conference. Though I didn’t attend the conference, I did browse his presentation online. One of his slides had the diagram shown below.

That pretty much hit the nail right on the head. And thats exactly my take on it. I think technology has a huge contribution to user experience. However traditionally that has not really been recognized as much.

The need for Creative Technologists:

I think there is a real need for the Creative Technologist. As technologists we understand whats possible with the current and the cutting edge technologies, which enables us to truly understand the problem statement. More so now when online landscape includes more than just technologies like Java, Flash, etc. What do the new platforms like Facebook, Yahoo Open, OpenID bring to the table? Look at how the labs features in GMail improve user experience.

How about browser extensions like Gears that could let enhance the user experience by letting them take your online content offline for reading later or BrowserPlus that could literally allow you to trigger the speech command on the local operating system and have it read out the content text for him.

And the opinion is not mine alone. Another great read is the article by Dan Harrelson from Adaptive Path (you know, the company that coined the term AJAX) on “What Makes a Design Technologist?” The 4 points he mentions for a creative technologist are:

1. A comfort level with front-end programming (web, desktop, mobile, device)
2. A tool belt filled with techniques for creating interactive apps
3. The ability to quickly pick up new tools
4. A itch to dive into code and “just built it”

And Creative Technologists have started becoming less rare to find on the web. Another article I recently read on the Read Write Web blog was on the fantastic Enjoysthin.gs application built by Ted Roden who is now employed by NYTimes as a Creative Technologist.

While Creative Technologist is still not a title that gets any results in Monster.com, I wonder if that’ll change soon.

Its that time of the month again! RefreshPhilly’s March session in tomorrow with sessions from the Luke Crawford, the CTO of Muxtape as well as by Todd Warfel from MessageFirst on Sketching and Rapid Iterative Design.

If you havent done so, do RSVP on the Facebook event page (we need the names for security passes for the building).

And in related news, Roz recently got interviewed by Technically Speaking on Refresh Philly. Great going Roz! Oh and I am totally stealing Rob Francis’s badge for the event: