I am a few days late posting about this, lets just say I have been catching up on sleep I had been deprived of for the last few weeks building this app. So in case you haven’t seen it yet, check out the video of the XFinity Social Remote, unveiled at the NCTA Cable Show Conference last week.

To read more about the app, see the official post on Comcast Voices on the app and its future.

More reviews:

• Gizmodo: XFinity, Please release this TV Remote Web App
• Engadget
• Silicon Alley Insider
• Barrons.com
• Even on Mad Money With Jim Cramer on CNBC:
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Fantastic stuff

There is a lot of blood sweat and tears behind this product, but its pretty satisfying when you see how much people like it. CIM’s MyDVRManager application for remotely managing your DVR hit Gizmodo yesterday. The service is being rolled out in phases and a good way to check if you may have access to the application is if your on-screen guide has changed to look like the new one as in the video below:

RDVR was also the biggest JavaScript/HTML based RIA I worked on with Chris, Mat and Bonnie (note: I have since moved from being Software Engineer to User Experience Technologist position but the RDVR remains one of my main projects, now from a user experience prototypes point of view) and these guys have done an awesome job with the codebase. Some of the things we used there were:

• JQuery
• ScrewUnit for unit testing
• LessCSS for CSS rules
• An internally custom MVC framework that completely decouples UI from the business logic

So once again, congrats to the CIM CrossPlatform team (Design/IA/Dev/Product/PM and QA). Am anxiously waiting for the app to go live where I live so I can be as happy as this guy here (he is using the manager to manage his Comcast Tivo box, but its the last version of the client application with a different color scheme):

Today was my last day as Lead Software Engineer at Comcast Interactive Media (CIM), and tomorrow I start my new role as a User Experience Technologist / Principal Application Developer for CIM. Its been an awesome 5 years in engineering but its time to move to newer domains.

The decision to move to UX was definitely not something I just woke up to. I have always considered myself an engineer, and have a Masters in Computer Engineering to back that up. Heck, this blog is a testament to my love for programming. I love learning new technology, and am fascinated by programming concepts and domains. However for me programming is the means to an end. My end goal has always been to get ideas down to working apps and getting them out there in front of the huge user base Comcast has. That was the most gratifying part of working on different projects like the Fan, the Comcast.net portal and more recently microchannels within Comcast.net and Fancast.com.

A while back I wrote a post on the need for creative technologists, and that feeling is something that has steadily grown over the last couple of years. The new technologies are enabling a much richer experience for an end user but there is a lack of experience designers who investigate the new platforms. And these platforms are more than just pure technology, they include things Facebook, OpenSocial, Yahoo Homepage, etc. It is something I hope I can bring to the table in my new role. And just for effect, I will re-insert Grant Skinner’s Venn diagram on where UX fits in the engineering/design world:

Thankfully it feels like the perfect time to be at this position. Off the shelf technology and instant on solutions like Google App Engine promise to reduce the temporal gap between ideation and functional prototypes. And with a strong initiative within CIM to encourage grassroots innovation, it seems like the perfect storm of awesomeness . Personally this position also will help me grow in areas I have traditionally not dabbled in, be it more middleware/backend programming or business and finance. I am very thankful to CIM for enabling me to explore this direction.

I am a little emotional about no longer being called an Engineer, but hopefully I wont be an outcast from the engineering team, even if I do wear a beret and occasionally talk about shades of teal . This blog will still be called Code Zen, and I will continue to release open source libraries (the 0.6 release of OpenPyro is coming up btw), but I think now I can be a little less bashful about commenting about user experiences and methodologies. I will be learning a lot in the next few months and as always, will share it all here.

Color me excited !

These notes are from BarcampPhilly ‘08 that were lost in the depths of my computer’s hard disk and I only just found again. At the event, a few of us from CIM held a round table discussion on innovation, especially developer led innovation in big companies. Here are the points that people mentioned:

• Innovation only comes from free cycles, even the best ideas need time to be thought through
• Leverage something thats existing rather than a brand new idea
• Agile development can actually hurt innovation with too much transparency. Its hard to justify something that you may feel has a long term win
• Technical managers should whet the ideas of their team members
• Innovation comes from bottom almost never from top
• Innovation = Risk
• True story: At AOL, the AOL IM service was declared a risk
• Constraints actually push innovation
• Innovation wont happen without proper incentives/rewards.
• How about cross team innovation. How do designers/developers collaborate to innovate?

So this has only taken almost a year to put up, with BarcampPhilly ‘09 coming up soon. Since then there has been a few opportunities within CIM to push bottom-up innovation, including a labweek for all of engineering.

I joined Comcast four years ago, fresh out of graduate school with a Masters in Computer Engineering and a passion for the Flash programming language. Back then, Comcast was one of the rare companies that had invested heavily in Flash and getting the opportunity to develop applications in Flash that would be seen by a huge number of users was an exciting opportunity.

One of the first apps I got involved in and was my main project till about a year ago was the Fan. Originally concepted by my then boss and later friend and mentor named Jeremy Landis, the Fan was a unique application. Comcast was probably one of the first companies who invested in Flash video back when it had just about come out. When I joined, the Fan version 1, was written with all the goodness of Flash 6: code in frames, gotoAndPlays, etc etc. That was not too easy to work with and the app was ported to the goodness of ActionScript2 soon after the release of Flash Player 7. Version 3 of the application added some amazing redesign by our new design lead, Alfredo Silva and some amazing interaction models by Gabo (of Gabocorp fame). The 3.5 version of the player introduced the ability to switch to a more conventional square view. There was a sentiment that adding a more conventional interface would lower the barrier to users actually interacting with the application more. The square view was extended even further in Fan 4 which was also written from ground up in Flex 2. Porting the circular view to Flex 2 was an interesting challenge and I think we did an amazing job with Flex custom components.

The circular view was discontinued early this year as was the monolithic Fan application with the Comcast.net portal moving to a more conventional single-video-on-page experience.

Its kind of ironic that today the original team responsible for the Fan was awarded the patent by the United States Patent office on the design of the application. My first patent! How f-ing awesome is that !!!

The Fan was always unique if anything, and there was always the debate whether a circular interface was indeed the best to watch rectangular video. But the people loved it for sure, so much so that it even won the Flash Forward People’s Choice award in Sept 2006, and yes, that was for the circular interface. I remember a lot of stories from friends who had parents/relatives who loved the circular interface, and it was perplexing to the usability folk, after all it was clearly breaking all rules of application design. But that was where the magic was. It was different, iconic and had a long history with the Comcast customers who used it to catch up on daily news, events, gossip, etc. Heck, it was cool! Cool enough for even Philebrity to run a post titled The Only Thing Comcast Ever Contributed To The Internet: “The Fan” (Philebrity posts are not usually the most Comcast friendly).

But anyway, this is a moment to celebrate. I have one more fond memory of the Fan now, and believe me, this one is hard to forget . Special thanks to all who went towards making the Fan a successful product, the editors, content video team, the design,dev and QA teams, etc. This was a fun ride.

This weekend Philadelphia was host to its first BarCamp event. For the uninitiated, BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants (wikipedia link here). Barcamp is described as an “unconference”, with the sessions being a lot more casual and more like conversations than presentations. Having been to a bunch of conferences before, I definitely found the organic nature of BarCamp rather refreshing. When I walked in at 8:15-ish in the morning, I had no plans of presenting anything but swept by the energy in the group, I ended up giving not one but two sessions (more on that later).

Working for Comcast, and pretty familiar with how it is most often a subject of blame than praise, the biggest surprise for me was how positively the attendees spoke of Comcast. For example, a session on ROI on social media was dominated by a discussion on the @comcastcares twitter account run by Frank Eliason from Comcast support. Always available a tweet away, Frank has been answering twitter users when they have Comcast related troubles. The conversation around how Comcast “gets it” was definitely new (kudos @comcastcares ). Comcast definitely had a strong showing at Barcamp this year, with a bunch of us attending as well as volunteering for the event. Aaron Held, the director of engineering at Comcast Interactive Media (the division I work for) gave a talk on building Comcast.net, a site that boasts being one of the top 10 portals on the web, to a packed room. Aaron and I also had a round table discussion about innovating within a corportation, and I personally got a lot out of that (I’ll post a blog post on that sometime later this week).

Also, continuing my agenda for a Flash-y world, I gave another talk on using Flash in an AJAX world, where I talked about where Flash had certain advantages over AJAX (besides the richer interfaces it enables). Kevin Fitzpatrick, another fellow Flash dev for CIM gave a talk on sharing your ideas early and leveraging the community to take an idea from concept to a product. Livia, another fellow Cimian (yes thats what we call ourselves now ) from our IA group also gave a talk titled “Jedi Mind Tricks – mediating user, brand, technology & business goals through conversation” which unfortunately I missed as I forgot to check for new sessions on the schedule. Wonder if anyone took notes on that one.

After an intense day of a lot of fun sessions, the day ended at the always fantastic National Mechanics bar, which was made even more geek friendly with a hooked up Rock Band and (gasp!) an open bar! It was amazing.

Hats off to the BarCamp organizers Roz Duffy and JP Toto and the entire volunteer army. You guys did an amazing job. Here’s to a lot geekier Philadelphia .

Oh and btw, one of the things I had to do was animate a wordle that the BarCamp peeps created. This ran on a couple of big screen displays at the conference. I am attaching it here for posterity and the source can be found here.

As promised, today we are formally releasing LogBook, our internally developed tool for logging events from Flex (and coming very soon, pure Flash AS2/AS3) applications. For the uninitiated, logging is the process of recording and storing information about events in your application. The functionality is similar to the trace command, but a lot more robust. Logging combined with a strong log viewer like LogBook gives you a much deeper understanding of the state of your application.

Some quick notes on LogBook:

1) LogBook is being released under the MIT open source license.
2) A detailed post on its features and how to use it is here at the CIM Flash Team Blog.
3) The code for LogBook is being hosted at http://cimlogbook.googlecode.com/.
4) We have also set up a Google group for logbook that we can use to discuss features that we should add in upcoming releases and bugfixes/patches.
5) The installer can be found in the downloads section there.
6) LogBook runs on the AIR beta 3 runtime.

At CIM we already have a list of features we are going to release in the next build. But of course if you have any feature you would like to request, please drop us a mail at cimlogbook@googlegroups.com. We are really hoping LogBook 1.2 is the first step towards a robust Flex/Flash development/debugging toolset.

Happy debugging .

The team at Comcast Interactive Media is putting the final touches to an internally developed tool we use for logging events from Flex applications. The application is built on top of the Flex framework and runs as an installable AIR application. Best of all, we will be releasing it under the MIT open source license. A much more detailed blog entry about logbook’s features will be published soon but here is a quick screengrab of the application (click to open in a new window):

Stay tuned .

Update: LogBook has been released and can now be downloaded at http://code.google.com/p/cimlogbook/

A new blog post on the CIM Flex developer group blog talks about some of the new features coming out in the next release of the Flex based player. Check it out here.

One of the funniest screen-grabs while debugging : link