The last couple years have been filled with tons of new technologies related to the Flash Player, so much so that it is very hard as a developer to keep up with it all. Most of the things that we get to learn is tied directly to what clients are comfortable with and able to pay for. As an example, of all the many projects that I have worked on over the years, only one has paid to have a Flash Media Server added to their hosting environment for the better of the project (PepsiCo for dewmocracy.com). Although I had played around with FMS, I had never done anything serious with it before and finally learned all it's glorious secrets.

The point here is that Flash development is actually a legitimate career choice. This technology has been around for over 10 years now and it's only getting better. The proof in this statement is in Adobe's latest efforts in bringing Flash to the masses. Announced on May 1st, 2008, the Open Screen Project represents a huge leap forward for the overall reach of Flash technology and a pretty bright future for us Flash devotees. I strongly recommend that you keep an eye on what Adobe has planned for our future by keeping up on the latest and here's a few places to see it unfold:
labs.adobe.com
opensource.adobe.com

Thank you Kevin Lynch.

Today I was informed that I have been chosen to be a judge for the Interactive Media Awards. Being a judge in an interactive competition is one of many things that I've wanted to do during my career along with getting published in a magazine, speaking at a conference, winning awards, starting an open source project and writing a book. Hopefully I'll have the opportunity to do some of these more than once, but for now I've got three down and three to go. The best part of this opportunity is the ability to give back to the community, which is also why I write this blog. I've learned so much over the last 12 years from others who were willing to share their experience and knowledge, it's my pleasure to give something back.

The 2008 Call for Entries is still open until March 31, so grab the bull by the horns and submit your work.

Writing a blog is cool, but getting an article into print is better. My first article, "Sliverlight Is No Flash Killer" was published in the August/September issue of Streaming Media Magazine as the last page article. I was pretty happy to get that position in the magazine as I always find those articles the most interesting.

I'm currently working on my second article so stayed tuned...

*and some apes
by Jill Greenberg

Being the monkey that I am, I could not pass up such amazing photos of my kin. This is my latest coffee table book.

See the portraits.
Get the book

Want to know what the coolest interactive technology trends are and how to use them? Point your browser at labs.adobe.com and get a leg up on your peers. Creative and Technical Directors alike will find the information on the latest from Adobe quite interesting. Having early access to future interactive technologies can make the difference between leading and following within the industry. Being the first out of the gate with something new is a great way to get you or your agency noticed.

Besides the obvious ones like AIR and Flex 3 here are a few others you should pay attention to:
ActionScript 3.0 Libraries
provides AS3 APIs for Flickr, Mappr, Odeo, YouTube and others.

Flash-Ajax Video Component
open source Flash video playback component for AJAX applications

Adobe Flex Ant Tasks
manage Flex builds and deployments with Apache's Ant

Flex Compiler Shell
shell environment for compiling Flex applications

Flex Scheduling Framework
sophisticated calendaring component

Flex Module for Apache and IIS
web-tier compilation of MXML and ActionScript

Flex-Ajax Bridge
exposes all your ActionScript to JavaScript

Adobe FLVCheck Tool
conforms FLVs not encoded with Adobe products to conform to the Adobe FLV file specification

JSEclipse
JavaScript plug-in for Eclipse

Spry framework for Ajax
JavaScript library for building RIAs

Flex cookbook
great ideas for Flex development

kuler
create and experiment with color and then share it

CSS Advisor
CSS sharing with the web development community

My whole career so far has been in the tech or engineering group, which falls in-line with how most interactive agencies are structured. When DNA Studio merged with Whittmanhart about a year ago I moved from VP, Engineering to National Creative Director for Flash Development and to be honest it was a bit of a jolt. I wasn't sure if I was going to like it at first, but my boss said it would be good for me and to give it some time. Crazy enough he was right.

Moving to Creative has been one of the best things to happen to my career. I never really felt like the tech side was the right place to be, but where else is a developer supposed to work? Flash developers are constantly caught in the middle between the two groups. Our work is created with an engineering input and always judged by its creative output. At the end of the day; clients, account directors and project managers really don't care how you made it, just that you did, it's on time and kicks ass. All the more reason to have your Flash folks in with the Art Directors.

The collaboration is much easier to achieve and the Flash developers don't have to deal with strict engineering standards which can be hard since most don't have a computer science background and probably came from the creative side in the first place. In my experience the best Flash developers always have hobbies or previous work experience with animation, editing or after effects, 3D and especially music production. This profession requires people that are half artist and half developer, those that understand the art of human to interface dialog and a very steady hand.

Flash developers are at the forefront of interactive development, most of which is done with a scripting language that is based on or similar to JavaScript. As new forms of user input devices start to hit the markets, we'll be there. When interactive tv ever becomes a reality, we'll be there. And when, if ever, the iPhone finally opens to developers at large, we'll be there...

Well, they'll save you tons of time and a couple of headaches anyway. There are some really amazing extensions to Firefox that can make your development go so much smoother, especially in the QA phase or all the time for those of you that subscribe to Test Driven Development. When the Web Developer Extension by Chris Pederick came out in June of 2003, it was a God send. Never before had the web browser been so handy. Previously I had only cursed it, especially IE, which I still do actually - mostly IE6, damn you!

Now there are tons of extensions, most of which are useless, but there are a few good ones worth mentioning. So that you don't have to weed through the endless pages of add-ons to find the few good ones, here's the Short List:

Web Developer
Exposes everything about your HTML, JavaScript and CSS. The best feature is by far the ability to disable your cache.

FireBug
The QA person's best friend. Works a lot like the activity window in Safari, but on steroids. Great to see what your Flash app isn't loading correctly.

ShowIP
This one is really great when developing for a load balanced environment. Shows you the IP address of the current page in the status bar, nice!

As it turns out, hacking seems to be the graffiti of the internet. The funny part of all this is that at the end of the day it’s all marketing, you gotta love a hacker who advertises. It seems that my site isn’t cool enough or maybe doesn’t get enough traffic to warrant good graffiti, instead I get nothing more than some crappy tagging akin to a 2? Sharpie tag on the seat of a bus. After riding on the N-Judah to work for 6 years I’ve seen some pretty amazing graffiti in the Duboce Park tunnel and would have felt fortunate to be a beckon of web insecurity if it had been remotely cool looking or at least made the link to their site that they left clickable.

I don’t really understand why someone would bother to take the time to do this. The only thing they did was remove my last post, replaced it with a bit of text and changed my admin password. I’m sure they could have gone a lot further than that and overwritten all my posts and put up pictures of unicorns. Being the curious monkey that I am, I followed the link that the hacker left and after a few clicks ended up on a site dedicated to internet security called zone-h. The page was a profile of sorts for the group that had taken credit for the hack and sure enough there was my site listed on page two of their Digital Attacks Archive in all it’s cached glory.

The site claims that the listings are for bringing awareness to the vulnerabilities of the technologies used to make the internet everything that we know and love. You have to think though that the hackers have to love getting public 3rd party verified listings of their hacks. Some of these hackers have up to 2000 verified attacks posted and are listed as competitors with rankings based on total hacks and even list how many were politically motivated. The hackers that did my site aren’t even listed in the top 50!

It seems that there were a few security bugs in the 2.2 release of WordPress which is hopefully how they were able to hack my blog. It turned out fairly easy to fix, except that I hadn’t exported the site or backed up my database so I ended up permanently losing my last post which was a bummer. To get past not being able to login in anymore, I created a new user by registering on the site and then used my hosting control panel to gain access to my database and upgrade my new profile to administrator. After logging in as a newly minted administrator I removed the hack, fixed the admin profile and then proceeded to upgrade my WordPress install to 2.2.1. I’m thankful that I have the experience to fix this kind of thing, but what about the other 50 million blogs out there? How do they deal with issues like this?

At some level I guess it’s really my fault. Ignorance of the intricacies of technology can only lead to the hazards that come along with putting your digital self out there for the world to enjoy and hack. In the famous words of Gny. Sgt. Hartman, “If there is one thing in this world that I hate, it is an unlocked footlocker! You know that, don’t you? If it wasn’t for !#@$%*%&$ like you, there wouldn’t be any thievery in this world, would there?”

The last thing I ever thought would happen was to get automated SPAM posted as comments on my blog site. It's a fairly new site, about a month now. So how did they find me? I don't even really show up on the search engines yet. I don't even get on the first page when searching on "Professional Monkey". Are there really that many professional monkeys out there?

So back to the SPAM. Now that they've found me, am I doomed to be bombarded with SPAM comments? It's happened three times now, each time with more posted comments than the last. It's the same format every time, always selling pharmaceuticals online. I don't require registration to post a comment because I didn't want to discourage people from posting to my new blog, but being trusting was probably my first mistake. The question remains, to require registration or not? For now I've used the SPAM tagging feature of WordPress and I've got my fingers crossed. Will report back with the results.

Whenever I find my mental capacity for programming beginning to fade out, there is nothing better for a late night Flash session than caffeine. Most of my best work was done after midnight and loaded up on more caffeine than you can shake a stick at. This approach to short deadline, client on your back, deadline looming, flying by the seat of your pants programming is for highly trained monkey professionals only - use with caution. Can be detrimental to good programming practices, sometimes advocates hacks and is prone to not knowing what the hell you did to your code the night before syndrome.

This picture represents the aftermath of tonight's session.

Believe me I know. I have a reputation for cool t-shits at work and it has everything to do with my success, there is no doubt. T-shirts offer a way for us to express our interests and state of mind in a compact, easy to distribute, not always appropriate way that gives our message a cool factor beyond anyones capabilities of verbally expressing them. T-Shits are modern day poetry and a political commentary platform for the Internet Generation.

T-shirt art is nothing new and has been around since the 1950s, but only since Y2K has t-shirt design really gone beyond simple brand promotion. A good t-shirt today has no brand affiliation and is used only as a means of personal expression. Giving others a way to identify with you in a visual manner, right on your chest, is quite an interesting form of communication.

The most important thing to know about t-shirts is to always keep your source a secret. The last thing you need happening is running into someone at work with the same t-shirt on as you.

Head my learnings, go out and buy a t-shirt today!

Thanks to my friend Dave Williams for the awesome new logo and site style development. I hope that you all enjoy it as much as I do and that it really helps to communicate my point of view and state of mind on the interactive world that we live and work in.

be sure to check out Dave's site: www.mathletic.com

Watch out Silverlight, you're not the only new kid on the block. Sun Microsystems announced JavaFX at the JavaOne conference today in San Francisco. It seems that everyone is trying to extend the reach of their interactive development platforms these days. First Adobe moves to the desktop with Apollo and now the Adobe Media Player, not to mention Open Sourcing Flex, then Microsoft invades the browser with Silverlight and brings .Net to the Mac and possibly Linux and now Sun has introduced JavaFX to help fulfill it's promise of Java Everywhere and has finally released Java into the Open Source world.

What a great year for interactive developers with all these great new tools and possibilities that now allow us to develop for just about any thing we want to, the job market never looked better. Browser, desktop, mobile, set-top and Blu-Ray DVD - what else could we ask for? Guess it's time to hit the books.

In true developer fashion, I thought my first blog entry should be a "Hello world!" post. I was recently asked to write an article about Silverlight vs. Flash, so I figured that it was a sign to finally start a blog about interactive whatnot. After 11 years of experience it's time to give back to the community. I wouldn't be where I am in my career if it wasn't for all the tutorials, articles, blogs, view source and co-workers.

This blog will be about more than just code, it will also cover surviving interactive agencies, freelance/clients, technology and the industry as a whole. Although my core expertise is in Flash, JavaScript/HTML and LAMP, I will also be talking about my experiments with Flex, Apollo, AJAX, Flash Media Server, Remoting, Silverlight/WPF and other emerging interactive technologies.

For more on me, see my Linked In profile.