European developers and designers: Interested in litl? Will you be in Brighton from Sept 26-29? Then you’re in luck! I’ll be on hand, (as an attendee, not a speaker… this year ), to show off the litl web book, at Flash on the Beach! I’m super excited about demoing the litl OS for the European developer base. I also can’t wait to be blown away by the sheer amount of talent that exists among the staggering speaker lineup! Get your tickets now, before they run out!

So, be sure to get a running start with the litl SDK, and start submitting channels at developer.litl.com. I can’t wait to see what you come up with! See you in Brighton!

Image via FITC

My session at FITC San Francisco went very well, and I’m super-humbled to have taken part in such an awe-inspiring event. To those of you who were not able to attend or make it to my session, fear not! I’ve posted the slides, and will be presenting this topic again on September 9th in a Connect session, for the Boston Flex Application Incubators Group (#BFAIG). See details here, and register at bfaig.eventbrite.com.

In case you need to be sold a bit more, check out @RJOwen’s comprehensive review of @FITC day 1 on @InsideRIA.

By the way, this was my first FITC event ever, and I cannot believe I let myself go this long without attending. The sessions from Theo Watson/Emily Gobeille, Eric Natzke, Brendan Dawes, Keith Peters, Robert Hodgin, and Yugo Nakamura were simply astounding. I have not been blown-away and filled with admiration and wonder like that in quite a long time. I can’t do the experience justice by describing it, but once again, RJ saves. the. day.

Even if I didn’t win a ticket to a FITC event next year playing trivia on Colin Moock’s Megaphone platform, I’d gladly pay full ticket price to experience it again. Simply amazing job once again, Shawn!

P.S. Some notes about the slides: The photography used in the backgrounds are my own original, award-winning work. My work made it into my alma-mater University of Cincinnati’s Art Gallery, in the ‘Best of the Decade’ exhibit. I have a lot more photography work hidden away, so I decided to use it since I’ve been trying to do something different with my slides.

Also, Chuck Freedman and I will be presenting at the FITC Unconference at MAX and at RIAUnleashed about multi-player gaming on the litl OS! Go grab the SDK and start submitting channels to the litl Channel Store!

UPDATE: I’ve just been informed that my presentation is now being featured on the Slideshare.net home page! I’m batting 1000 on Slideshare! Thank you all for checking out my slides!

Incredible news! litl is now a sponsor of FITC San Francisco, and I’ll be representing them there! Come join me as I walk-through the ins and outs of contextual application UX development, and see some of the exciting new features of the litl OS!

Session Title: It’s All About Context

Flash is everywhere now. On the desktop, in pockets, and even on TVs. The key to making your application uniquely valuable is to provide a consistent user experience by focusing on context. While we have the tools to create/author 80% of the code and interface, we must capitalize on the uniqueness of each device and platform to deliver an optimal experience that is mobilized, not minimized. Discover how screen resolution, portability, native interface controls, and use-case – the context of your app – dictate how the last 20% of the experience needs to be tailored. In this session, we’ll explore the new range of capabilities you should consider when planning to deploy applications across a variety of contexts including web (Flash Player 10.1), mobile (Android phone) and the litl OS – (developer.litl.com).

I think there are a lot of misconceptions regarding user experience when it comes to multi-screen workflows, but we’re entering this new era of flexible development relatively early as a platform, and I’m hoping to help start us out on the right foot by focusing on leveraging the advantages each context affords.

This is an incredible opportunity, and I’d like to extend an ecstatic thank you to litl and Shawn Pucknell for allowing me to be amongst this hall-of-fame quality speaker lineup! Now if I can just keep from gushing. Nope. Can’t do it.

The lineup is EPIC as well, and chock full of brilliant minds. I’m personally incredibly excited to (hopefully) meet folks like Brendan Dawes, who I’ve referred to as “My Interaction Design Hero” on multiple occasions, and, of Essential ActionScript notoriety, Colin Moock. These are two individuals that I have learned a great deal from in my short career, and I’m grateful for the opportunity to shake their hands and thank them personally. It’s always an absolute blast catching up with old friends and colleagues as well as getting to meet some of the coolest and most talented folks in the Flash Community!

Also, San Fran! I’ve never been to San Francisco, but my wife loves it, and so does about everyone else I know who has visited or lived there. I can’t wait to explore it for myself, and play tourist with the SF natives. I might even try to visit the Adobe offices if they’ll let me in I have time!

The moral of the story: be there! Get your tickets now! Early Bird pricing ends Friday, July 9th! That’s today!

But wait, there’s more! As a part of litl’s sponsorship, we’ll be giving away a FREE ticket to FITC during our two upcoming webinars focused on the litl SDK! This is your chance to get a guided, first-hand look under the hood of the litl SDK, and to be eligible to win a pass to FITC! Check out the details here, but remember, space is limited, so be sure to reserve your spot today!

Good luck, and see you in San Francisco!

I have accepted a position at litl, LLC and could not be more happy about being a part of such an innovative and talented group of people. Here are the FAQ:

When do you start? June 21 was my first day (today).
Are you moving to Boston? Even though I love it there, I won’t be moving to Boston. I will be working remotely.
What will your title be? I am a Channel Developer.
What will you be doing there? I’ll be joining the Channel team, developing content for the web book and the upcoming web-based TV product. I’ll also be working with the talented SDK and evangelism team consisting of:

Ashley Atkins
Kathyrn Rotondo
Ryan Canulla
and Chuck Freedman

In addition of being a part of a supremely savvy company and development platform, I’ll be helping evangelize the litl SDK at various conferences and related events. My first tour stop with litl will be:

Columbus Flash/Flex User Group – August 13, 2010

I can’t mention any more specifics just yet (more soon as it becomes finalized), but there are a lot of conferences left in the year and a lot of blogs to contribute to. Expect much more in the way of litl and contextual application architecture here on Commented Out and in person at a RIA event near you.

So, why the move? This is a loaded question, but I’ll cover the biggest reasons.

1. Growth as a developer. Let me be clear about the folks at litl: there are a LOT of SERIOUSLY intelligent people working here, from a wide array of backgrounds. From design and UX, to OS engineering, to Flash development/SDK, to hardware integration, to marketing, there is no shortage of insight and world-class professionalism. Being constantly exposed to that level of knowledge diversity is the type of environment where you quickly can jump light years ahead in your personal abilities. It’s like the NBA players that no one knew until they played with Michael Jordan, vastly improving their skills just by being around him.

2. Being able to show my work. This sounds odd, I’m sure, but for the majority of my career, I’ve been under strict NDA, and many of you know the pain of trying to explain what it is we do. When I showed my dad litl’s site, he got super excited. “How do I set my home page to litl.com?” he asked me. Every time I talk to him now, he mentions how cool he thinks the litl web book and OS concept is. He now has something tangible that he can touch, see, and experience for himself, but more importantly, that he can show other people as a proud dad. The same goes for my wife, the ultimate salesperson, who has already started carrying the web book around in effort to draw interest from the general public. Well, that and she “loves it!” Those conversations with friends and family about what I do just got a lot easier. It also helps that I believe in litl as a platform and as a respected player in our industry. Which bring me to my next point:

3. litl has become a driving force in the Flash Platform. It’s pretty awesome to work for a company that is embracing Flash on all levels of product integration and to see that the Flash Platform itself is being furthered by the products that are being delivered by litl. I heard some great quotes from John Underkoffler (the inventor of the real-life Minority Report UI) during his TED talk on the cloud as an interface:

“The cloud IS the interface…”

“… we’ve got the Web and, increasingly, the cloud, which is fantastic, but also in the regard in which an interface is fundamental, kind of a distraction. So we’ve forgotten to invent new interfaces.”

And that’s exactly where litl comes in. litl’s ground-breaking OS has been so successful because of the right balances of design and development, the sweet spot of a wonderful user experience. Harnessing the cloud by way of the Flash Platform and delivering it in such a beautifully crafted package was no simple task, and yet litl presented developers and consumers with something totally new, and technologically unique. Now THAT is exciting, and a big part of my decision to come aboard.

Needless to say, it’s a huge move and even a bit overwhelming, but one that I know is a step in the right direction for my family, and for my career.

However, the fact that I get to work with Chuck Freedman may prove a little confusing for many.

Oh, and you might be wondering about the significance of the photo above. When I got my suitcase out to pack for my trip to Boston, there were only 2 things in it: the cap I bought at my first Red Sox game, and the pack of cards that explain the design philosophy behind the litl. If that’s not a sign, I don’t know what is.

O’Reilly’s Flex 4 Cookbook is now on shelves and is the perfect way to get started with the Flex 4 framework. Using the tried-and-true cookbook format, you’ll be up and running in no time. The content is as excellent as the list of folks behind it. Just to give you some insight into the caliber of this book, let’s take a look at the hall-of-fame quality of the authors.

Joshua Noble – @factoryfactory – http://thefactoryfactory.com/
Todd Anderson – @bustardcelly – http://custardbelly.com/blog/
Garth Braithwaite – @GarthDB – http://www.garthdb.com/
Marco Casario – @marcocasario – http://casario.blogs.com/
Rich Tretola – @RichTretola – http://blog.everythingflex.com/
David Tucker – @mindmillmedia – http://www.davidtucker.net/

As inspiring and impressive as that list is, that’s not all. There were several highly influential members of the Community that served as Technical Reviewers as well. Let’s go down that roster, shall we?

Sean Moore – @seantheflexguy – http://www.seantheflexguy.com/
Chuck Freedman – @chuckstar – http://chuckstar.com/blog
Russ Ferguson – @asciibn – http://www.insideria.com/russ-ferguson/
Mykola Bilokonsky – @mykola – http://mykola.bilokonsky.net/

Uh, there is this other guy too. I’ll give you a hint. His name rhymes w–  OK it’s ME! Yes. I was honored to be a part of such an elite group of Flex gurus to help Tech Review this fantastic book. Even if I wasn’t a part of it, I would still be posting this. The people involved, especially those at O’Reilly, are as professional as they are skilled at what they do.

I recommend picking up a copy and digging in. The latest and most-cutting edge development techniques are covered within, including Unit Testing with FlexUnit, working with the new video components utilitizing the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF), secure server-side communication with BlazeDS and AMF, Spark layouts and containers,  declarative graphics skinning with FXG, and a ton more Flex 4 goodness. Actually, writing this reminded me of how packed this book is with awesome. I’m going to go read it right now! Grab a copy today!

Check it out! http://www.slideshare.net/ssod

Check out my @FlashAndTheCity 2010 slides posted below, or you can view them on Slideshare
at http://j.mp/SuttleFATC10

Sitting here, after a whirlwind weekend in New York City for Flash and the City, I’m really very thankful. The last 8 months have been intense, and the amount of work Elad, Jose, Jesse and I put into this event is difficult to quantify. What makes it all worth it was all of the compliments and outstanding feedback from the community, other speakers, attendees and sponsors. As a first time conference, (which at times we were all too aware of), I think we made the best possible showing we could. Nothing’s ever going to be perfect, but for our rookie season, I think people were generally very pleased and even more happy that New York has a new event.

I’d like to thank all of you that came to my session (including other speakers), and for the wonderful compliments, and tips/pointers for next time. I am still getting feedback and people who weren’t even there have said that they’ve heard great things. I could not be more humbled or personally satisfied.

I’d like to thank Elad for letting me be a part of this and giving me the opportunity to help shape the future of this event. I can’t wait for FATC 2011. It will be even better with your feedback.

Even more importantly, I’d love to thank my wife for being so patient with me over the last months while organizing the event and for spending part of our anniversary in New York. You’re the best, I love you.

A few weeks ago, I was invited to join a special group of developers in Boston at litl to kick the tires on the web book and preview the upcoming SDK in a hands-on training session. I wanted to take this time to publicly thank them for having me and giving me a sneak peek at the truly innovative work they are doing. I also wanted to mention, that the more people I meet at litl, the more I realize that this is a company that gets what makes a great user experience. As I said on the episode of RIARadio which featured Chuck Freedman and yours truly, litl is a company that is filling a niche that people didn’t even know existed. So, as a developer and an organizer of Flash and the City, you can understand my excitement to have them as a sponsor.

Even more to my point, litl has chosen Flash and the City to make several unbelievable contributions, including an expansion of the private SDK beta, sponsoring the Hudson River Yacht Cruise,  giving FATC Award winners their very own litl web book, and most recently, announcing the launch of a Flash-based web-TV product! According to litl’s Chief Evangelist… Chuck Freedman:

“I can say that we will have a Flash-Based “Web-Connected TV” device on the market, running litl OS as well as ALL channels built with our new SDK.”

“In the coming months, our SDK will be expanded to include “accelerometer movement, video chat, trackpad gestures, and microphone input” that will allow open development of “gaming, communication, entertainment and other experiences.”

“We believe that our platform’s use of Flash will be the best and easiest way for developers to deliver great content and applications to the TV!”

I don’t know about you, but the prospect of being able to develop for Flash-based hardware, including TVs, with an open-source SDK is simply incredible! I’m so grateful that litl will be at Flash and the City to kick off their development platform. @ChuckStar and Katryn Rotondo will be giving an overview of the litl SDK in a new session on Sunday morning at 11am, and several others from litl will be on hand to answer any questions and demo the web book.

Also, if you attend my session, I may be mentioning and or/demoing the sample channel I built. No promises though. A lot can happen and NOT happen in 3 days.

See you at Flash and the City!

Here on Commented Out, I don’t have a lot of rules. However, the rules I do have apply to myself as well as commenters.

1. Use your big boy words.
If you’re going to take the time to comment on my site, be mature and rational about it.
“ure wrong cuz appple is cool fLash isa piggie” does not qualify as a good comment. Neither do anonymous, or fake email addresses. Save it for YouTube.

2. This is not a ‘sucks site’.
I’m not out to say “Flash and Adobe are the best at everything and everyone else can take a hike.”  Though I might think it sometimes, it does nobody any good to have an agenda. The last thing the internet needs is another opinionated fanboy. Insulting, uninformed, non-constructive blabbering will not appear on my site. Period. Which leads me to my next point…

3. Opinions are good, facts are better.
The current trends in today’s tech sites, (aka “Tech Tabloids“) are to report opinion as fact, to just not do any research at all, or to re-write a story someone else wrote and call it yours. If you disagree with what I write on Commented Out, great! No really. I want to be educated and see from alternate points of view. If and only if, your facts are more relevant than mine. I do my absolute best to back up everything I preach with credible sources of reputable information, and if I’m incorrect, please correct me in a respectful and mature manner. All I ask is the same in return.

So, if your comments don’t meet the previously listed criteria, it’s not getting posted on my site. I will not have Commented Out become the middle of a flame war or a place where people are afraid to comment. Thanks for your time and attention.

Apple announced iPhone 4 today, a markedly more aggressive OS overhaul than the previous 3. “Aggressive” in that Steve Jobs pretty much gave the proverbial middle finger to Adobe, Google,  Sony, Nintendo and Microsoft.

I’ll quickly go over a few of the iPhone 4 “tentpoles,” an ironic term Apple is using in place of the word ‘features’. The term “tentpole” in mobile development is defined here by Brian Fling, author of Mobile Design and Development (review coming soon here):

“In Hollywood, executives like to use the term “tent-pole” to describe their movies and television shows. The term has dual meanings: one is business, and the other creative. The business goal of a tent-pole production is to support or prop up the losses from other productions. However, to create a tent-pole production, the creators involved must make an artistic work that they know will appeal to the largest possible audience, providing something for everyone. You probably know tent-pole movies as “blockbusters”; in television, they are known as “anchor” shows.”

All quotes are from GDGT and  Gizmodo‘s live blogs.

1. Mutltitasking

Middle Finger to: Google, Palm, Microsoft

“We weren’t the first to this party, but we’re going to be the best. Like cut and paste — it’s better than any other implementation. It’s really easy to implement it in a way that really drains battery life. And, it’s really easy to implement it in a way that reduces the performance of the foreground app and makes your phone feel sluggish. We figured out how to implement multitasking for third party apps and avoid those things. That’s what took us a little longer, but I think we nailed it.”

Essentially Apple is saying that they sat back and listened to the complaints of modern mobile users (Android, WebOS, WinMo) and just one-upped them. Great reasoning. NOT.

2. “Game Center”

Middle Finger  to: Adobe, Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo

“Gaming is extremely popular on the iPhone and iPod touch. In fact, we have over 50k titles… let’s look at the competition. If you look at dedicated gaming devices like the PSP and DS, this just blows them out of the water.”

“We wanted to make this even better — we’ve added a social gaming network. We do automatic matchmaking, we’ll find others with a similar ability and match them against you. You can see how you’re progressing in a game with achievements.”

“There are 50,000 game and “entertainment” titles. Compared to DS and PSP, there’s 4321 games on the DS and 2477 on the PSP.”

Apple is not allowing Flash on their mobile devices because they’re afraid of it’s power and ubiquity. I’m not sure why more people aren’t talking about this. [Ed. note: Sarcasm implied.] They want to add a social aspect to their gaming to rival Microsoft’s XBOX Live and Sony’s Playstation Network.

3. iAds

Middle Finger DIRECTLY to: Adobe

“We want to be even more interactive than the ads on the web, and we want to get some of that interactivity from video. The ads keep you in your app…” People don’t click on ads because you get yanked out of your app. Because iAd is in the OS itself, we’ve figured out how to do interactive and video content without ever taking you out of your app!”

“The user can return to their app any time they want. We think the user will be much more interested in clicking on these things because they won’t pay the penalty for doing so. You can add iAd opportunities in an afternoon — we’re going to host and deliver the ads, and we’ll give developers an industry standard 60% of the revenues.”

[Ed. note:  So, the user can go back the app anytime they want, just like on the web? Or do you mean like when QuickTime or YouTube takes the user away from the app they're in?]

“They even included a game in this ad!”

[Ed. note: How novel!]

“Have you ever seen an ad like this?” Silence. “… anything even close?”

[Ed. note: Since 2003.]

“That’s an example of 3 ads that are very easy to make. In addition to ad agencies being able to make these things, there are hundreds of thousands of iPhone app devs who know how to make these things. Emotion plus interactivity. The ads keep you in your app, so you’re much more likely to click on then and explore.”

“This is a pretty serious opportunity, and it’s an incredible demographic. But we want to do more than that. We want to change the quality of the advertising. We’re all familiar with interactive ads on the web. They’re interactive, but they’re not capable of delivering emotion.”

[Ed. note: Flat out lie. Delivering emotion is determined by marketing and user experience professionals, not development platform.]

“The average user spends over 30 minutes using apps on their phone. If we said we wanted to put an ad up every 3 minutes, that’d be 10 ads per device per day — about the same as a TV show. We’re going to soon have 100m devices. That’s a billion ad opportunities per day!”

“What’s happening is people spending a lot of time in apps. They’re using apps to get to data on the internet, rather than a generalized search.”

“All this stuff is done in HTML5, by the way.” Bigger laughter. Ouch, Adobe.”

Let me break this down a bit. Apple is controlling all ads for all apps now. Which means it is getting 40% of 10 ads per app per day, and this is good for users how? Sure developers make money, and so does Apple, but “high-quality” ads are still ads. A user opens an app to USE it, not to be advertised to, just like the web. The last thing developers need is another way to monetize distractions.

From a Flash developer’s perspective, sure this sounds dooming, but we all have to remember is that, the numbers, while accurate, are a bit out of context. Sure, 64% of mobile web browsing is being done on the iPhone, and we all know that Apple wants HTML5 to reign supreme over Flash, but they’re failing to mention a few key facts.

1. Android is at 19% and has been around for 1/4 of the time the iPhone has. That is arguably the ONLY reason that the browser stats for Mobile Safari are so high. Give it time. Let’s see what the numbers look like at the end of 2010.

2. Flash/AIR are just now getting onto the latest devices, and will be on nearly every device in the future. Heck, there are almost 60 companies that have joined the Open Screen Project and Flash Lite is most likely on well over a billion devices. However, for Adobe to stay competitive and relavant, they need to update the Flash Lite numbers from 2 years ago,  and post the Flash Player 10.1/AIR mobile numbers publicly. Every single Apple presentation since the announcement of the iPhone in 2006 has opened the same way: with data. Numbers are hard to argue with, and Adobe has been relatively quiet in this area. It’s one thing to expose these numbers to those of us who develop using their products, but the mainstream media needs to see Flash/AIR’s numbers as well. Now is the best time as consumers and the media are even calling Apple out on their latest attempt at “revolutionizing” a product. (Yes, I’m purposely not calling it by name, but I agree with this and tweeted this if you care.)

Now, that I’ve given the Flash crowd some comfort, I’ll just put this out there: If Apple is supporting HTML5 for iAds, does this mean they will support it for App Store submission along with Objective-C? It would certainly explain a lot of opposition and submission troubles with PhoneGap and other non-standard iPhone apps. And then there’s this, taken from the iPhone 4 SDK agreement (apparently – I haven’t seen it myself, but I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t downloading it for the last hour.) Line 195 states:

3.3.1 Applications may only use Documented APIs in the manner prescribed by Apple and must not use or call any private APIs. Applications must be originally written in Objective-C, C, C++, or JavaScript as executed by the iPhone OS WebKit engine, and only code written in C, C++, and Objective-C may compile and directly link against the Documented APIs (e.g., Applications that link to Documented APIs through an intermediary translation or compatibility layer or tool are prohibited).

Now, no one really knows what this means, but worst-case scenario, it means that Flash CS5 will not be able to publish iPhone apps. From what very little knowledge/opinion I have, Apple didn’t know about Adobe adding this functionality in Flash CS5. Needless to say, they weren’t too happy about it. This could be Apple’s way of exacting their revenge in a not-so-quiet, but equally unsuspected manner. Or, I could just be a part of the paranoid group of people who don’t put these  kinds of childish antics past Apple, and perpetuating incorrect assumptions. If I’m incorrect, please correct me, I don’t want to be part of the blogosphere that thinks research is optional and opinion is news. [Ahem.]

Besides, what’s the worst that could happen? We go back to the massive amounts of Flash/Flex work we had before MAX 2009? Come on, regardless of what the Apple Genius manifesto says there is still a TON of work out there and it’s not going away in a month. Evan Kirchhoff of Corona, another 3rd-party iPhone/Andriod development framework akin to PhoneGap, has said that the Windows version of Flash CS5 violates Apples terms of service, but that is still up for debate. The point is, we still have 99% of browsers to deploy non-iPhone content too. Just like we did before. And now we have emerging mobile platforms in AIR Mobile and Slider, that will deploy to everything else. We all made a living before, and we will continue to, probably even more so with mobile. I assure you, the sky is NOT falling. Steve’s word, along with any of his minions’, is gospel.

There is also the question of what would happen to Unity 3D, a rapidly growing 3D development environment with dedicated iPhone publishing and ELIPS  Studio’s OpenPlug, a 3rd party IDE that allows Flex developers to “generate highly efficient native code for Windows, Symbian, Android, and iPhone”. Also, Appcelerator’s Titanium, yet another framework that allows developers to “build native mobile and desktop apps with web technologies,” could be at risk as well if Apple does decide to drop the hammer. [Thanks to Pradeek for reminding me. I was just looking at this the other day.]

Could get ugly if Apple is serious. Sure would suck if Unity and Flash developers paid $99 for nothing. Even worse, it would be an absolute travesty for Adobe and 3rd party iPhone development companies if all of that time money, research, and testing has been for naught.

And if it’s any indication (it’s not), Amazon had some rather disheartening reccomendations for me today:

Either way, it’s adamantly clear that Apple’s control issues have been taken to an entirely new level, and will only raise the walls of their self-contradicting garden. I’ll wait patiently to see, but the entire Google and Adobe developer communities are collectively holding their breaths until each company formally responds.

[Update]: Official reactions from PhoneGap, ELIPS, Appcelerator, Unity, and Adobe. A video interview with Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch has been posted, and here is Steve Jobs’ apparent response to the now infamous “Sectiion 3.3.1″ during an email discussion with Tao Effect, a Mac software development  company. I couldn’t have put it much better myself.