In October of last year, I hosted a small panel presentation on mobile development platforms and their future at Adobe MAX. At the event, I was introduced to Dom Sagolla(@dom) who joined me on the panel as an expert on development for the iPhone. Since MAX, I have kept in touch with Dom and got the chance to read his upcoming book (140 Characters) . I really enjoyed it, and thought I would share my impressions:

Nothing frustrates me more than those that accuse SMS, instant messaging, and tweeting of bringing about the decline of language. It is even more annoying that this type of commentary often comes from people with little or no experience with online social networking. How many times have you heard statements like the following:

“I don’t want to spend time keeping up with what people are having for lunch”

“Most of the stuff on Twitter is just people talking about crap”

“I’ve just heard so much trivial, superficial, shallow hype attached to it, I find myself not wanting to jump into that pool.”

People with this view see the message as being tidally locked to the medium in a downward spiral. The assumption is that the constraints of the short form are so severe that quality writing is unachievable.

Dom challenges this perspective in his first book 140 Characters – A Style Guide For The Short Form. He takes off his software developer hat and turns back to his days as an English major. He sets out to explore the history of the short form of writing and it’s dramatic resurgence due to the rise of modern day social networking.

The main body of the book draws out all of the most cherished literary devices in writing and reexamines them for use in the short form. Dom urges writers to spend more time distilling the essence of meaning and emotion from their thoughts. Select tweets are used as examples, showing wonderful invocations of irony, sarcasm, suspense, awe, and humor. The mechanics of poetry are even explored in detail, with suggestions on how they can be applied to the short form.

Younger generations are growing up with the short form as the primary communication format in their lives. I would certainly recommend this book to English teachers for use in high school level curricula as a way to explore creative writing in a way that is useful, relevant, and engaging for modern students.

For all of us Twitter and Facebook users, this book is a refreshing change of pace from the usual social networking “expert” discourse on things like:

• Strategies for obtaining new followers
• How to get Retweeted
• How brands can leverage social networking

Technical tips on all of the above are valuable but tend to generate a lot of noise on the network. In contrast, those that take the advice in this book, will quickly find themselves focused on generating a more engaging and meaningful signal.

Tony MacDonell (@tmtek)

One of our pet projects this year, Konductor, has been nominated amongst some great applications in the InsideRIA’s poll : What are the best RIAs of 2009. Take a minute to check out the solid list of applications in the poll including Aviary and Creately  – and perhaps show your love by throwing Konductor a vote.

We’re excited to announce that another of our recent projects, ‘What’s the Bzz’, has gone live today. ‘What’s the Bzz’ is a data visualization piece that illustrates the real time activity of the BzzAgent network and how BzzAgents are talking about and engaging with the brands, products and websites that they care about. Check out the data visualization over at the BzzAgent site.

We’ve been busy on a variety of projects in the shop the past couple months with one major effort being the new educational interactive platform for Digital-Tutors. Who is Digital-Tutors? Digital-Tutors has been an innovator and leader in creating and releasing project-based training that provides artists internationally with award-winning educational solutions and services developed by a high-qualified team of experienced educators and industry professionals.

The new interactive platform enhances the learning experience by transforming what is traditionally presented and considered a passive video online experience, to a fully interactive and engaging one.  Users can choose between course playlists created for a wide variety of software topics, or have the option to create and customize their own personal playlist from any of the over 7000 videos in the Digital-Tutors library. Users can easily remember important sections by marking up a video with notes, tags or even by creating and definining a clip of a video.

Digital-Tutors has just released the new platform to the public and users can take it for a free test run. They have also created a fantastic  video about it to announce its launch that describes in greater detail the features, benefits and challenges of creating such a unique platform.

Gabor was recently interviewed by Geof Harries from Subvert.ca. Get the inside scoop on what Gabor had to say about such tough topics as development process, business lessons and project preference over at Subvert’s blog.

Sometimes folders get passed around liberally amongst a team of people working on a project that contain SVN data. This can be a pain because some team members may not be fully aware of this invisible data, and more often than not they can end up getting checked back into a repository causing conflicts.

We whipped up a simple little Adobe AIR app to handle this issue. Simply drop a folder onto it and it will clear out all of these invisible files recursively.

CleanSVN (Adobe AIR app)

Its been a few days since FITC 2009 in Toronto. Once again, the good people over at FITC put on a great conference – with a really diverse speaker list this year.  I spent an entire day in front of a mic – speaking on two panels alongside giving a presentation. I have to admit, I really enjoyed the panels – its great to just sit down and have a conversation with friends and let it go where it may, allowing for more audience participation. I took away so much from my fellow panelists and hopefully the audience walked away feeling the same.

This year was a great year for meeting new people – the conference is such a great place to network and I really enjoy meeting new people and hearing about what they are working on. A big thank you goes out to guys of Grand Creative for hosting a really chill bbq at their styling digs. Do yourself a favour and check out their work – they are truly a talented crew.

Thanks goes out to everyone who came to my session , I got some great feedback and plan to incorporate it in the next run. As I mentioned in my session, if you want to take the Konductor platform for a test drive – feel free to shoot me off an email at stacey@teknision.com.

For everyone who makes FITC possible -  you guys did a great job as always – congrats to all of you for pulling off yet another wildly successful event.

Let the countdown begin – FITC in Toronto is just a short 3 weeks or so away!  I’m going to be super busy at the conference this year – having committed to a presentation and two panels. Both I and Steve will be attending this year from Teknision.

The first panel is one about a topic I’m pretty passionate about – team workflow. Moderated by Joshua Hirsh of Big Spaceship, the panel entitled “There is no ‘I’ in Team… But there is Meat” will discuss  how to increase team efficiency in both production and communication.  I’m looking forward to hearing the ideas and expertise of my fellow panelists – Dan LaCivita from firstborn, Ulises Valencia from Grupo W, and Mathew Ray from CP+B.

The second panel - “Reality Cheque:Running  a Freelance Business” moderated by Ann-Marie Cheung will find me discussing the ins and outs of doing freelance work.

And finally, for my presentation, I’ll be walking through a recent AIR project, Konductor, to highlight the challenges, approaches and discoveries of working on a multi-dev team project that was R+D intensive.  “Large Scope/Little Worry” should be a presentation that hopefully the audience can relate to and learn from.

I’m looking forward to seeing everyone- please don’t be shy and come up and say hi!

The Ottawa Flex User Group is meeting tonight at the usual place – the Adobe building over on Prescott Street. Haven’t decided if you are going to FITC yet? Let us change your mind – as 10 FITC conference passes are being raffled off at tonights meeting. Check out the post on the Adobe groups page for more details about how you can qualify.

Tonight’s presenters will be the peeps from JohnnyVoIP alongside our very own Jason and Tony. So come on out, say hi, have a beer and get your Flex geek on.