Blog for November 2007

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

Daily Links

FITC Road Show - Winnipeg 2007

FITC Winnipeg - Inspire. Educate. Challenge. Connect.

On Saturday, November 17th I had the pleasure of attending FITC (Flash in the Can) at the Ramada Marlborough Hotel in downtown Winnipeg. Off all the other places this conference is held (Toronto, Chicago, Hollywood & Amsterdam) it landed in Winnipeg for yet another exciting year. It’s a unique event which has one track of presentations geared towards technical speakers and another track geared toward inspirational creative speakers.

"On the global stage, FITC stands as an original event company, and is recognized as one of the top in the industry. FITC has three goals within the Design and Technology space: to Inspire, to Educate, and to Challenge. This is accomplished by assembling the movers and shakers within the industry, and presenting them through presentations, panels, Q&A sessions, workshops, evening mixers and our awards show, all squeezed into very intense events." - FITC Website

The day began with registration at the door (along with spify Mediatemple lanyard for each person in attendance). I was surprised  at small number of booths (I think it should have been at least doubled), some of which included New Media Manitoba, IC Group, MTS, Assiniboine Community College and Critical Mass.

The crowd waited in anticipation for the start of the speaches with opening remarks given by Shawn Pucknell (Director of FITC). The first speach I attended, also a highlight of the day, was titled "Democraticizing Ideas" by Kerry James and Tim Scollick of Critical Mass. I thought that this was one of the more relevant speachs to what I do. They discussed the designer and developer relationship, talking about the problems that a designer ecounters with a developer (vica-versa). The bottom line that I got out the presentation was that if you are a designer then it’s important to have a good idea of what a developers job entails, what challenges it presents and how can you create a great design to meet technical requirements. And if you are a developer then it’s important to know where designers  are coming from, think of ways to guide them through your process and think of solutions that co-excist with their creations.

There was also a very interesting speech titled "Music, 3D Environments & Social Media - Where is it all headed?" given by Ron Lamourex, president of www.cafesonique.com presenting about 3D communities onto the web on how it has worked for them. Interestingly enough the company is Winnipeg based.  I also attended two action script speeches which talked about what is new with actionscript 3.0. These tips will definitley be useful when the times comes around for me to do something quick in flash.

My two highlights were at the very end of the day when Erik Natzke gave a speach titled "Beyond the Knowledge: The art of playing" and Joshua Davis gave another speach straight after titled "New Works".  It was really neat watching these guys present becuase they both in their own ways captured the audience with their incredible works generated in actionscript (it’s really neat seeing ther art as a result of their code and mathematics). Each had his own story to tell which made it even more interesting.

All in all I feel fortunate to be able to attend such a great day full of great speakers right here at home.

Daily Links

Leopard, Spaces and Multiple Safari Windows

Safari Windows across multiple spaces

Leopard introduced the average user to virtual work spaces, known simply as Spaces in OS X. These virtual work spaces can contain as many applications as you like in an effort to keep you organized. The general concept of Spaces as a simple implementation for the masses is a good one.

My main issue with spaces is that you can not have seperate windows from an application in more than one space. an obvious application that I would personally like to have in a few different spaces is Safari. It would be nice to have a single window open in my web development space as well as having a window open in my communication space.

Presently there is the option within the spaces preference pane that lets you assign an application to be available in all spaces, or locked into a single space no matter which space you launch it in. That doesn’t really address the need to have a window in space 1 and space 2, but not in 3 and 4 (or more).

To work around this present limitation I’ve found a little trick. Here is what you can do to get single instances of Safari into various spaces: use the dashboard to launch the individual windows.

Yup. That’s it. Just go to the space you want a Safari window to appear in. Hit F12 to launch dashboard. Use the google widget, or any Safari launching widget like Junior Mint, to pop a new Safari window into the current space you entered Dashboard in. Rinse and repeat in each space you want a single window of Safari.

This doesn’t really fix spaces, but it solves the browser window issue for me anyhow.