Well, I’m at the airport heading home after CTIA 2010. Herewith are my final thoughts…

Last night was a bit of a bummer, as we were not chosen as finalists for the AT&T developer contest. We had a good application, but the judges told us over drinks at the award ceremony that size of the company does play a big role in the contest. I can’t really fault that logic, as Adobe probably doesn’t need the 10k prize as much as a small 2 person shop might. We’re just thankful for the opportunity to get on AT&T’s radar with our enterprise mobile initiatives and hopefully set the stage for future talks. I must say, however, that AT&T’s awards event at the Venetian was very nice, good wine and great food!

The bulk of the show on Day 2 was much the same as Day 1. I soaked up a whole lot about the industry, but I think for mobile application developers other conferences such as RIM’s may make more sense.

Oh, and I got a picture of Shaun White. I have no idea what a pro snowboarder has to do with Wireless…but Marvell certainly managed to attract attention to themselves!

Approving tasks just got a lot easier for Adobe LiveCycle ES2 users!

Ok, now something I am really excited about: LiveCycle Workspace ES2 for Mobile devices. I was engineering lead for this project which we began earlier this year as a special bonus to our process management customers. I’ll be posting some blogs later on about developing processes that are optimized for Mobile devices, but for now feast your eyes on the info below.

Oh, and you can get the iphone application today at http://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewSoftware?id=331646271&mt=8 , although you will need an ES2 server to connect to.

Announced today, LiveCycle® Workspace ES2 Mobile, for the iPhone®, BlackBerry® smartphones and Windows® Mobile smartphones, helps organizations save time and money with faster electronic approvals.

When approval tasks only show up in email, they tend to become a needle in a haystack depending on the amount and quality of email received. The LiveCycle mobile application provides a dedicated task list “inbox” on the device where people can easily view tasks that have been directly assigned or delegated to them. The delegation view is ideal for shared queues or providing vacation coverage.

Tasks can now be quickly found while on the go, so expenses, purchase requests, invoices, contracts, vacation requests, escalations, and other HR, IT, Legal, and Finance documents and forms can all be quickly approved using an authenticated click through electronic signature on the mobile device.

LiveCycle Process Management ES2 natively supports these new mobile clients and can significantly increase the agility of workers who already face the prospect of multiple approval processes throughout their day.*

Workers can easily see a list of tasks assigned to them…

They can also take specific actions on each task…

…contact the person who set up the request by simply tapping their name in the application…

…and even view the PDF file associated with the task**.

For more information on LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile, as well as LiveCycle Process Management ES2, check out the links below.

• LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile for iPhone
• LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile for BlackBerry smartphones
• LiveCycle Workspace ES2 Mobile for Windows Mobile
• LiveCycle Process Management ES2
• LiveCycle ES2

*LiveCycle Process Management ES2 is required and processes must be configured to support mobile approvals.
** To view a flattened PDF of the associated form or document, the device must have PDF viewing capabilities.

My colleagues in Adobe HR have asked me to post details about two summer internship opportunities we have here at Adobe Ottawa.  Click the links below to see the full position descriptions.

• Release Development Intern
• Software Verification Intern

Adobe Ottawa is a really great place to learn and work.  If you are currently enrolled in a BA/BS in Computer Science or related technical field you need to be looking at these opportunities above.

I wrote up a quick class that will create appropriate validators for all TextInput fields in a container (and any of its subcontainers).

Click here to launch the demo.  Right click on the demo to see/download the source.

It’s a very Microsoft-ey weekend.  Yesterday I installed Windows 7 Build 7000 on my MSI Wind netbook, and … WOW.  I have to take my hat off to Microsoft because they really have heard our complaining over the years.  I guess it took them a boot in the pants like Vista to do it.  Win7 makes this netbook work faster that with XP or Linux.  Also, it required me to download NO drivers, and all of the function keys work as well.  Amazing.

Windows Live Writer seems pretty cool too – connected to my WordPress instance, downloaded my theme and categories and presents a nice editing experience.  I must be in an alternate universe – a whole weekend not being annoyed by windows.

Hi everyone,

MixMatchMusic released a URL shortening service today that is oriented toward Music related content, called tra.kz. I decided to whip up a quick actionscript library for it, which you can all use for fun.

Download it here: Trakz.zip

Here is how you might use it:

import mx.controls.Alert;
import kz.tra.Shorten;
import kz.tra.events.TrakzEvent;

private function callTrakz():void
{
    var trakz:Shorten = new Shorten("myAPIKey");
    trakz.addEventListener("urlShortened", uS);
    trakz.shortenURL("http://adobe.com/go/foobar");
}

private function uS(event:TrakzEvent):void
{
    mx.controls.Alert.show(event.shortURL + " Failure: " + event.failed.toString());
}
]]>

Ping me if you need an API key…

I’m working a bit more on my media manager, and cooked up this useful code that others may benefit from. It uses the TRYNT Movie IMDB Web Service (v2) which, given a search term will return some IMDB URLs. Surprisingly, IMDB has no public API, so the TRYNT guys are using a data replica from IMDB on their own database I think… Here is the first pass code… I’m cleaning it up locally but it is good enough to see how this works…

private function openIMDB(aviName:String):void {
  var movieName:String = aviName.slice(0, aviName.indexOf("."));
  var svc:HTTPService = new HTTPService();
  var vars:URLVariables = new URLVariables();
  vars.t = movieName;
  svc.url = "http://www.trynt.com/movie-imdb-api/v2/?" + vars.toString();
  svc.resultFormat = "e4x";
  svc.addEventListener("result",handleIMDBQuery);
  svc.send();
}
private function handleIMDBQuery(event:ResultEvent):void {
  if (event.result['movie-imdb'].error == "true") {
    mx.controls.Alert.show("Unable to find this movie on IMDB.", "IMDB error");
  }
  else {
    var url:String = event.result['movie-imdb']['matched-url'];
    navigateToURL(new URLRequest(url), "_blank");
  }
}

Note to the TRYNT people… My application is for personal use, so I’ll put the attribution right here. If I ever publish the AIR app, I’ll include your icon and a link to it…

I have all of my DVDs backed up to XVid AVI files, and stored on a Drobo connected to my Vista Ultimate x64 machine. The two TVs in the house connect to this library using Linksys Media Extenders (one DMA2100, another DMA2200). After a while, the sheer number of videos I had started making the Extender’s UI sluggish, so I began organizing the movies alphabetically into folders. The problem with this is that its an extra step for me when importing a file, and it is very easy to forget what movies you have put in recently — so I made a “New Releases” folder and added shortcuts. Again, an extra step.

I figured this morning…why not create a simple AIR app that will list all of my AVIs, allow me to maintain the “New Releases”, and respond to a Drop event by properly storing the AVI in the right directory (e.g. d:\Movies\A\Anger Management.avi).

So, I did it in a couple of hours and was it ever fun

Here is a picture:

Next I’d like to add a special tab for TV Shows… maybe I’ll do that now.

In building this, I did find a couple problems with AIR that I’m sure will get better over time:

• No system.exec style capability. I’d wanted to be able to inspect the video files to get some metadata from them, as well as capture a screen to make the display a bit nicer. To do so I’d hoped to call a command line program that could give me that. Not really an option.
• The File class can’t create symbolic links/shortcuts… it can only detect and handle them. This means my new releases are basically copies of the file. The media extenders read shortcuts, so having symlink creation capability would be very slick.

For some time (nearly 11 years now!), my job has been a mixture of defining, developing and managing the development of software products. Over the past 3 years I have been almost 100% dedicated to management with only the time to commit to small production development assignments or personal projects.

When I first started, I thought the key part of the whole life cycle was, well, coding. As an opinionated alpha coder, I could not imagine anything being more important than the production of working…and even tested code. From there, my attitude changed when I started to see how choosing the right product to develop at the right time had such an awesome effect on a company’s bottom line. I began to believe that the most important thing in the software world was identifying what you should be doing, product strategy wise.

Then…I went to work for a large software company with a well established market presence and literally barrels of cash in the bank.

The transition to “big company” caused me to revise my outlook on software development fundamentals. Insulated from concern of where my employees next paycheck would come from if I were to make a mistake, I started to focus on managing the software development process in the hopes that coming up with the best formula of development methodologies mixed with effective coaching and empowerment of the individuals I am responsible for would in the end yield the best possible product for my employer. In the process I became an expert and champion for some notable agile frameworks, and was part of a sweeping implementation of them at my company. I figured for a while that the real art of software development was choosing how to actually set out and do it, and mind the helm until you are ready to declare “Golden Master”, and you know…it is somewhat difficult and stressful when you take it seriously…but its not the key!

It took me way too long to internalize this, but the key to successful software is simply PEOPLE. Yup, that’s right. You can throw your fancy Scrum framework in the bin along with your management books and empty soft drink cans (a mainstay of any development team it seems), provided you remain fully cognizant of the fact that how your team interacts, comes to decisions and carries on its work is the most important ingredient to doing a great job in the software development game. Of course, effective product management and engineering processes are of great importance and cannot be ommitted from the formula. My point is that negative human issues present in the implementing team will cause all of that to be a total waste.

For example, an unfortunately very common NHI (“negative human issue”) is trust. Imagine a scenario where you are managing a product that has teams contributing from multiple geographies. The teams interact primarily via meetings and because of the distances involved the members of the teams do not become personally familiar with each other. The result ends up being a passively adversarial relationship between teams with occasional active flare ups, which invariably results in an ingrained sense of distrust between teams and individuals. In the end, this distrust causes ineffective managers to try to separate the teams concerns…effectively creating silos and reducing team interaction to the boundary/integration issues.

Outcome: bad software, unhappy customers and a development team that is well setup to continue creating bad software and unhappy customers.

So the key to software development management, in my humble opionion, is the same as what was drilled into me at hockey clinics when I was a kid: “Play the Man, Not the Puck”. As a manager, you should be detecting NHIs such as trust issues and putting into play countermeasures as subtly as possible. Don’t be one of those managers that is overly focused on metrics and managing by numbers. Use your instinct and humanity to help you calmly approach obstacles and devise your remedy. Don’t devise processes to address human factors, rather, use humanity to address human factors. Really, it will work.

Anyway, I would love to hear comments on this random posting I felt like writing out of the blue

If you are a Professional SmugMug user, and just want to replace the SmugMug logo (not develop a custom theme), you can do the following:

• On the “customize” page, add the following to the CSS box


.smuglogo {
width: 170px;
height: 33px;
background: url(http://yourphotos.smugmug.com/photos/XXXXXXXX_XXXX-O.png) no-repeat;
}


• …and in the Header section:


<div/>


Of course, make sure you replace the background photo with YOUR logo, and your logo’s sizes. Try to keep the logo as small as you can so it fits into SmugMug’s layout….or you can go and figure out how to override that too