An Open Letter to Flex Mobile Skinners

Over the last few days I have been working with Flex for mobile and have been struggling with the skinning workflow. The workflow for browser-based Flex is pretty clear and well documented with support in Catalyst and Creative Suite to make it pretty seamless. For mobile it isn’t as clear.

So I have been doing some research on best practices for Flex mobile skinning from the user experience designer perspective. How do I create assets for the mobile developer to use? What are the design constraints? What are the various skin parts of the mobile components that I need to hit?

What experiences have you had? Are there resources that you have found helpful? Where are the biggest gaps or problems you have had when working with Flex mobile skinning?

Add your comments below…Would love to get your thoughts…

Upcoming San Francisco User Group Meetings

I wanted to share some information about two upcoming user groups here in San Francisco that may be of interest…

San Flashcisco

The first group is the popular San Flashcisco that will have two presentations. The first is from Mixamo on how to add 3D using Molehill to your Flash game projects. The is information on the workflow on the Mixamo website on how to work with 3D models using the Flash Player 11 beta, now available on Adobe Labs.

The second presentation is from Mitra Shahidi who will cove tips on key framings and tweens using characters for animation using Flash.

The group will meet at the Adobe San Francisco office at 601 Townsend Street, San Francisco on Thursday August 18th at 6:30 p.m. Presentations will start at 7 p.m.

 

GamesJS

This new user group will have a focus on HTML5 and JavaScript for game applications. The inaugural presentation will have two sessions. The first is from Jack Lawson who will give a talk on crafty.js, a game engine that includes sprite map, collision detection, combined with a small footprint and flexible cross-browser compatibility.

The second presentation is from Ben Savage, who will talk about Spaceport, a gaming API that mimics the ActionScript 3.0 core display classes in the engine to make it easy for Flash developers to quickly get started writing with Spaceport. The platform is a hybrid HTML5 platform that runs on multiple platforms through a cloud based solution that runs the games. It even supports Flash Professional export to OpenGL for support on iOS, Android, Symbian and others.

The group will meet at IGN Entertainment at 625 2nd Street, San Francisco, starting at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday, August 17th.

Hope to see you at both!

Beginning the next chapter…

For a few years, I have been working at Adobe as a product manager in various forms. When I started, I was brought into the company to help expose workflow gaps and issues that prohibited designers and developers to work together using Adobe products. The result of this work would evolve into multiple features in the web and interactive products, and also into Flash Catalyst. Along the way, I wound up working with some of Adobe’s best product managers to bring Creative Suite 5 Web Premium to market.

Mapping Design and Develop Disciplines

The world of interactive design and development has significantly grown and expanded in the last few years. Frameworks and tools, like Flex and Flash Catalyst, have expanded the capabilities of the designers and developers that work together to create content and applications. With this expansion however, we have delineated the world as two hemispheres: designers or developers. The reality though is that all of us are a varying combination of disciplines, some are designer-based, some are developer-based. It is through the combination of these disciplines that give us all unique value in projects and teams. We also look at these disciplines to help expand and grow our own abilities and skills. To help define this dynamic world a bit better a new model is needed. This discipline map is a good first step to represent who we are and how we fit in with our peers and colleagues.