Shift8 Creative Graphic Design and Website Development

Every web designer, developer, and just really anyone who does business should have one of these tablets, I swear.

Why? Well, normally I'd have to say tablets are not really that helpful. They are fun, I think everyone is crazed over them, but they don't offer any real productive value. Sorry, but it's true. You play Angry Birds on them is what you do. Then carry it to the office so you can try to justify it. I could see that if you don't have a smartphone, then a tablet is a great tool for productivity.

Not the HTC Flyer. This is a tablet that really is geared for business and its a great addition to a netbook, smartphone, or laptop because it's simply different than all of them. It's honestly one of the only tablets that has something unique about it. The pen.

While reading about this tablet I was concerned the pen wouldn't be precise enough. Well, it is. It can be quite fine tipped. It works just about as well as some other devices like a Palm Pilot or Windows device with stylus...Only, better. There's two levels of pressure sensitivity as well, so it's pretty good for sketching. Mind you, not as good as what Wacom tablets offer, but honestly pretty close.

Drawing on glass, a slick surface, isn't so bad...Though you do miss out on the tactile feel and it's not real natural. I assume you can put on a matte screen protector and you'd get some resistance that felt more natural.

So why for web designers? It should be obvious...You can note anything. So you can simply go to your web sites and mark them up. Conveying design changes, etc. are a dream come true when you can do that. You can sketch up fresh ideas for design as well to then share. 

Additionally, you can draw all over PDF documents. These can be saved down as flattened PDFs or layered PDFs that will open up back on a PC. You will need to get a file manager app in order to e-mail those saved PDFs out, but you can. It's nice to open those layered PDFs up on a PC to review what you annotated and then remove those markings if you wanted to.

Think about tools like Mockflow and how they export to PDF. Or any other design tool where you may have a site map or wireframe. Bring that PDF right into the Flyer, mark it up, and e-mail it right back out. Beautiful.

Further apply this to business and think about signing PDFs. You can sign off for things, contracts, approval, etc. Having a pen in a digital world means serious business. It helps bridge a gap.

Think about presentations too. You can be going through a slideshow and make markings with the pen to help annotate. Speaking of presentations...The notes app has a recorder. You can record a lecture or presentation so you can play it back later. While this recording is going on, you can take pen notes and those drawings are placed on the audio timeline of your recording. Another beautiful feature.

I can't wait until there's more pen apps out there because I could only imagine the number of apps that could help make my day to day job easier and more productive.

Simply put. Every web designer and graphic designer should have one of these tablets. If you do business in a creative field, this is a must. Even for other industries the pen is a nice tool.

Geek conferences.  Well, perhaps "trendy" conferences that all us web developers are always wanting to go to. Or...Meetups...But darn, that meetup and that conference they are half way across the country. It costs so much money and takes so much time. If you're lucky your boss might pay for you to go (as well they should for the value!). Though, probably that won't happen so you miss out. 

Well, that's where I believe in recording and slideshare, etc. However...That's only so useful. This is 2011 God damnit, where's my hover car and sexy computer lady voice that I can talk to when I'm lonely?! Ah, the Ballmer peak got to the best of us...Or maybe not. We actually do have many great examples of technology. We finally have tablets (again), but now that hardware is better they are actually somewhat cool. We have a lot of good web software too and don't forget the cloud. The problem is, you have to hunt for some of this awesome tech...And so, I've found something very noteworthy.

OpenMeetings.de is a great site (and open source project) that uses red5 to provide online meetings and presentations. Ok, yea there's AdobeConnect and Webex and all those other guys...However, they don't have quite as many features and they mostly all require some special software to download and have some problems. Typically most of those services run better on Windows as well. However, the most problematic thing is they all cost money. Lots of money. It's hard for open source communities that have little or no funding to afford these services so...They don't. You end up with conferences that try to get sponsors to cover the costs and you end up with wikis and slideshare and IRC chat rooms. Don't get me wrong, all that is still needed...But I think we should have somewhere to turn for virtual meetups.

OpenMeetings doesn't give you live screen sharing like most other services (and before I forget, join.me is another great mention). The screen sharing is actually a series of screenshots updated fairly frequently. Certainly frequently enough to show a presentation. Almost enough to show live typing, but I think that's enough for the needs of a meeting. Furthermore, you can actually record the whole event to later download as an AVI or FLV! In addition to this very elusive feature (RDP and RFB have been around for ages, yet it's still hard to find good free solutions apparently), it also provides video and audio communication via your web cam and microphone. It also provides text chat and a whiteboard. You can give control to other users and allow them to share their screens and video/audio as well.

It certainly appears to have all the features that one could need. It also has a few other goodies like polls but the most important feature, aside from the sharing parts, I think is the fact that you can plan meetings on a calendar and then invite people. However, how easy is it to use? How well does it work? From what I tested, it's very compatible and pretty easy to use. In fact, it's so compatible that it also worked on my Android 2.3 tablet! You obviously couldn't share your tablet's screen and it didn't recognize the webcam on my tablet, but it definitely worked as a viewer. The resolution being a bit lower than an actual computer made it a little hard to read text but you could see the shared screen and whiteboard. Further, you could actually interact with the whiteboard. Drawing on that with your finger was definitely fun. The speed was fair, again I don't think the whiteboard is 100% real time, especially due to how it renders when you first load it (it seems to replay all the actions). However, it works. Virtual meetings, virtual classrooms, here we come!

Note: Oh, and if anyone from 10gen is seeing this, YES that is a MongoDB mug in the background, I went to an actual conference to get to have it only break on me day one as I cleaned it...I can still use it, as long as I don't pick it up by the handle. You still owe me a mug, especially for entering that contest last month! It was a lot of typing...What does a guy have to do to get a mug? I've even now made a product/brand placement for ya. 

So I want to make sure that I keep posting content on my blog. I not only want people to come back to my site, but I want to get in a good habit of writing as well as make sure that I'm jotting down some of my thoughts. The amount of crap that runs through my head is probably more than the average person's. That's not a pat on my own back, that's actually quite sad because I just want things to turn "off" sometimes. Sleep deprivation, lack of focus sometimes, and overall insanity is really what it leads to. Sticky notes and endless reams of printer paper, and sketchbooks (not that I sketch anymore like I should) really aren't cutting it. I need to decompress on my blog as well. So I'm adding some new categories to help stay organized.

Believe it or not, I use my own blog for reference. I do come back to what I wrote down and use it to copy and paste code snippets and keep tabs on where I was and where I am now. Sometimes I rant sure and those posts may not do any good for anyone...But I'm bored, and probably angry at the moment. Or, maybe I'm procrastinating. Like I am now...It's about the middle of the evening and I should be working on my little lightweight CMS but instead I'm writing...Hmm...Oh well.

So in the spirit of keeping it interesting for you all, check this out! Have an Android phone? Remotedroid can be found in the app market, but the server can be found on its Google code site. It's cross-platform, just run the jar file. Make sure that you have port 57110 open for UDP traffic (check computer firewall and router). 

You can hold down on the track pad area with one finger and swipe the other up and down and it should scroll. It may support some other gestures too, I haven't tried. It works really well as a mouse. The keyboard I found to be a little slow, but bearable for simple things like surfing the internet or perhaps your media center computer (ie. Boxee, etc.). That's really what I intend to use it for. Sure, there's a Boxee remote app for nearly all phones, but this works much better in my opinion...Especially if you want to do more or Boxee crashes or you don't run it all the time. Boxee seems to get a weird resolution change issue after my computer wakes up...So I have to exit it and restart it. Can't do that with the remote app. However, the remote app does have a novel picture of whatever is playing.

Anyway, a nice little discovery. What else? Well, just boring stuff. Things that I'm working on as I mentioned...A lightweight CMS. It's coming along well. It was the basis of the previous post about including external JavaScript files from another JavaScript file. This lightweight CMS doesn't use any framework...Or database even. It's intended for very basic, static, sites. Old sites. Imagine those sites for small businesses that were designed a while ago, or not necessarily a while ago, but perhaps designed very statically...This is quite common actually even in a world where we have Wordpress and Joomla and Drupal and Croogo! Don't forget that nice CMS. One day add Minerva to that too. Another project of mine for those of you who want to laugh, go ahead...But I promise that one will get finished as well.

I'm calling this lightweight CMS "Argos" with the metaphor/slogan of "Who says you can't teach an old dog new tricks?" So these very simple (1-20 page) sites are really the target. You can't use Argos on a dynamic site. Argos actually writes directly to the HTML or PHP page and alters the HTML contents of it. It of course stores data in JSON files to keep backups (also for historic rollbacks) and also backs up the entire site on installation (well, it will when I'm done). This ensures that the site using Argos doesn't get messed up and also helps to prevent user mistakes...Or rather, allows a user to "undo" things...Something I think that's missing from many CMS' out there. It's also designed to be quite compatible. Basically PHP 5 is the only real server requirement. It has to have the JSON PHP extension. That's the extent really of the requirements. Of course many shared hosts do offer MySQL but I figured I'd keep it as compatible as possible. Plus, do I really want to setup a database? What if I'm not installing the CMS? I want to deliver it with one PHP script. Let it download the files it needs and walk the user through installation. I'm assuming that they don't know what MySQL is and they certainly don't know how to setup a database and then a user to access said database.

The CMS does have a backend, but it's very simple for now. It does include a nifty file manager script that I found. So, there's another great find for you all...phpFileManager. It's just one PHP script actually, it works really well! I was thinking about expanding upon it and adding a few features and then just using it as a "swiss army" knife for web development. Adding things like markItUp! to it and so on...But keeping it all one file. It doesn't matter if it ends up being a few megabytes even...Just being able to get onto a server, wget the file from my server or FTP it somewhere, then load it up to go work on something in a pinch would be great.

Anyway, enjoy the discoveries and updates. I do post minor things like this on my Twitter feed by the way, so follow me!