RodeWorks

I’ve been looking forward to getting the new Adobe CS3. And now that I’ve spent a day and a half hearing the folks from Adobe highlight all the new features and improvements, I’m even eager to get it. A couple of highlights for me include: Read the rest of this entry »

Among my first web design books were those authored by Lynda Weinman.  She was one of the first real designers to show how to make graphics and visual design work on the Web.  And her books were (and still are) great.  A couple of years ago I had the pleasure of seeing her speak at the New York Flash Forward conference, which she was also involved in producing.

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The new Dreamweaver CS3 now makes it easy to include AJAX components in your web pages.  Adobe has integrated the SPRY framework into the application.  Past versions of Dreamweaver have had various dynamic elements, but I’ve never really used them.  They never really seemed to be worth the trouble, and created some pretty funky code at times.  But this new implementation using SPRY looks great.  You can easily link to an XML file and display the various elements in the file in various ways.  You can also link different elements.  So, for instance, your XML file might have product name, description and image elements.  In Dreamweaver you can have one area that displays a list of all the products.  In another area you can display the image and description of the specific product you have selected.  Pretty cool.

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Here at the Adobe CS3 conference, the demo of the new Contribute showed it being used as an editor for a WordPress blog.  Very cool.  As I set up more people in a WordPress driven content management system, I’ve been worried about the WordPress editor.  Let’s face it, if you’re a coder/web person its fine, but even the graphical versions ain’t great.  I’ve looked at several editor plug-ins and none of those are quite what I want to unleash on a user either.  But Contribute is great — I’ve had several non-technical people using it on traditional web sites, and they haven’t managed to mess them up.  And find the tool easy to use.  So combine that ease-of-use with WordPress’ power — could be a good combination!

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Here’s a quote from the May 28, 2007 Computerworld article “Execs Seek Help in Web 2.0 Efforts”

“E-mail is passe for students; they all use text messaging, wireless, all the now [social networking] tools, wikis and blogs… The kids are already leading us there, which presents us with some challenges to keep track of them.”  Ronald Bonig, CIO, Geore Washington University.

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Now don’t get me wrong, I love open source products.  But sometime all these “free” apps make me a little cranky.

One big concern is they are not really free — sure they’re free from a purchase cost, but as light weight as they appear at first glance there is a very real cost to installation, configuration, training, implementation, data conversion, maintenance and ultimately switching to something else.   So  while there is a temptation to jump with the “flavor of the month” I find myself getting a little more cautious, and starting to add consideration of commercial products in my thoughts.

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