now, that this flash / iphone thing is closed, Adobe, can you please make sure, that Flash Player 10.1 on Android will be nothing else but mind-blowing? You know, not like “it works OK”, but more like “wtf, is this flash? you’re kidding. this is flash? Can’t believe it, this is sooo fast!”. It doesn’t matter matter, if it takes another month, but please get this right.

a weekend with a lot of driving lies behind me. The plan was fool-proof, we thought. Take the plane from Hamburg to Frankfurt and go to Wiesbaden by train. Unfortunately, as most of you probably have heard, there were some ash-clouds coming into our way and so on Friday me and David were hastily driving to Hamburg airport and canceling our tickets and rent a car. From Hamburg to Wiesbaden it is roughly 520 km. So i got up at 5 in the morning, picked up David and drove to Hanover first, were we picked up Jens and Ulf and then headed for Wiesbaden, where we arrived at 9.45, perfectly on time, but a bit tired, naturally.

The weather in Wiesbaden was awesome, no clouds and after a while we recognized, also no condensation trails of course, because there were no planes flying. I remember, after 9/11, when there was no air traffic over the USA, scientists did a study, where they found, that these condensation trails actually have an effect on climate. I wonder, if scientists were doing studies here in Europe over the weekend, too.

Anyway, the conference began and the first speaker was Prof. H. Franke. I have to say, it wasn’t the best opening talk, the see conference has seen. Prof. Franke is a true scientist and as such elaborated on facts, that most of the people have probably already heard of. It would have been interesting to me, if he had put these facts in context to when they were found or invented, because then we could have seen, that a lot of what we are working on today has been found out decades ago already, but Prof. Franke did not talk about history, he presented the facts, like if they were brand new.

Because of the air traffic problems, some speakers could not make it to the conference, others had to take adventurous trips through Europe to arrive at Wiesbaden. Thus, the program got mixed up a bit, but that’s understandable, of course.

The two most interesting talks for me were those from Andrew Vande Moere (infosthetics.com) and from Hannes Koch (www.random-international.com).

Andrew talked about the projects he did and does as a lecturer at universities in Australia and Belgium. The point there was, that Andrew suggests, that data visualization is persuasive, as the designer can choose, how he interprets the data and thus where he puts the emphasis on. Later in the evening, i had the chance to have a chat with him at Mexican restaurant down at at the Rhein, which was nice and insightful.

Hannes Koch presented work from his design studio random. At one point he joked about the people, who always want to know, how the pieces are done technically rather then simply enjoying the pieces. I have to admit, i am one of those nerds, too. I would say, it lies in the nature of us human beings, that we want to understand, how things work, and art installations are no exception. So the only difference might be, some people care less, others care more.

Hannes was the last speaker. In the evening, together with Lars, Raphael, Jens, Patrick and a bunch of other guys we were having a good time chatting, having a beer and enjoying the very nice weather.

Then on Sunday we had to drive back all the way to hamburg, so when i arrived there, the rest of the day was mainly sitting on my balcony and doing nothing really but preparing for my upcoming talk at the GoodSchool next Thursday.

yesterday i recognized, that my Google pagerank went from 4 to a flat zero. Some analysis suggested, that since my blog was located in a subdirectory called /blog and since my root startpage did not contain any content at all, my blog startpage inherited the pagerank of my blank root startpage. OK, that /blog subfolder was stupid anyway, so i have re-structured my whole blog and now you can reach it directly via ghost23.de instead of the old ghost23.de/blog.

Of course, i didn’t want to screw up with all the existing incoming links and your bookmarks, so i set up some mod_rewrite rules, that will hopefully cover the old /blog/… links.

In any case, you might want to update your bookmarks (in case, anyone has any bookmarks to this site ).

about 2 months ago i bought the international version of the Amazon Kindle 2. Since then, i have used quite a bit and i thought it might be interesting to others, what my overall impression on the device is so far.

The device

The device feels solid, not really lightweight, but lighter than an average book. I recognize, that i can easily handle it with ether the right or the left hand. The buttons are where the should be, although it is a bit irritating, that the “previous page” button only exists on the left hand side, because it makes me push the home button (which is on the right hand side) by mistake sometimes. I have not used headphones with the device, because i do not listen to music or audio books on it.

The screen works just fine. It takes about one or two seconds for a page to refresh, something other people complain about, but it has never bothered me, because flipping a real page also takes a bit. The “power” button is about small, i find it sometimes unnecessarily tedious to slide it.

The battery

Not much to say here. It works for weeks. Just make sure, you don’t have 3G turned on all the time, because you actually only need it, when buying a book or doing updates.

The display

I am impressed by the screen every time i look at it. The resolution is very good and the quality of the text is brilliant. Images do always have that feeling of being drawn, even for photos, it is a bit weird, but that is, how i see it. You do have to make sure, that you sit in sufficient lighting, because the device has no back light or something.

Reading books

I have not yet bought dozens of books, but i have some very different kinds of books. I have not yet read magazines, because there almost none in German yet. But i have heard, that magazines can be a problem because of layout issues, cannot say anything to that though.

For books, i have read two novels, which just worked great. Even for images, they look very nice, you can also select every image and zoom them to fullscreen. After some minutes, i forget, that i am reading on a digital device, it just feels right. I must say, i use the Kindle mostly en route, like on the train or in the plain. At home, i still mostly read traditional books, because, well, i still have some

I also bought one book on software development. Actually i have the same book as a traditional book and as a Kindle ebook. There are some problems with the electronic version:

• Code Examples: The are normally layouted for the fix width of the original book and thus they wrap badly on the device. You can try to fix it by adjusting the font size, but it still is not a good solution
• Graphics: Sometimes, in the text you read something like: “I have put these two images side-by-side, so that you can see the difference”. Well, that does not work on an ebook, of course, since you can only see one page at a time. Also, books, that make some intense use of layout, will probably not work on an ebook. And something, every author should be aware of anyway, is, that you should not use sentences like: “As you can see on the image below …”. Because on an ebook, you never know, where the image will be.

I also have a bit of a problem to know, where i am. With a traditional book, i can go to the table of contents in no time. For the ebooks, i miss a shortcut for doing just that (perhaps i simply haven’t found it yet ?).
Update: Thanks for the comment; hitting “Menu” and then “Table of Contents” does the job

Other than that, reading on the Kindle works just fine and i can really recommend it.

Software

The Amazon Kindle can only handle its own format, which is a petty. Since a couple of weeks, you can also read PDF files, but i find that rather unusable, because layouts in PDFs are fix, so since the pages are zoomed out to display completely, the font size is normally to small to be read. Unfortunately you cannot even zoom it, although this would be tedious, too.

There are tools for converting epub to the kindle format, though. I have tried them and it seems, as if they work great. One of them is Stanza. It is actually for putting ebooks on the iPhone, but i use it for converting any kind of ebook to the Kindle format.

Wireless

This is one of the big cool features of the Kindle. The international version has 3G and it works great. Wherever i am, i can switch on 3G and surf through the Kindle Store and read samples or buy books. A very nice user experience. To date unfortunately, there are only English books in the Kindle store, i hope, that changes soon.

Conclusion

I am really satisfied with my Kindle. It is slim and light, so it takes almost no space in the bag, so i usually take it with me, when i have my bag with me. I do hope, that there will be German books in the store soon though.

it’s nothing new and every speaker knows it, but i once again forgot it, when i held my last talk at the GoodSchool in Hamburg about Technology and the Internet: If you talk for some time, DRINK ! My talk went the whole evening, three hours and at the end, my throat hurt badly.

So note to myself: If you drive, don’t drink, if you talk, DO drink (doesn’t have to be with alcohol though ).

Besides that, i had quite some fun talking about fundamentals of internet technology. One thing, that i always like to point out to people, who start diving into the subject is, that one of the basic ingredients of the internet are: Cables !

There is a very informative map of submarine cables, that build the backbone of the internet today. So it’s not all virtual, the whole net is relying on very real stuff. The global internet map is just as interesting.

hurra, new job positions are available at Interone. Beside a lot of interesting offerings, i would like to point out one, that is the most interesting for me (i wonder why ) and is so fresh, it is not even listed yet. We are offering permanent positions for Flash developers here in hamburg.

The RIA team at our summer team trip

You have studied media informatics or something similar, have a couple of years of experience in your profession and you know how to develop RIAs and digital campaigns on the web? You’re into developing stunning user interfaces, are not afraid of 3D and dynamic and animated content? You speak AS2 / AS3 fluently and you care for clean, structured code? You use Design Patterns not because it’s cool, but because they help you write better code? You are also familiar with HTML/CSS and Javascript? And of course, you are able to work with the common tools, like FlexBuilder, Flash CS4, etc. Well then, if you’re willing to work in a team and have fun building apps and campaigns in Flash, why not give us a note?

The RIA team here in hamburg is a group of talented and highly communicative people with a strong focus on team work. We help each other, we don’t compete. We reflect on our work, we always aim for the better and, most importantly, we focus on getting the job done effectively.

So, want to give it a try?

Then simply send a mail to: i-wanna-work@interone.de

just read this article from Ryan Stewart (Evangelist for Adobe). He is complaining about the hype, that is generated around Google Wave and the fact, that he thinks, Wave could have been built with Flash/Flex years ago. And why Flash/Flex apps haven’t managed in the past to generate such momentum. Also read the comments, as the discussion there is a great read. I made my own thoughts about it.

One thing is, in most cases, where new stuff on the internet is getting hyped, it is about concepts, not technology. Only if the technology supports an innovative concept, then also the technology participates from the hype. So with Google Wave, sure, perhaps this could have been built with Flash, but it wasn’t, because no one had the idea and/or the will and/or possibilities to build it. When Flash had its hype years ago, it was because of vector graphics and animations running in the browser. It wasn’t the technology, it was the concept of having the possibility to show rich graphics and animations on the Internet and build them easily. Now Flash is an established technology, so it won’t see another hype itself so easily. Guess, we have to live with it: Flash isn’t cool, innovative apps are cool, no matter, what the technology behind it is (that’s not to say, Flash wouldn’t be a good starting point to build great apps).

In the comments, Wave is compared to Aviary in terms of “hype-potential”. Well, i don’t think, you can compare these two apps. Google Wave is a tool, that is targeted to mostly every Internet user. Aviary is a tool for a very sharply defined user group. So, if Google Wave was featured on CNN, you cannot expect Aviary to have that, simply because of the target group.

Also, a very important point is, that Google simply has the monetary power to build platforms like Wave. It is the same thing with Google Maps or Google Earth and so on. You need a heck of a lot of money and resources to build and maintain these applications. That limits the number of companies / teams, that can build them.

My last point would be, that Flash in terms of a technical platform is still pretty young. It is hard to make the cut, but i would consider the introduction of ActionScript3 as a point in time, where Flash seriously started to turn into a technical platform, where it became interesting for classical developers to work with it. And still, considering the developer tools, that we have for flash compared to stuff, that Java- or C#-developers have, there is a long way to go. If i am not mistaken, a major part of Google Wave was written in Java and then ported with their Web-kit to JavaScript, so they probably could use those nice tools that exist for java development.

So, what does that tell us now? Actually nothing new, because it’s always been that way, that great ideas at the right time, that come together with enough money and resources have a big chance to excite the crowd. Let’s see, how Adobe will improve the flash platform not primarily in terms of featureset in the player, but more in terms of developer tools (some fresh ideas for the Flash IDE perhaps? We need to get those designers back on board).

do you remember Hannibal Smith always saying “I love it when a plan comes together.” ?

Well that didn’t happen in my talk yesterday. My notebook suddenly decided not to turn on the VGA port, so the projector was showing nothing.

Well then, i made the talk analog, means on the flip chart.

Hope, the people there still found some interesting bits in my improvisation

once again Interone Worldwide is hosting the upcoming Flex UserGroup Meeting in Hamburg.

http://www.flexughh.de/2009/09/04/flexughh-meeting-16-09-09-sven-busse-flash-engineering-agile-ansatze-zum-bau-von-rias-mit-flash-flex-und-actionscript/

And as if it was on purpose, i will be talking there, about my book “Flash Engineering” and everything about software engineering, you would like to discuss. So, if you have something specific on your mind, go ahead and comment below, i’ll try to address it.

Hope to see you all there on Wednesday, starting at 19.30.

my colleague Roland found this very cool Javascript library Cufón. It does, what sIFR does, but better in my opinion and without flash or server generated pics. It’s fast, easy to use and it is accurate in terms of font size, multiple lines of text and so on. The headlines on this blog are now rendered by cufón. Check it out for yourself.