Along with everything else that is going on on the ninth day of the ninth month of the ninth year of this millennium, my colleagues on the Adobe TV team have launched their completely redesigned site.

The initial version of Adobe TV was launched about 18 months ago. And while it accomplished its mission to provide a single point on the web for learning about Adobe products, it was quite honestly a mess due to a hastily thrown-together backend and an even worse user experience. Ironically, I’m almost sad to see the old site go, as I used to use it as an example of what NOT to do on the web – namely build an entire site in Flash/Flex. Don’t get me wrong, I love Flash and have no problem with Flash content – especially video. There are only very limited examples of using Flash/Flex to build an entire public facing site and doing it right – so limited in fact that I can’t even think of any.

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During a recent discussion about Ajax frameworks, a comment was made suggesting that while the Spry Framework was nicely integrated into Dreamweaver and offered a wide range of options, effects and widgets, it was simply too bloated to use in production. In my usual fashion, I of course defended Spry. As the discussion progressed, we were soon huddled around my laptop, inserting various widgets from both Spry and jQuery and comparing the individual Javascript files. I have to admit that I was taken aback when we began looking at the size difference between the Spry widgets and their jQuery counterparts.

Spry Accordion vs jQuery Accordion

For those who may be unaware, Dreamweaver CS4 offers not only the ability to use the built-in Spry Framework, but also to add widgets from other frameworks such as jQuery (more…)

Friday has to be the best workday of the week, not only for the obvious weekend reason, but also because it seems to bring out the silliness in not only myself, but my fellow colleagues. Earlier this morning I received an email announcing the fact that one of my Evangelist colleagues, Serge Jespers, had created a widget badge to help promote our upcoming Adobe MAX Conference in Los Angeles. (more…)