The life and times of David Bates, Programmer, Graphic Designer, Webmaster, Handyman, Logical Thinker, Husband, Father, and an INTP. Just sit back and take it in one post at a time.
Today Adobe released their new version of the flash player 10.1 and I will say it was a much anticipated update for me. I love flash and have developed in it since it’s early day when it was another product altogether. Flash started out as a way for me to program desktop apps that looked and felt the way I wanted as I have always loved to be able to create the interface and then program it to do what I want. Since then my love of Flash has faded in and out as changes and flaws where found in the system. I almost completely wrote off flash until YouTube and Air had launched. I had been writing projectors for autoplay cd’s for years and air gave me a whole different type of application delivery mechanism. Anyway I love flash and even though I use Silverlight quite a bit, when someone needs a project completed in a hurry and want it to look custom my default is always Flash. So with that here are my thoughts on the release.
The Good:
As you all are aware Apple recently hit Adobe below the belt saying that security flaws and memory errors. I would have expected that in Adobe’s press release they would have addressed that first. But instead they slyly take on the mobile market slating that performance and low power was their main focus. This should make Google happy as it show them that Adobe is not lying down and taking Apple’s low punch lightly.
Better Hardware video decoding… they already own most of the video market. HTML is too early and silver light is just now hitting the market hard. I would have liked to have seen more about HTML 5 video and how Adobe was going to provide tools for video publishing compatible with HTML 5.
Mac Specific Improvements: this is a straight jab at Jobs. I read this as here you go. You wined and we fixed it, now put us in the iPad
The Better:
Mulitouch: I have been having to use third party apps to accomplish this thusfar it is great to see this come to the mainstream and is also another sideways jab at Jobs
Multi-Tab memory usage: This is much improved and a much anticipated release. If you have a ton of windows open and multiple flash objects they each have their own memory space. Adobe has streamlined this now.
The Scary:
Ok this one paragraph scared the heck out of me:
“Now, content that runs in Flash Player will automatically shut down when the available memory is running low.”
This is scary because what if you are running a mission critical flash app and you run out of memory? They also did not state whether it was physical RAM or paged? Scary stuff.
Today I was invited to join BEM Interactive’s March Madness Google Analytics event. It was a great overview of Google Analytics that I used as a refresher since it had been 2+ years since I had taken any real time to mess with GA. However I also come away with some high level tips from BEM’s GA Ninja Jeremy Shaffer. This guy really knows his stuff and can speak to a crowd very well… something I am still trying to master So without further adieu I would like to share you with what I took away from today.
1. Without a good foundation IE. hosting/website design analytics won’t do you a bit of good. Analytics are meant to help you streamline and custom tailer a site for a visitor, not fix a broken site.
2. You will not magically gain traffic by installing analytics. It takes a full market strategy to drive traffic and analytics can quantify if a strategy will or has worked.
3. Just running reports showing numbers will not get you anywhere. You need to be qualifying questions instead. How can analytics tell me I sold a product from this campaign for example.
4. Define conversions for your site. Having traffic is cool but at what point in your site do you deem their visit valuable? Is it when they click order now? When they visit your careers page? Fill out an email sign-up sheet? define these conversions and then use analytics to quantify them.
5. Quantify valuable metrics. You may have had 43,00000000 visits to your site over the last year but where did they come from and what did they do? How long did they stay? Did they bounce? (yeah that one is for Jeremy Shaffer for those of you who where there.
6. Segment traffic. It is great to know what is happening with all of your visitors but when you get down to answering questions about specific ad campaigns segmentation really helps you find out about your traffic patterns and customers.
7. Analytics should help you come up with solutions to problems. You can report a problem but you will really shine if you can also suggest a solution based on traffic patterns.
8. Don’t get in the mindset that web based analytics cannot help quantify your traditional advertising. You can give customers unique urls or include tracking data in the url so that you know that traffic to that url is from a traditional campaign.
Hope this is helpful to you, if you have any other tips leave them in the comments below.
David Bates
So Windows is making a mobile operating system. Yes is the short answer, and it is brilliant but it seems up until now people never associated windows mobile with Microsoft maybe it was due to Microsoft itself never hyping the OS or maybe it’s the manufacturers fault. Who knows, who cares… As the local tech person for everyone I know I have had a lot of questions that start something like “why would Microsoft try to get into the mobile os business now? Is it because both Apple and Google have one? They must be trying to copy them huh?” I just smile and say well windows has been in mobile phones for a very long time… remember the Motorola Q? They all shrug and then say “yeah but it sucked”… and I say yes that is why they put so much effort into windows phone 7 series, because they needed to to stay in the game.
So now that I got their attention I delve into why Windows Phone 7 Series is an OS worth having such a long name. I think they got it right. First they are requiring the device manufacturers to have certain features like touchscreen, accelerometer, and three hardware buttons along the bottom. Then they are basing the phone on an already existing platform, Silverlight and XNA both of which are highly used on the xbox 360 Microsoft’s gaming platform. Finally they are making the tools free. This is a big step for Microsoft and you can still see on the http://developer.windowsphone.com/ they still charge $99 per year for developer access to legacy SDK’s and samples. What freelance developer wants to pay that… especially when Apple and Google both have free tools (Apple is not completely free as you have to buy an Intel mac) and the phone up till now did not have powerful processors or GPU’s. Windows Phone 7 Series even goes one step further to make the software on the phone support full multitasking or as some like to call it multi-APPing. Combine that with a slick UI and sound UI standards we have a real contender on our hands. I wish this phone would be released a lot sooner than the Christmas time-frame that they currently predict.
Now I have downloaded the SDK and even followed the keynote given at http://live.visitmix.com/ to make a picture viewing app. It worked great, was easy to follow given I already knew the tools from silverlight development and fast… on my computer the emulator outperformed any picture app I ever had on my IPhone. I can’t wait to see what comes of the app store and I hope that MS takes a hint from Apple and Google and decide to make it free to publish apps but charge for advertising and take a cut of sales. If so I’m in.
I have been chatting up the #GoogleGSO thread this morning after hearing the JoshInTheBox Google Song on 1075KZL this morning.
Play it here:
It seams like there is a lot of discomfort around how the city of Greensboro is handling the marketing campaign to try and lure Google into our town. First they abandon their 1,400 follower twitter account in order to create a new branded one instead of simply using a hash-tag, and then they pay $10,000 for RLF to build a wordpress site, which is Google’s competitor for blogspot. when there already where good standing grass roots movements like http://www.google4gso.com/, and the twitter hashtag #GoogleGSO on twitter.
I hope we get it, it would mean a lot to our community but if Greensboro as a city is going to make these kind of basic mistakes on a marketing campaign we made need to look for better business leaders to help us next election season.
One thing I will give them credit for is the google crate… that is awesome
Today I set out to figure out why I couldn’t get IIS under windows server to serve up .ASPX pages.
I had asked for a .net setup from IT and when I placed my files in the site I could not get it to serve up ASPX pages. It would serve .HTML and .ASP but not .ASPX so I decided to investigate myself. Hopefully my investigation and solution will help you troubleshoot this issue without wasting as much time as I had to. All of the steps below refer to IIS 6.0 and Windows Server 2003 R2 Standard Edition.
Step one: Figure out if ASP.net is installed. You can do this several ways the quickest is to see if there is a ASP.net tab within your sites properties in the IIS Manager. Another way (and the way I chose to pursue) is to open the Control Panel and then Add/Remove Programs, and then click the Add/Remove Windows Components. Once Windows searches for installed components you will see a list. Click on Application Server and select details, this is where you should see ASP.net checked. If you don’t see ASP.net checked or if it isn’t there at all you will need to go to step two. If ASP.net is installed then skip ahead to step three.
Step two: Install ASP.net There are two ways to install ASP.net the easy way and then the way that you only do if you can’t see ASP.net in the Control Panel’s Add/Remove Windows Components section. The easy way is to check the checkbox in the Add/Remove Windows Components section and then follow the on-screen instructions. The hard way is to download the .net redistributable from Microsoft(the package linked is the 32 bit see bottom of page for X64).Install the package and then perform windows updates. This process will take 1-3 hours depending on connection speed and amount of updates needed. You will need to reboot when finished.
Step 3: ASP.net is installed but I still can’t see .ASPX pages: This can happen for several reasons and I could make you sift through thousands of google pages to figure out why, but that wouldn’t be very good of me I was getting 404 errors when trying to view an .ASPX page and this was because Active Server Pages where prohibited in Web Service Extensions. This KB Article explains why but you basically go into Web Service Extensions in the IIS manager and change Active Server Pages from Prohibit to Allow.
There we go I hope that helps you if you have a similar problem.
