Any new updates as far as posts will be done on Feedgrids.com from now on. We will be including a blog on the site as well. I am trying to consolidate my online presence to one website, I am getting way to busy and not able to manage all the various websites.

See you on Feedgrids.com!

feedgrids.com is now live and ready to be used and abused! Me and Derek Pittsinger worked very hard to collect all the necessary resources and create a site that displays the best of the web in one place!

Here is a bit about the site:

Providing quick access to our favorite creative resources while exposing new and lesser known feeds all in one place.
Our goal is to join the thriving online creative community and become a helpful tool for the user to find inspiration, education, or just be a source of interesting information. We hope that when people use this site it will in turn direct even more traffic or bring in new visitors to the sites that we follow, admire, and get valuable information from.

This site was created while trying to fulfill a personal need. That need was to have all of the creative feeds from all of the sites that we visit on a daily basis in one place; presented in an attractive, visually interesting way and simply categorized to find what we need quickly.

From that need, feedgrids.com was born! Now we want to share this site with the community.

As we continue to work on new features to make the site better for all of us, we hope to hear from you about the features that you would like to see incorporated into feedgrids.com

Visit feedgrids

Being at the right place at the right time is only a small piece of the puzzle. I do not believe that success only comes from hard work, luck and opportunity. Those things help, but only after you found, and realized your true gift.

I believe people are born with gifts, its all a matter of realizing what those are. Only a few of us discover the hidden potential, and that is why we only have the few geniuses in the world at any given time. Those geniuses happened to realize what they had and acted on it just by pure interest, and passion, not because they felt forced to succeed in it. Most successful people are successful in something they love doing and were doing way before they became successful the outcome was only a bonus.

I strongly disagree with the fact that anyone can do anything, if it’s not in your DNA to have passion, or interest in something why would you try to succeed in it? Why would you want to? You would never have those opportunities, or luck because you wouldn’t surround yourself with them.

To reference the book by Malcolm Gladwell Outliers: the story of Success. It is true that people like Bill gates might have succeeded in the technology realm because they were exposed to a computer early on when most people didn’t, but so did other students in his classroom. His true passion that was buried within him became apparent. The other students just didn’t have that interest. We can’t force people to do something they don’t have a care for.

I do not believe Bill Gates, or Steve Jobs at some point said “I will build this new operating system to be rich and famous”, they had a passion for computers and that passion led them to success, and opportunities in a newly emerging untapped industry.

There are many students out there with the same passion and determination to succeed in their fields, but there will always be the ones that do better with less effort. If you have it you have it. I see that all the time in my own field of design. I saw it all through my college education, people that were never meant to be designers tried and tried and never got far enough in skill or creativity compared to others that just had the gift.

Those people were a bit unique because even though they had no gift for design they had passion and determination, but that again, only proves my theory, that hard work and passion is not enough to make you successful.

So, I do agree that circumstances might play a role in the upbringing of an individual, the people you surround yourself with, the opportunities, luck and hard work, but I believe that all those things only play a small part in uncovering your own genius and not creating it!

Another good example is child proteges! 5 year old’s with brilliant piano skills or Math skills. Those kids just have it!

Please feel free to argue and share your thoughts…

My first year at Adobe MAX and it was awesome! Great vibe from everyone, great excitement, and overall great atmosphere. I didn’t know what to expect, I had no idea Adobe goes all out like that, thank you so much for doing all this for the fans and users!

The staff was very informative, and ready to help you out when you had questions or got lost on your way to the next lab. The sessions were very casual and informative, even though a couple seemed somewhat basic, I was hoping to get more in depth in some of the labs for Catalyst for example, but being such a new product, having introductory sessions makes sense. I did learn some neat tricks that I didn’t know though, so in the end I was satisfied.

Some of the coolest stuff was during Sneak Peeks, some will make it to the market some will not. The Adobe Rome project really stole the show though, unbelievable what can be accomplished with actionscript, 200k lines of code to be exact, still once you see what it can do you will be surprised it only took that 200k. Think Photoshop, Dreamweaver, Flash, and Fireworks combined, with a slick and minimalist UI design that removes any unused clutter from the workspace, and you have Adobe ROME. I really can’t see this project ever making it out to market though since it would really cut into Adobe’s profits Buying ROME would mean no need to buy the full suite anymore. Anyways, below is a video of it in action!

Dan Goldman also showed a very cool “content aware” spot healing brush that just makes removing things from photos so quick and easy its unbelievable, that tool I am sure is being shipped with CS5. Photoshop has a history of updating their favorite cloning and healing brushes in every version of Photoshop. My wife will be so excited when this comes out, it will make her post photography work so much faster. Check out my HD video below.

Another cool sneak was the smart paste in Dreamweaver, being able to just copy and paste flash files, spread sheets, images, and videos straight into your html files, WTF!? Video below.

Also, on the next video Chewbacca displays some awesome physics in flash, wow!

Here is a link to the Adobe Max photo stream on flickr, enjoy!

I had the pleasure of working on a cool project with Jonathan Campos and the team over at BugQuash. The BugQuash App was presented to Adobe last week and things went very well, they liked it so much that they are presenting it at Adobe Max next month!

For those new to BugQuash, it is a social space for users to post and quash flex bugs.

Some of the features of the app include:

• Bug Lists
• Active members
• Social feeds, such as twitter, blogs and news
• Live locations, this shows active users all over the world as seen on Tour de Flex
• Member profiles
• User Collaboration
• Member achievements
• Browser and Air App

Technologies used:

• Flex4
• Flash Catalyst
• Photoshop
• Livecycle Data Service
• Java
• Hibernate
• MySQL
• Ruby

The project was created to show what can be built in 4 weeks. Yes, 4 weeks from design to development. That left only one week for the concept and design of the UI and information architecture for the whole app. In the end I think the app came out looking and working amazingly well. I am always impressed with what flex can do in such a short time as long as you have someone as brilliant as Jonathan on the front end, Nate Beck, and Brian Burck on the back end.

The app is not online yet, I will keep you posted on its location once its up. But I included some screen shots on this post until then.

Now that the deadline that we had to meet (Adobe Meeting) is gone we have some time to go back and fine tune a few elements before it goes live and you guys start playing with it. We will be adding in additional graphical elements that we just didn’t have time to include on the first build. We will also spend some more time playing with the latest builds of Flash Catalyst and see how much more we can do with that.

See you at MAX!

In a previous post of mine I mentioned some work I did for the very awesome people over at slideroom.com

My role on the project was to redesign their existing application, and address some of the usability issues and complaints they were getting from some of their users. Working along with the marketing team and the development team we redesigned the whole UI and UX experience!

The new version is now live, and I can’t be more thrilled to see this puppy move! Watch the video below.

Watch the SlideRoom Video