Nathan Levesque

As of tonight, I decided to discontinue pursuing future projects in the area of traditional HTML/CSS design. This is partly based on my mounting frustrations with the CSS standard, that despite being explicitly defined by the W3C, has never been fully and properly implemented by any browser. Every designer instinct tells me that CSS is necessary and not to use table designs, but recently I’ve found it increasingly hard to rationalize this as a benefit against productivity.

As far as I’m concerned, technology should be an aid in my pursuit of the holy grail of Design. If the technology is too old, or just not up to par with my needs and expectations, than I have no other recourse but to pursue other technology that lets me do what I want consistently and with the relative ease I expect. To this end, I have recently put much time into developing with Flex, and in the future plan on working with Silverlight (as much of an Adobe fan as I am, I’d be a fool not to learn more about the competition, for more info, see Blue Ray). I like pushing the edge, and to me, CSS feels like a hack to make HTML, nearly a 30-year old technology, look decent. Ditto on JavaScript in terms of AJAX (that aside, I love what JavaScript is, just not how it is used).
Another factor in this decision is a shift in career focus for me. While I intend on continuing my design skills, I find myself enjoying application programming more and more each day. I find myself more challenged with this, but challenged in a good way.

I find it so much more rewarding not to be fighting the technology, but instead fighting against my own lack of knowledge as I push myself into these areas of programming that are, at least to me, new. I don’t feel like I’m giving up on HTML/CSS. In fact if anything, I consider my journey through HTML/CSS based design complete. It’s been a mix of good and bad, but what I take from it are the lessons and the experience.

So here I am, feeling at a crossroads of sorts. While I find comfort in what I’ve learned, I feel the urge to push forward, and while my past and the present is important, in many ways they both hold me back.

Now all along you’ve probably been wondering about that little picture up there. It’s for the analogy I’m about to give you: Living as a developer/web designer is much like swinging along on monkey bars. You want to keep moving because if you stop too long on one rung, you lose your momentum, you risk losing your grip, and even if you want to start moving again, it’s not that easy.

RIP, HTML/CSS
2002-2008

So it’s been a day since Flex Camp Boston and I have to say it was a great event! They had some great speakers there and it was absolutely jam-packed with information. It was a very good atmosphere and the only time I felt even slightly out of place was when someone asked anyone in the room with a graphic design background to raise their had and I think I saw only one hand other than mine. But that really doesn’t matter, Friday was about Flex, pure and simple.

If you’re interested in getting an idea of what went on, Daniel R. was taking notes and posted them on his blog.

The discussions about ColdFusion really got me excited. I’ve heard of it before (mostly because of the ColdFusion extension option in Dreamweaver installs). Now since I hadn’t heard a whole lot of buzz about ColdFusion I had pretty much dismissed it as something I should learn. However, the discussions Friday really made me start thinking that I should. It was also the first time I had actually seen ColdFusion code and at first glance I could pretty much figure out what most of the code meant. I think this is definitely (yet another) programming language I will be learning. Now I’m starting to see why a lot of the Senior level jobs out there list at least 5 programming languages as required. You simply end up learning them one way or another. I still feel like I’m constantly playing catch-up on technology, but I like to think that I’m getting closer after having learned C#, PHP, SQL, ASP.NET, Python, ActionScript, and Flex in the last 18 months.

I really want to thanks everyone who had a part in putting Flex Camp Boston together, especially Brian Rinadli and the Flex Camp sponsers. And if you were a part of it and you’re reading this, when are you going to start selling tickets for next year?

I will be attending Flex Camp Boston on December 7th. I’m very excited to be going as I have spent the last several months becoming familiar with Adobe’s Flex 3 Beta and Adobe AIR. I am presently developing an AIR application focused on providing a way for university faculty/staff to keep track of students’ progress through individual courses and through their achievement of their degree. I hope to have a functional demo available to show at Flex Camp Boston.

Spry 1.6 has been released!

OK, almost a week late posting about this, but regardless Spry 1.6 has been released by adobe as well as the Spry home page getting a brand new (and much more professional looking) makeover. This version of the framework has some new widgets as well as being a more compressed version of the library.

The Spry team mentioned on their blog that they weren’t able to fix all the bugs and add all the new features that have been requested but are continuing their work on to Spry 1.7.  They also mention a new updater for Dreamweaver CS3 that will allow for this and future Spry updates to be very easy.

Don’t forget that this is still a prerelease version of Spry, although it has still been put to use on a few popular sites and is still worth looking into and using if the functionality that you want works for your target users.