Sometimes finding yourself doing absolutely useless stuff. Putting such a big amount of work and enthusiasm for works or people that don’t necessarily worth it. Keeping an ideal alive, somewhere in your head, even though sometimes you feel you’re moving a bit far away from it.

Making too much compromises and thinking this is the price to pay. Trying to understand people that don’t care about anything else than money. Spending hours in sad meeting rooms staring all together at a beamer image. Wondering what you’re doing here. Looking at the city lights through the plane’s window and thinking you could do much more than that.

Being patient BUT being deeply convinced that understanding the mechanisms is a first step to change absurd things. Being deeply motivated to bring a bit more sense where it’s really needed.

Design is not a cool job, it’s a fucking hard job.

Just found this nice paper, “The Computer for the 21st Century” by Mark Weiser, from Xerox PARC.

The most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it.

Read more here.

Happy new year.
david

1500 people, 4 days, 120 sessions, 60 skill labs. MAX is probably the biggest Adobe event, it’s an opportunity to connect with designers, developers, partners, executives and have a sneek peak on Adobe’s strategy and future products. This year for the first time it was in Milan, I couldn’t miss it.

First impression: they have money, lots of money. And the kick-off meeting was, hmmm, let’s say “typically american”… 3 giant screens with 3D animations, red lasers and loud pop rock music. It made me think about a kind of Macworld-of-the-poor .

Very shortly, Adobe’s strategy for the coming year is built around three main concepts, which are Client
and Cloud, Social Computing and Multi-screens. Nothing really new or groundbreaking for us here, well Adobe is not Apple  but the right basics at least.

Client and Cloud

Among others, Air and Flex represent Adobe’s strategic approach to combine desktop and online applications. In a few words: taking advantage of services across the cloud while being strategically present on the users’ desktops.

Social Computing

Adobe’s tools already allow us to create content, well they’re gonna help us to share it more and more. Share and create with your friends and the rest of the world. Less broadcast, more participation. Real time collaboration, leverage use of social services. Three examples? Cocomo, Wave and photoshop.com.

Multi screens

Think mobile first ! Target, design and share for multi-screen world. Adobe is working on solutions aiming at facilitating the creation of consistent and reliable experience across screens and devices. They’re initiators of the Open screen project and want to impose flash player 10 as the “industry standard” for delivering rich content across all our electronic toys. Well, even tough the intention is “good”, Adobe are probably not the right people when it comes to open and standards, so….

2 cool things I tried anyway are the Flash Catalyst (ex thermo project) and building Air application directly within Dreamweaver CS4, using relatively basic skills of xhtml, css and javascript.

Adobe Flash Catalyst is a new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. I had the occasion to try it and have a special MAX 2008 early beta release on my mac  and I have to say that this is pretty smart.

First of all because it makes the entire process of designing software more flexible and more efficient. Because it allows to design interaction and motion very early in the design process, stop thinking fixed. And also because it gives a code output directly usable for developers, so that they don’t need to rebuild everything from scratch. It will not replace flash, because it’s mainly intended for rough design purposes, sketch and ideal for interactive wireframes… Adobe will release a public beta release early next year, so watch it ! I will try to post a more detail explanation, with screenshots in early january on this blog.

That’s it for now.
Best.