What is HYPE?
“HYPE is a creative coding framework built on top of ActionScript 3. A major goal of HYPE is to allow newcomers to Flash and ActionScript to creatively play and express themselves while they are learning how to program.”

Learn more about HYPE here:
http://hype.joshuadavis.com/

This comes from the talented artist, designer and technologist Joshua Davis.

My friend Juan Sanchez already has been playing around with it, along with Degrafa, a Declarative Graphics Framework of which he is a part. Originally, it was used primarily with Flex, but now it’s getting more AS3-based and is able to be used with Flash as well.

You can check some of his experiments at:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/mostlyalso/4073728461/

I gotta say, I was relaxed until I sat down on set, then got totally nervous. Very weird how you freeze up a little on camera. There is a ton written on the project already.

“The Complete National Geographic” is a great product, and it could be another award winner for our team. To view the press release, click here, or view it on the National Geographic Web site.

The application currently is available on Amazon.com and soon will be at Target and Walmart.

I have the majority of my sessions picked out, and I’m super excited to learn what Adobe has been cooking up since last MAX. In addition, it’s always a good time catching up with friends, meeting new ones and seeing what everyone has been up to. See you at Adobe MAX!

This is a great acknowledgment as we faced several challenges working on this application and also developed it in a fairly young technology, Microsoft’s Silverlight. I was the lead UX designer on the application, working with a very talented team. It was a great experience to get into Microsoft Expression Blend & Design to implement the styling of the application and being exposed to XAML and how scalable it is to work with, especially when collaborating with development.

I have written a post previously about this application; you can catch up on it here:
My Visual Search Post

Here is WMA’s post about it:
http://www.webaward.org/winner.asp?eid=13855

Visit Photobucket’s Visual Search application:
http://photobucket.com/visualsearch/

This looks like a great resource to add some very dynamic and robust sparkline charting elements to your Web site with very minimal implementation efforts and code.

For more info, visit:
http://www.omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/

What is a sparkline?
I first heard of this term while attending one of Edward Tufte’s conferences in Colorado a couple years ago. If you are familiar with Tufte’s work, you know his skills with data visualization and charting. He referred to the graph types that have vertical and horizontal units of measurement, which create a line that resembles a “spark” as it represents the specified data types across the graph.

This looks like a great resource to add some very dynamic and robust sparkline charting elements to your website with very minimal implementation efforts and code.

For more info, visit:
http://www.omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/

What is a sparkline?
I first heard of this term while attending one of Tufte’s conferences in Colorado a couple years ago. If you are familiar with Tufte’s work, you know his skills with data visualization and charting. He referred to the graph types that have vertical and horizontal units of measurement which create a line that resembles a “spark” as it represents the specified data types across the graph.

My session will be running on Tuesday, October 6 at 1:30 p.m. and again on Wednesday, October 7 at 5 p.m.  Hope to see you all there!

To see even more significance in that award, I’ll put it in perspective:

• EffectiveUI is about six years old.
• We have grown 2,333.9 percent since then.
• Only 38 percent of new businesses survive past the first 4 years.
• We are in the top 1 percent of businesses in terms of revenue.
• And all of this during a recession.

Pretty awesome. I hope we can all keep it going. I have total confidence that we can.

“Megan, I started going through the tutorials on eDesign and after about 10 minutes the feeling I had could be compared to when I fell in love with my husband. I liked what I had heard about him; I liked what I had observed from afar; but when we actually got to spend time together, I KNEW very soon that he was “the one.” And after 20 years, he is still the love of my life AND my best friend. I must confess that I am in love again!! eDesign is definitely “the one” for this new Yearbook Advisor. I will be so happy when we have the paperwork taken care of and my students see eDesign. They are going to be great with this program. And I am truly anticipating when returning students start working with eDesign and begin experiencing the “real Yearbook experience.”

Thank you both for your help. It is great to work with someone with enthusiasm. Our school hasn’t experienced a lot of that in the recent past but thankfully a new day has dawned – for our school, our students and their Yearbook!”

This totally made my day. Getting feedback like this about a product I helped design refuels and refreshes completely.