Due to way Facebook features are more and more embedded outside of Facebook, and because Facebook itself changes so fast, I’ve noticed that it is not always so easy to grasp what Facebook applications actually are and do. I hope this simplified image helps a little while understanding and especially explaining to others what its all about.

Attached in the end as OmniGraffle file for anyone to use as you please. If you come up with a better version, I encourage you to leave a note here and share with others.

facebook-application-anatomy.graffle

No plan survives first contact with customers (also read the comments, lot’s of valuable stuff in there). “The problem was that two weeks after they got out of the building talking to potential customers and users, they realized that at least 1/2 of their key assumptions in their wonderfully well crafted plan were wrong.”

And here are couple other good links:

The Best Entrepreneurs Know How To Fail Fast

Fail Fast, Fail Cheap“The only barrier to failing fast and failing cheap is your ego. You must be willing to fail, fail, and fail again if you are going to win in today’s competitive marketplace. Remember, even if you’re falling flat on your face, at least you’re still moving forward.

Failure success and neither (Seth Godin)

Before continuing any further, its good to look at an opposite opinion as well. Here is a good article by Mark Suster calling the fail fast meme the latest “emperors new clothes”. Why the fail fast mantra needs to fail. This is a nice provocative article that gets most things right, but the idea of the “fail fast” little wrong in my opinion. One of the key points of this article that I fully agree with though, is this: “You want to talk about the ultimate “fail fast” – how about if you fail before you’ve spent any money building product because you validate there isn’t a big enough market or you can’t make money?” Couldn’t agree more with that.

What is important to note, is that failing fast is not same as giving up. Startup company should not be filled with philosophers that try to think how world might be, but with doers that can get things “out there” to see for real and reflect on their own assumptions all the time. Ie. it encourages humility. We do, we learn. We try, we fail. We get up, and try differently.

And this is what we should be doing as opposed to concepting untill we bleed, specifying untill we get the caffeine jitters and implementing untill we dream wacky dreams of software modules that do trivial tasks.

And related to that, another good article: Startup Lessons Learned: Validating an idea, case study

So we need to (CASE 1):
1. Understand what is required to make the business work
2. Test as many of those assumptions as possible
3. Expose the idea to real market test — will they buy?
4. Fail
5. Improve and try again untill we succeed
6. Worry about the other stuff only after this

Where as before we used to (CASE 2):
1. Do lot’s and lot’s of ideating (secrecy is a big plus here)
2. Write a clever business plan (volume of pages is a big plus here)
3. Gather a team (impressive cv’s, anyone?)
4. Raise funding (more the merrier)
5. Start executing the idea (it ought to be diffcifult, right? Everyone knows it is, when its big!)
6. Expose it to real customer (of course they can’t FULLY understand it at this point)
7. Fail

CASE 1 = cheap, some weeks
CASE 2 = expensive, some years

As back to Mark’s concern, it might help to rename the whole fail fast ideology. How about if we just call it “Try fast” or “Squeeze”?

I’m planning a followup article on the suitability of this ideology in terms of funding. Especially in Finland we are blessed (?) with many public funding instruments, which principals have a limited understanding of such thinking. How can you seek funding and say that we don’t have all the answers? Good question, and all input in regards to this topic, is greatly appreciated. Do drop me a line if you have good insights into this!

ps. Big thanks goes to Osma, who has a very wise view on these matters and who has pointed most of the source materials to me.

Resource Utility is for managing personnel resources in a calendar view. It works in a very simple way: select a project and then click on the day for a person.

Benefits include easy overview of resource utilization and free resources. You can use it either in a browser or using AIR client which works like any normal desktop application.

Resource Utility features:

Pricing:

Licensing

You can use the Resource Utility application for free. You can do whatever you wish with the back-end code. At least for now, the AIR application source code is not available. If you wish to obtain source code or need some custom modifications, please contact us at info east.fi. No support, sorry. Flex and AIR are registered trademarks of Adobe Systems Inc. Resource Utility is a trade mark of East Interactive Finland Oy Ltd. And credit where its due; the original resourcing concept comes from Imppu. Thanks!

Privacy note

When downloading, we are asking your email address just out of curiosity. We will not spam and we will respect your wish if you don’t want to be notified of updates. Your email address will not be rented, sold, given or used for any other purpose than providing notification on updates. AIR application will contact our server to check for updates, and when it does that, we will save your IP address. We use this information for usage statistics and that is the only information that gets passed to us.

Try Online Demo

username: demo
password: demo

Or

ResurceUtility AdobeAir application
Backend cfg: http://east.fi/ru/demo/db/
username: demo
password: demo

Downloads
Resource Utility Server
Resource Utility Client (AIR)

In case you wonder, visualization on the front page is a graphical representation of our version control system activity from few of the projects we’ve been building the past twelve months. Check out the Subversion visualization tool to make your own visualizations.

Some of the bots are freely available and we plan to release more with very permissive licenses. For more information about the concept, visit Activebot.net’s own wiki.

Some benefits we’ve found with this approach:

Happy coding to everyone!

It is a perfect example of focus and specialisation – Let’s focus on the core business, the rest is sourced.
MMO gamers often complain about the need to “grind” stuff, farming gold and special gears by doing repetitive tasks for days or weeks. As a result, many choose to buy the in-game stuff with real-life money, so they can spend time playing instead of grinding.

Such opportunity obviously has given birth to a new kind of career.
It is a bit in the grey area whether it is a work or a game.

In South Korea, virtual game shows attract millions of audience.
Teenagers are coached and trained in camps “sumo-style” to excel in playing the games .
The parents are all supportive for such career path, that later on their children would prosper in the game industry.

This brings up the memory of the time when call center business started to pop up in India.
This demonstrates yet again what a strong impact video games have in our everyday life.

Many have claimed that print advertisement is ineffective (or even dead). Or then, more and more people stop watching TV these days. People are all getting so accustomed to following news and trends in blogs, forums, widgets and social networks. That everything has become dominantly digital.

In the meantime, book sales in Finland have increased in the past years. Print newspaper and TV news broadcast are apparently still the most important sources of news in Finland (a country swimming in technology and geeks?).

Certainly, it does not necessarily mean all these people who watch TV news and buy books would also faithfully subscribe to print ads and TV commercials. Also, the demography of these people is an a very important factor.

However, it is obvious that offline marketing is not dead and digital is not all mighty. They are just different medium. And the fact is, different medium have their edge in different time and space targeting different people: morning coffee, afternoon coffee, evening couch-potate time, or private time in toilet; for females, people in their middle age, or teenagers. Careful planning and timing is crucial.

Timing apparently also has it that while I am still browsing through my magazine pile, Captain Blackbeak has made a bunch of excellent points concerning recession and marketing.
Instead of following the herd blindly, or going digital full speed as if there is no tomorrow, the key question for both agencies and clients at the moment, as Captain Blackbeak also stated, should be “Where is my advertising effective and why?”

It is true that in the current recession digital marketing is very likely going to grow significantly. It is not because there has been lots of hypes and optimism spinning within the marketing scene. It is just that tough time forces people to look for alternatives, challenge accepted status quo, and be more effective in achieving results. It is just that both agencies and clients have to get smarter.

and further that
• traditional media is really suffering
• 47% will be increasing their internet marketing spending
• 56% will be increasing their email marketing spending
• 40% will be increasing their mobile marketing spending
• 52% will be increasing their search engine marketing spending
• other growth areas are direct marketing and in-shop advertising

so things are looking rather peachy for digital agencies. Or are they?

So what is it that those marketing euros will be spent on? My guess is, that the most immediate stuff is:
• more keyword advertising
• lot’s of banners (auts!)
• some campaign sites (double auts!)

But other than that, what are advertising agencies and digital media agencies offering? Hopefully many different ideas and concepts will be planned and tried. But in times like these, are marketing decision makers brave enough to do something out of kilter? Next time you plan, consider some of these, and please feel free to suggest some more ways to do something else than banners, keywords & campaign sites:

• different forms of viral marketing (more about these in another post later)
• blog sponsoring
• product blogs
• blogs providing full transparency
• sponsored & syndicated content
• recommendation marketing
• transaction marketing
• custom communities
• community participation
• discussion forums
• commenting
• comparison services
• questionnaires
• application
• games
• affiliate marketing
• email marketing
• mobile marketing

… and the list goes on. Of course marketing planning should not start from means instead of business objectives, but means is a fair gauge of how “digitally aware” your marketing is.

Couple interesting findings:
• Taneli’s interesting look at two popular communities and their demographics: Facebook Finland Network revealed + IRC-Galleria comparison

• Osma’s (very detailed) look at how LinkedIn deploys AdSense. This one raises lot’s of interesting questions about the future of targeted marketing: How LinkedIn’s special keyword Google AdSense works

Less money, more results

Having less money around, there is less things you can do. Now how this can be a good thing? In situation of limited resources you are forced to look the optimum way to reach certain result. When pursuing for goal you are much more challenged looking to alternative paths how to reach it. It the “fat old days” not so long ago it used to be that you had plenty of choices that you could choose from –developing certain online service you could choose doing it yourself, finding right partner to do it or use already some existing and modify it.

Now with fewer resources many of the top decisions are already done for us. We can only focus on the really relevant doable options and just have to discard others. So this means we have to sacrifice some of the results also – right? Think again.

Scarcity brings clarity

There exists interesting study of comparing human performance in different option spaces. Economic game involving MIT-students moving in the virtual rooms / options aiming for best possible income provided interesting results. The performance of players actually dropped 15% when more options were introduced. This is because of human psychology; “Closing a door on an option is experienced as a loss, and people are willing to pay a price to avoid the emotion of loss”

Putting this into business context is kind of interesting. The downturn has closed many doors for all of us and sure it hurts us but as that is something we cannot change let’s think that the economy did us a favor – we even may have some increase in productivity.

Other means speeding up on the downturn

Less competition. Competitors decrease as the players with weak business models drop out. Just make sure you are not belonging to that group. There is also chance that some players are forced to move in to your market but established players should be in good position to counter new entrants.

Good people. It is easier to keep and recruit new employees. Not many are willing to change jobs on downturn so there is good chance keeping the key people for your business. Those companies that end up with difficulties may have to lay off good people so capturing a talented individual or even a team is a good possibility.

So at the end economic downturn and scarce resources do not have to mean fewer results and may even be an opportunity to getting more done and build your business ready for the economical rebound. Who knows – maybe the recovery can be as fast as the tumble.

Their answer is “yes but no way, we will not commission you.”
I thought it was about confidence on our competences and experience. And I showed them some stuff we have done and the relevant prices.
“So, are we not good enough?”
“Certainly yes. And you are cheaper. But still no.”

They showed me what one agency has done for them so far.
“The concept is .. ah… lame”
“Yeah, tell us about it!”
“The visuals are kind of fresh, though.”
“Yes, but the UI makes us mad! And we complained about it already in the last campaign.”
“What is the campaign supposed to achieve?”
“Lots of eyeballs from the streets and screens. And win an award.”
I almost choked when they told me how much their agency charges them.

I thought my team and I can do a better job for them.
I asked “So what do these agencies provide you that small agencies like us do not?
“Nothing. Actually, probably even less.”
“Umm .. But still you would not commission us?”
“Nope, that is the painful reality. We are bound by traditions and bureaucracy.”

So, bound by traditions and bureaucracy, marketing agencies sell less results for more money?
It really got me thinking, especially in the context of such an economic downturn.
Shouldn’t marketing be focused on getting results first? Namely sales of a product, instead of winning an award. In bad time like this, I would expect people reflect more on their habits and traditions, be inventive and make changes.
Well, maybe and maybe not.

This is what they say:

Tour de Flex includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. Topics include the Flex Core Components, Flex Data Access, AIR Desktop Capabilities, Cloud APIs, Data Visualization, Mapping, and a growing collection of custom components, effects, skins, etc.

How cool is that?

Papervision3D is for real. From what I’ve ever seen with Flash3D this is the first time I’ve seen something that’s really usable 3D in Flash! Carlos Ulloa, the author, has done a excellent job in creating a very clean, easy to use api. I was up and running in less than 10 minutes with my first project!

Now, if you come from a background in 3D with programs like 3D Studio Max, Maya or Softimage, you’re gonna love this. It works the way you’d expect it to work with controlling 3D space – x, y, z, rotationx, rotationy, rotationz, scalex, scaley, scalez. PV3D also gives you the ability to manage a camera with zoom and focus to create different lens effects.

Papervision3D and Anaglyph

The implementation of Anaglyph technology is truly easy, all we need is papervision3d project. If we have an older version of Papervision3D, we just need to swap out the existing Scene3D with AnaglyphicScene3D. For papervision3d GreatWhite release, must be used the AnaglyphicRenderEngine and ejoy.

All codes for anaglyph tech is available here.

With some perspective of doing various kind of development projects I am more and more convinced that in many cases the challenge and opportunities of continuous development still remains to be fully discovered. Project being big or small, product or service – the same challenges seem to exist.

There are few facts that we know regarding just about any project or development effort
-    The budget and timeframe is always challenging, often both fail short
-    The final results are not perfect – not even when it was exactly what was envisioned when starting the project
-    Lack of understanding what really needs to be done – requirements and the features of the “thing” is understood not until the project is already well on its way
-    Listening customer – Once the project is completed we start getting the real feedback from our efforts, but very often chances to react are limited because of lack of resources (which are often released soon after the “thing” launches)

All of these are symptoms of one-phase-single-try discontinuous development.

This does not make sense – unless you are in a discontinuous business.

Reasons for this are:
-    Business is continuous evolving interaction with customer – (at least should be)
-    The launch of the product or service is just a beginning of that interaction, the work really starts from there  – not end as many have tendency to believe
-    If the product/service development is subcontracted the customer wants to have long term development partner
-    The subcontractor wants to have successful customer providing continuous stream of development orders also in future

So the solutions part – nothing above was anything new for anybody -  iterative and agile development are the practical tools for these, HOWEVER on the business management level we STILL seem to operate like the old days of deliver-and-forget kind of mode.

Simple solutions:
1.    Start with small steps – not major big bang but gradual increments
2.    Try different things – test and experiment various opportunities to reach your goal
3.    Start spending in right points of time – when you have proof that something seems to work, focus resources to develop that particular area
4.    Reserve resources for continuous development – note that this does not mean MORE resources but rather using those same resources for the right things at the right point of time
5.    Build for long-term-result based partnerships rather than one-time-deliveries

Sounds easy? Too easy? What do you think?

If you look at the numbers, WOW (and MMO) is phenomenal. Earlier this year, WOW active subscriber number hit the 10 million mark. Meanwhile, there are about 16 millions of active MMO subscribers worldwide. If we do some simple maths here, assuming the games charge an average of 10€ month subscription fee, we see a 160 million € revenue.

In real life MMO seems to bear similar kind of intensity. People buy and sell in-game items in eBay. People pay others real money to power-level their in-game characters. People trade real money with in-game money. Some people also steal others’ in-game properties. In tragic cases, it even resulted death of real persons.

In the meanwhile time, MMO is not just for teenagers, who run marathon playing sessions on pizza and energy drinks in basements. Look at The Sims Online. Look at Second Life. Even “niche” fantasy MMORPG like LOTRO are full of players in their 30s and 40s. Regularly in the game I meet these people, who have regular jobs, spouses and children. They interact with each other outside the game, run net discussion forums about in-game issues …

The mind-boggling numbers, violence and the diverse age group lead me to think about the GTA series. With friends we have been discussing when they will release a true GTA Online MMO. After all, there is already the MTAcv.
And with 6 million copies sold in the first week alone, the GTA4 sales are pretty comparable to WOW.

So, the million dollar question is how marketers do take advantage of such massive amount of eyeballs. Yes, there is Second Life. There is also Habbo Hotel. But imagine the potential GTA Online, in which a second New York City is recreated, with all the shops, malls, office buildings, taxis, billboards … And players all can roam around do whatever they are so used to do in the GTA games, joining and forming gangs, grabbing territories, earning street creds … It will be a totally different ball game.

As a gamer, I would love to see that. As a marketer, I cannot wait for such opportunity.

Another take on where the line is drawn, is this time from digg.com. You know all these ridiculously long terms and conditions you agree, when you register to a site? Here is an exert from digg’s tos:

By way of example, and not as a limitation, you agree not to use the Services:
9. with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services;

Well, I was found guilty. My crime was digging one of our blog article and suggesting others from East to do it as well (most grave offense I later learned). This is the end part of a discussion with their support (which started by me profusely apologizing for any possible misconduct I might be guilty of, unknowingly):

Your account was removed for violating the Digg Terms of Service (digg.com/tos) that you agreed to.

“By way of example, and not as a limitation, you agree not to use the Services:

with the intention of artificially inflating or altering the ‘digg count’, blog count, comments, or any other Digg service, including by way of creating separate user accounts for the purpose of artificially altering Digg’s services; giving or receiving money or other remuneration in exchange for votes; or participating in any other organized effort that in any way artificially alters the results of Digg’s services;”

Due to the nature and severity of abuse, your account will not be re-instated. This decision is final and irreversible.

So that’s it. Bye digg. And sorry about the trouble, I really should have known better. Well, it seems this is quite commonplace with digg. Here are some interesting reads, if you are interested in digg:

How I got banned from digg
How to get banned by digg
The hypocrisy of digg and spam
Life after digg, an interview

It could also be said that I was “digg illiterate”. I didn’t know the rules, but I started to play the game nevertheless. And I’ve been around for a while (since the good 1200 baud modems and bbs’s). Just shows you the importance of knowing the rules, whether they are written, unwritten or in a form of some legal mumbojumbo. Has anyone else gotten burned recently?

Multitasking is a proven Productivity killer. No doubt about this. But we are living in a multitasking world no matter if we are talking about our personal live or our job and have to survive somehow. Trying to get rid of it will not help, it is simply not possible. What we can do is an OPTIMIZATION.

There are number of ways to do this and each and everyone have to find what fits him best.
I will share my personal experience here and I will be glad to hear what is your way for optimizing (if you have such. If not then go and get one right away or you are lost ).

First, start with changing your waking-up habit – if you are not one of those so called “morning birds”. There is nothing more productive than the “fresh morning brain” (Hannibal Lectar will agree with me)

Usually I wake up around 6:30 and going to the office around 8:00 (one hour before the rest of the colleagues). This one hour alone in the office helps me very much to organize my thoughts and to prepare my plan for the day.

Start with creating a simple text document on your desktop and call it TODAY.txt
Then I’m starting to outline all that I have to do during the day in order of IMPORTANCE.

TIP: Try to schedule your tasks so that you do the most important of them before lunch time. It is proven that afternoon hours are not that productive so leave the lowest priority tasks for the afternoon.

What If an unexpected and unscheduled task comes to you during the day?
First – do not panic, instead do PLANNING!

Second – stick to the TODAY.txt plan. If you haven’t accomplished the highest priority task for that day – don’t pay big attention to the new one which just came. This will only distract your focus and will have a negative effect on your overall performance for the day.

Never overload your colleagues!
It is better to outsource in case of an unscheduled task than putting more loads on your colleague’s shoulders and make them stressed to heaven. You will see the revenue of this approach with the time and also this will grant better quality to your Clients. In order to achieve this, try to always have an up-to-date “Outsource Help list” next to you.

Always discuss!
Do not act like a “Big Boss”. Instead, be a good Listener. Remember – the Multitasking leads to Stress (which is not bad in healthy doses) and of course the Stress lowers the Productivity. The key to avoid this is preparing realistic daily plan and very well balanced distribution of duties. At least this model works well for me.

Looking forward to hear your thoughts and improvement suggestions

And please bear in mind, that I write from my own perspective, which is a perspective of a digital media & internet worker, enthusiastic, addict and science fiction buff. So do take my views with a grain of salt. Since I seem to have too much to say, I’ve divided this into few parts.

Drivers for change

To understand what is going on in the world of technology, internet and the world in general, I feel its important to look at drivers behind all the change taking place. There are number of things at play, which all affect each other in ways no one really fully understands. And it’s not exactly easy to recognize the drivers either, but I’ll give my best shot at it.

The most important factors in my opinion are:
1) Constantly accelerating speed of change
2) Relationships & trust
3) Fragmentation & attention span
- personal time
- information
- attention
- communications
4) Our relationship with information
- the exponential growth of it
- availability of it
- interconnectedness of everything
- constant availability
5) Moore’s law

In all of these areas, we’ve already experienced the first waves, and world is truly not what it used to be ten years ago. To examine these drivers a little further:

1) Constantly accelerating speed of change
For this, I would recommend reading Alvin Toffler’s Future Shock, where he talks about this topic. And it’s amazing, that this piece was written in the 1970s! Some time ago, there were times for five year plans. Then we started planning one year at a time. Then came the quarter economy — we were planning in cycles of 3 months. Now three months is too long. They say there is a limit to Moore’s law in technology (obviously we haven’t reached the limit yet). In the same way, is there a limit to how much change we can handle as human beings? We haven’t seen the limits yet at least.

Part of this phenomena is agile approach to everything. We do before we plan. We iterate everything. We accept that things are more often totally incomplete. Everything is always in beta. If its ready, it must be outdated. We do and then discard. We mix and mash. We understand that whatever we do, it will be expired in no time.

Currently I see huge differences between companies and between individuals in how they cope with change. There are very few big companies that are agile, and because of that smaller companies can have a certain advantage, if only they realize that. What was important before? Muscle. Something that big companies are good at. What will be essential in the future? Ability to change and adapt. Something smaller companies are better suited for.

2) Relationships and trust
First it was what you know. Then it was who you know. Next one is about who you trust. Today a teenager has as big network in IRC-gallery or Facebook as the most seasoned business “networker”. Busy people meet more new people during a week than our ancestors met in their lifetime. Our networks are getting bigger and bigger, and even here in Finland, we’ve learned how to “network”. But who can we trust?

I’ve been wondering for some time, why despite all these social networks, we are not seeing too many networks that put emphasis on trust. I’d like to see a web service where you can register, create your network and then give context sensitive trust ratings to all of your contacts. You would have your own personal “trust ticker”, updated in real time, reflecting all changes in your social relationships. Cruel? For sure. Will it happen? For sure.

If such a trust network existed and it would reach critical mass, it would become impossible to ignore it. We would start basing all of your business dealings to trust ratings of our potential business partners. Phone rings, and there you don’t know the number? Luckily, based on reverse query of the phone number, it would also indicate the trust rating and its strength on the screen when it rang. Based on that, you would make a decision about answering the call.

All of this would be possible with today’s technology, and I argue that also certain social demand exists for it. Remember, you read it here first.

3) Fragmentation & attention span
We are dealing with more and more information and more and more stimulus in smaller and smaller dozes. The change is many times faster than what the evolution has prepared us for. Here are few very interesting articles about what’s going on:

Driven to distraction by technology:
“The typical office worker is interrupted every three minutes by a phone call, e-mail, instant message or other distraction. The problem is that it takes about eight uninterrupted minutes for our brains to get into a really creative state.”

Life interrupted (about human multitasking):
“In fact, multitasking — a computing term that involves doing, or trying to do, more than one thing at once — has cemented itself into our daily lives and is intensely studied. Research has shown it to be consistently counterproductive, often foolish, unhealthy in the long run, and in the case of gabbing on the cell phone while driving, relatively dangerous. Yet it is also expected, encouraged and basically essential.”

Keeping Pace with Today’s Quick Brains
One of the key parts of the brain which focuses attention is the Reticular Activating System (RAS). Located in a very low region of the brain, the RAS has the job of filtering all incoming stimuli and making the decision as to whether we attend or ignore something. How does this play in today’s classroom?

4) Our relationship with information
Do you remember the days when information was not a commodity but a scarcely distributed form of wealth? When we paid big sums of money to access databanks & read almost exclusive white papers. Especially when there was LESS OF IT ALL.

Anyone can produce information and thanks to the internet, everyone can also distribute it in the most efficient manner. Challenge obviously is, that there is so much of it (over 900.000 blog posts like this one a day according to Technorati) that its not easy to find it. Also this links back to the previous point about trust. You have all the information in the world, but what part of it can you trust?

Still; I claim, that we’ve only seen a beginning. We still don’t have the intelligent knowledge agents Apple envisioned in the 80’s, that would harvest the net for information that would be relevant to you, and would cross-reference it in a way that is only possible to AI. And on the other hand, we do have it; just look at digg and other services that do all of this, but with a help of thousands of people. “Wisdom” of the crowds?

5) Moore’s Law
“The complexity for minimum component costs has increased at a rate of roughly a factor of two per year … Certainly over the short term this rate can be expected to continue, if not to increase. Over the longer term, the rate of increase is a bit more uncertain, although there is no reason to believe it will not remain nearly constant for at least 10 years. That means by 1975, the number of components per integrated circuit for minimum cost will be 65,000. I believe that such a large circuit can be built on a single wafer.[2]”

So far we’ve been doubling processing speed every two years. What we have today on palm of our hand (like iPhone) would have been unthinkable ten years ago. We are living sci-fi. And actually we’ve reached a point where we don’t really demand the processing power as fast as it’s growing. The technology in computers we had three years ago, is still almost as valid today as it was three years ago. Almost memory is so cheap, it’s not really an issue anymore. Also in many countries, the 3G network is so good, that you are basically connected at all times.

So what more could we hope for? Brain to computer interface would be really nice. Just to take use of all this magnificent power we have in a more efficient manner.

And others
These were my five drivers, and here are some that didn’t make it on the list, partially because they are not really drivers as such anymore, more like current conditions:
- globalization
- mobility
- ideas are more of a commodity

I don’t normally recommend books that I don’t really like, but in this case I will make an exception. Thomas L. Friedman has written a book called “The World Is Flat” which deals with change and drivers behind this change. Mr. Friedman is totally clueless on certain issues and doesn’t hide the fact that he’s very impressed with his own intellectual process, but still, he manages to draw a fairly good picture about the change taking place. Anyone able to recommend better book on the topic, that would contain less factual errors?

In the next post, I’ll try to get into the actual predictions of the future.

2. Smart Objects can link to their masks and they can transformed with Free transform, Perspective etc.

3. Easier moving between tools.
When I work with Brush Tool for example I can push L tool. In time when I push L I can work with Lasso Tool, when I stop pushing L button I return to Brush Tool again.

4. Shortcuts for Channels are Ctr+2,3,4…
Ctr+1 is Actual Size

5. In previous CS3 version you can delete layer (del, Backspace) only when you work with Move Tool. Now you can delete layer always.

6. For Mac users – Ctr+` switch between tabs.

7. If you work with Hand Tool and the image is enlarged you may hold down left mouse button any time and Photoshop gives you preview with the whole image and you can quickly navigate in it.

8. In Adjustment palette (Curves, H&S и B&W) there is a Target Adjustment Tool which can correct only selected values instead of the whole image.

9. Dodge and Burn Tools have one check box – Protect Tones. It makes awesome corrections.

10. Edit >Auto Align layers Vignette Removal check box

11. Edit > Auto Blend Layers . This blends selected layers with image with different focus point. The result is one image with a better focus. Very interesting functionality.

12. Edit -Content Aware ToolThis is awesome smart resize tool!

All this makes developer’s life a little bit complicated. So there is Ant
First of all if you are willing to use it you should install it within flex builder:
Help -> Software updates -> Find And Install -> Eclipse Discovery Site -> Java Development -> java development tools

Second is just to place & configure the attached build scripts.
* auto-build-scripts v1.0
* auto-build-scripts v2.0

Note: for the configuration of the build scripts you’ll need some knowledge of ant scripts syntax and a guide line.

Here is some brief setup guideline (later one I’ll post detailed one):
1) copy the jsch-0.1.29.jar into you ant plugin libs directory ( ussually this is something like this on windows based systems C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 3\plugins\org.apache.ant_1.7.0.v200706080842\lib)\org.apache.ant_1.7.0.v200706080842\lib )
2) download automation build scripts v2.0 and follow the steps from the readme.txt (bellow is shown for reference)

Little hints:
* version.xml placed into the root of the project is a templating xml which on every build its version is incremented so later at runtime it can be loaded (or even embed on compiletime) to recognize the build version of the project

Todos:
The selected automation building approach is very scalable and can be improved in many different ways:
- improve the scripts to state when they can completely replace the internal flex builder compile routine ( this can be achieved by following the instructions )

Readme.txt (included into auto-build-scripts.zip v2.0)
Air Release Automation
———————-

~ setup & installation ~

- create new air project with name <> under – copy content from auto-build-scripts/airProject/* to /*
- configure the release output via air.properties, air-config.xml, local.properties
- Open Ant View -> add ./build-scripts/build.xml
- execute the script

Note: the project should follow the following structure to get it working quickly:

|- build-scripts
|- build.xml
|- src
|- <>.mxml
|- version.properties
|- versionTemplate.xml
|- local.properties
|- air.properties
|- air-config.xml

Flex Release Automation
———————-

~ setup & installation ~

- create new flex project with name <> under – copy content from auto-build-scripts/flexProject/* to /*
- configure the release output via flex.properties, flex-config.xml, local.properties
- Open Ant View -> add ./build-scripts/build.xml
- execute the script

Note: the project should follow the following structure to get it working quickly:

|- build-scripts
|- build.xml
|- src
|- <>.mxml
|- version.properties
|- versionTemplate.xml
|- local.properties
|- flex.properties
|- flex-config.xml