Author / Grant Skinner

Grant Skinner

The "g" in gskinner. Also the "skinner".

@gskinner

by Grant Skinner

gskinner.com Hits 3 Years and 10 People

I’m pretty excited that my little company recently reached 10 full time people. We’re just entering our fourth year as a company, and it’s been a wild ride. I have an awesome team, we have a lot of fun, and we get the opportunity to work on great projects in addition to building out some of our own internal ideas.

Our continued growth means we can tackle bigger and more interesting projects, as well as broaden the scope of the services we offer. But, it is a little weird to be running a company that offers benefits. 🙂

It is also kind of cool to finally be able to select the second option on those “company size” dropdowns (10-50), though I’m not that interested in ever making it to the third option (51-500?).

Thanks to my team (present and past) for being such all round great people to work with, our clients for challenging us to push the boundaries and giving us such awesome projects, Adobe (and the not to be forgot Macromedia) for the tools/platform and the openness with developers, and everyone in the community that has helped make it such a cool space to work in. Cheers!

It’s an exciting time in this industry, and I’m really looking forward to the next 3 years.

by Grant Skinner

A Flash of Silverlight? My Analysis.

By now, everyone has heard of Silverlight (previously WPF/E), Microsoft’s answer to the Flash player. There have been a lot of posts on the topic of Flash versus Silverlight, but I thought I would chime in with my own thoughts on the subject. I have not played with Silverlight in much depth, so please feel free to correct me if there are mistakes.

From my perspective, the discussion can be broken into four categories: opportunity, runtime, tools, and intent.

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by Grant Skinner

Flex + Apollo + Digg API = DiggTop!

When we were invited to build a sample application for the Digg API contest, my first thought was to do something cool with another new release. We’ve been doing a ton of work with Apollo (our “gTimer” time management app for example), and I decided it would be fun to do something more “creative” with it.

The concept was to build a desktop Digg reader that I would personally want to use (I’m fussy). I wanted it to be something really functional and useful. I wanted an Apollo application that added value to the Digg experience, and skipped the seemingly obligatory cube flip effect (fast becoming the hallmark of Apollo apps). This wasn’t planned to be an application that wowed you at first sight, but rather be an application you’d want to keep using after the first day or two.

The end result was DiggTop. It’s a nice, small (<500kb), unobtrusive (especially in mini mode), cross-platform application (Mac OSX and Windows XP) that lets you view a custom blended Digg feed on your desktop. We mainly aimed to keep it simple and usable, but we also threw in a few cool features, like keyword feed support, custom article notifications, video preview, application update notification, and image slideshows.

I’d love to go into depth about it’s features and how we built it, but I’m catching a plane to FitC Toronto in the morning, and should probably finish packing. Instead, I’ll leave you with a screenshot, and a link to the DiggTop home page, where you can learn more, and download the alpha application for free.

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by Grant Skinner

Flash CS3 Components Revealed

FitC Toronto 2007 is just a couple weeks away, and I’m working hard to finish off my talk on the Flash CS3 component set.

I was really excited when my team (gskinner.com) was chosen to develop the component set for Flash CS3 (except FLVPlayback), with Adobe and Metaliq. I had the pleasure (and stress!) of leading the architecture and development of this new set of components.

At FitC Toronto, I will be giving a full tour of the v3 components. I’ll be talking about the goals and philosophy behind the new architecture, skinning, styling, and extensibility (extending or creating new components). I’ll also take a shallow dive (I only have an hour) into the inner workings of the new component architecture. I’m hoping to provide content for both designers working with components, and developers that are interested in building new components or extending existing ones.

FitC looks like it’s going to be one of the best conferences in 2007, with a really stellar speaker roster. If you’re going to be there, and want to learn about the latest set of components in Flash, check out my session “Components and AS3” right after lunch on the second day. Also, feel free to pop in on my panel with some really smart dudes (Mike Downey, Aral Balkan, Keith Peters, and Chris Allen) on “AS3, Flex & Apollo: What They Mean For You” on the first day of the conference right before lunch.

by Grant Skinner

Back from Japan

I just got back from 16 awesome days in Japan. My wife and I spent a week in Kyoto, and a week in Tokyo, checking out the sights, eating amazing food, experiencing the culture and hanging out with friends.

There’s way too much to talk about here, so I’ll stick to super brief disjointed thoughts: Kyoto is really beautiful, and an excellent place to experience the more traditional side of Japan. Tokyo is a huge, crowded, and rather ugly city (aren’t all big cities?), but the people and culture make it amazing. The amount of respect, decency, and politeness Japanese people show others gives me hope for the rest of the world. Cherry blossom season is a great time to go to Japan – it’s so beautiful under the Sakura, and there’s so much happening. Hanging out with Marcos and Glyn (who flew up from Korea) was awesome – great company, and we got to experience parts of Tokyo that we never would have otherwise (thanks guys!). Japanese gardens are absolutely unsurpassed in beauty and detail – every step reveals a new, perfect photo opportunity. There’s a lot of super cool stuff to buy in Japan (we certainly got our fair share), including some really neat toys. Heated toilet seats are kind of nice (I suppose moreso for female types), but I’m not a fan of “posterior washes” (it’s kind of violating). You must have sushi at the tsukiji fish market at least once in your life (it’s soooo good).

We were there mostly for vacation, but I also squeezed in a little time to meet up with Mariko and Teiichi from Adobe Japan, as well as to show some of my recent work and hang out with some Tokyo Flashers. It was really great meeting everyone, and getting to see and hear about some of the cool work that’s going on over there.

Overall, one of the best trips I’ve been on. I’d strongly recommend it to anyone. I took a ton of photos, and might post some here when I have time. I’m going to have to do some re-working of my Sakura experiments to match all the photos I took.

Now I have to get busy and finish preparing for FitC Toronto (which I also highly recommend)!

by Grant Skinner

Apollo Time Tracking Application: Codenamed gTimer

Our development team is in a mixed environment of Mac OSX and PCs (mostly WinXP), and one of the challenges we’ve always faced is time tracking and reporting. There are plenty of decent, low-cost options on either platform, but we were never able to find a single time tracker that worked on both that met our needs. When I started playing with Apollo, I realized that it would be a great technology to build a cross platform time tracking application that did everything we needed. We’ve been working on it for awhile, and the result is a cool Apollo app we’ve code named gTimer (the name will change). If you’ve attended any Adobe keynotes or conference sessions about Apollo you may have seen it demoed.

I think it’s somewhat unique, in that it leverages Apollo’s potential in a different manner than the one Adobe is promoting. Rather than taking an existing web property, and moving it onto the desktop, we have created a new desktop application that takes advantage of the web, the Flash platform’s capabilities for rich UIs, and Apollo’s cross-platform support.

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by Grant Skinner

Using Flash Symbols with ActionScript in Flex

Normally Flex will strip all ActionScript from an embedded Flash symbol. We’ve developed a technique called Shake’n’Bake SWFs (yes, I did watch Talladega Nights before coming up with the name), which allows you to utilize Flash symbols in Flex projects with all AS intact. I mentioned this technique at 360Flex, but didn’t go into much detail because there are better options available when using Flash CS3. A couple of people mentioned that they would like to learn about the technique, so I thought I’d blog about it.
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