Let’s face it, the web application development space is constantly changing, and while the world goes by at 140 characters per second (depending on who you follow), sometimes its great just to be able to sit back and read a magazine from cover to cover.

Appliness is a new FREE digital magazine that covers all things related to web app development and how they relate to the Adobe toolset and related technology. It’s produced with Adobe’s Digital Publishing Suite and therefore available on both iPad & Android. Each issue has great articles, code samples and more and is a great read.

Go check it out on iTunes Store and Google Play and make sure you give the team feedback so they can continue to produce relevant content!

Adobe today announced the availability of a major update to its Web Experience Management (WEM) solution, part of the Adobe® Digital Marketing Suite. At a time when marketing budgets are under intense scrutiny and a one-size-fits-all approach to reaching customers is no longer acceptable, the WEM solution helps organizations drive engagement by delivering more consistent, contextually relevant experiences on the Web, mobile devices and social media.

Through a unique combination of the latest Adobe Digital Marketing Suite products and services, Adobe WEM empowers marketers, in partnership with IT, to quickly personalize brand and e-commerce experiences, optimize landing pages and micro sites, and engage in social communities and conversations. The latest solution consists of:

• Easy-to-use, unified Web Content Management (WCM) that helps marketers leverage customer context to personalize online experiences and better reach digitally immersed customers
• Innovative HTML5 Mobile Application publishing support for the rapid, simultaneous launch of content across websites, mobile sites and smartphone and tablet apps
• Enterprise-class Digital Asset Management (DAM) intuitively integrated with Adobe creative tools and the forthcoming Adobe Creative Cloud™ to streamline creation and re-use of rich media

At the heart of the WEM solution is Adobe CQ, a recognized industry leader in WCM software built on open standards. The new Adobe CQ 5.5, available today, significantly builds on this leadership position through several innovations, as well as integration with other products in the Digital Marketing Suite, including Insight for analyzing large volumes of data in real-time; Scene7® for converting rich media to dynamic content optimized across channels; Search&Promote for targeted site search and surfacing relevant product and content matches; SiteCatalyst® for actionable online analytics; and Test&Target™ for website optimization and personalization. In addition to new e-commerce capabilities delivered via an open framework and partnership with market-leader, hybris (see separate release), Adobe CQ 5.5 advances include:

• Client Context—Deliver contextualized content and consistent brand experiences as customers move from channel-to-channel and device-to-device. Harnessing rich profile, segmentation and analytics data from the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite, Client Context empowers digital marketers to create, preview and optimize the personalized experience of target customer audiences.
• Mobile App Development—Empower marketing to rapidly create HTML5-based mobile apps through new integration with PhoneGap, Adobe’s standards-based framework for building cross-platform apps. Intuitive, drag-and-drop functionality takes full advantage of device features, such as the accelerometer, camera and GPS.
• DAM—Enable collaboration on rich media assets, including video, beyond the borders of the organization. Marketers can easily find, share, add comments to, and revise and publish assets regardless of format, speeding time to market on digital campaigns. Now includes integration with Adobe Creative Suite® tools, as well as Adobe Creative Cloud, which is expected in the first half of 2012.
• Cloud Manager (beta)—Ensure optimal performance during peak customer demand by eliminating bottlenecks and accelerating time-to-market on new campaigns. New cloud service enables marketers to take control of fluctuating peak customer traffic while minimizing turnaround time of key online initiatives.

While Adobe CQ5 offers many out of the box video capabilities, some of our customers are using Brightcove’s video cloud platform and need to integrate the two technologiess. Adobe Solution Partner Coresecure have developed a very nice integration piece for connecting CQ5 with Brightcove.

I’ve downloaded the package and tested with my CQ5 installation and the content author experience is as nice as possible. Just drag & drop the Brightcove component onto a page in CQ, then search and drag the video you want to play from the Content Finder. That’s it! Sizing & alignment options are also available via the dialogue.

Features & Benefits

The Brightcove Video Cloud CQ5 component includes the following features:

• Browse your Video Cloud account within the CQ5 interface
• Search for videos by Video ID or by name
• Embed a video and player into a page

A full guide on the integration capabilities is here

Getting Started Guide

Installation Instructions and an Administrative Guide can be found on opensource.brightcove.com, by visiting Coresecure or download directly from GitHub.

Pricing Model

This integration is a Brightcove Open Source project, available free of charge to the Brightcove community. Yes FREE!!!

If you’ve seen other CQ5 components out in the wild, let me know!

I’ve been reading quite a lot about Arduino & open source hardware recently and managed to build my first robot! Since I learned quite a bit in the process I wanted to share the experience.

This robot is based on the Magician Chassis from Dagu using an Arduino controller & Monster Moto Shield. I order the kit from Australian Robotics who have had really good service and delivery times.

I approached the building in a few stages;

1. Assemble the chassis
2. Program the Ultrasonic Range Finder
3. Program the Monster Moto Shield
4. Combine the above three steps!

Assemble the chassis

Assembling the chassis was quite simple. Most of the pieces simply screw together although I had a bit of fun trying to get the motor mounts to snap in place. They were a bit tight but managed to fit so if you experience the same then you should get there eventually.

Programming the Ultrasonic Range Finder

This part was fun and my first experience doing something more interesting with an Arduino beyond blinking a LED. I used a breadboard and experimented getting the range finder working in isolation. This is generally a good way to approach building anything, as once the range finder was working I knew that code was fine and could go onto the next step.

Before moving on, I made one simple mod to the basic range finder sample, and that was to add a feedback LED so I could see when the robot detected something in front of it. Not needed, but good for debugging.

In the picture below you may notice an Ethernet Shield, this is not needed and was simply part of my test environment.

Assemble & Program the Motor Shield

This is the part of the project was the most challenging. I made a few mistakes but got there in the end.

First of all I could have probably gotten away with just using the cheaper Ardumoto – Motor Driver Shield rather than the Monster Moto Shield but after watching the demo video on the Sparkfun site and viewing some images, it appeared that that was the recommended controller and being new, I wanted to make sure things worked.

The blue screw terminals shown on the board below are not supplied so you’ll need to purchase and solder these on as well as the risers (not shown below) so it mounts on the Arduino board. If you are new to soldering (or a bit rusty as I was) you may want to practice on something else before burning out a $80 board. For this I used a different cheap Arduino shield to practice on.

My last hurdle was powering up the motors. I made the mistake of thinking that the motors would be powered via the base Arduino power source and spent a few hours scratching my head trying to work out why the motors wouldn’t start even though the board had lit up. I emailed SparkFun tech support and they quickly set me straight (thanks Michelle!) and advised that I’d need an additional power supply even though one was not shown in the photos. I connected a second power supply and voila! We have movement!

Putting it all together.

All that was left now was to combine the 3 stages above. Merging Arduino code, putting the sensors on the robot chassis and start testing it out. This part was smooth sailing and after a couple of trial runs and tweaks to the code, I’m quite happy with the results.

Here is a video of the completed robot

If you are interested in building something similar, here is the final Arduino code I used

SensorBlinkMotor.zip

Now comes the hard part.. what to build next? Stay tuned…

Adobe has released its first ‘Digital Marketing Insights’ report based on an analysis of data measured by the Adobe Digital Marketing Suite. The analysis looks at aggregated & anonymous data across 150 Retailers with 16B transactions and presents key findings on the impact of tablets on purchase behavior for retailers. This is the first in a series of data-driven industry insights that provide leading trends in digital marketing to customers and partners.

Report Overview

The report compares the business impact of consumers who visited retail websites using tablet devices (“Tablet Visitors”) with that of visitors who used smartphones and traditional desktop/laptop computers.  It is based on analysis of 16.2 billion visits to over 150 U.S. retail websites during 2011.

Key findings:

1. Tablet Visitors were 3X more likely to purchase than Smartphone Visitors and spent 54% more per purchase
2. Tablet Visitors spent 21% more per purchase than Traditional Visitors and were nearly as likely to purchase
3. The share of visits from table users quadrupled, from 1% to 4%, in just 12 months

Bottom line: Retailers can no longer afford a “one-size-fits-all” approach to mobile optimization because Tablet Visitors and Smartphone Visitors are distinct customer segments. Retailers should evaluate the opportunity that Tablet Visitors offer and develop strategies to better attract, convert and retain them.

You can access the report here;

http://success.adobe.com/en/na/programs/digital-marketing-insights.html

The team at Reading Room are putting on an event in Canberra on Dec 2nd. Here’s the brief;

“Despite spending enormous amounts on Web-based initiatives, government agencies report concerns in keeping up with the pace of digital channel change. In a multi device / multi-channel world people are expecting personalised experiences that span across and cater for the individuals needs in browsers, mobile, social & apps. By employing new engagement models, applying user-centric thinking to service design and embracing user participation, agencies can raise the effectiveness of their digital footprint.”

Three presentations..

Pia Waugh
ICT Policy Advisor, Office of The Hon Senator Kate Lundy
Public Engagement: How to master the black art of crowdsourcing great ideas and community feedback

Tim Hill
User Experience consultant, Reading Room
Government Gets Social: Examples of effective Government communication in social media

Mark Szulc
Director of Solution Consulting, Adobe Asia Pacific
Building context aware experiences in a multi-channel environment: Content has moved over to a new king…Context.

Pia & Tim are great presenters so if you are planning to be in Canberra that morning make sure you register!

cfObjective Australia is coming up fast.. just a few weeks to go! Held Nov 17 & 18 in Melbourne Australia. There is a star line up of presenters including Terry Ryan, James Talbot, Kai Koenig, Marc Mandel, Geoff Bowers, Justin McLean and .. and me!

I’ll be presenting a talk on Model Driven Development in the Flex stream. Thats right.. there is an entire stream of presentations for Enterprise Flex Developers.. now you’re interested right?

From the organisers;
“cf.Objective(ANZ) + Flex 2011 doesn’t focus as such on Livecycle or ADEP – but our Flash Platform and Flex track is the finest conference content Australia and New Zealand has to offer for this field. If your organisation is in the Asia-Pacific region and looking into building Rich Clients with an LC or ADEP backend – cf.O(ANZ) + Flex 2011 is the place you want to send your developers and architects to for learning about the front end and integration part.

The program is available online here:
http://www.cfobjective.com.au/program

On Nov 16 there are also a few excellent full-day workshops happening and we’d like to see them get a bit more uptake as well. 

The most interesting ones for Flex/LC/ADEP developers are:
– Developing Performant Flex Components for Desktop and Mobile (Mike Labriola)
– Building Mobile Applications for Android and iOS using Flex (James Talbot)
- Agile Technical Practices for Rich Client Developers (Sandy Mamoli and Kai Koenig)
http://cfobjective.com.au/program/workshops/

Check out more on the site: http://www.cfobjective.com.au/

In case anyone is using Lanyrd, there is a Lanyrd page for the conference. It can be found here: http://lanyrd.com/2011/cfoanz/

There is also a LinkedIn event here: http://events.linkedin.com/cf-Objective-ANZ-Flex/pub/717170

And a Facebook page here as well: http://www.facebook.com/pages/cfObjectiveANZ/280504190302

drop me a note if you are planning to attend!

I’ve completed building my first custom component for ADEP WEM (formerly known as CQ5) and what else to build but the HelloWorld of modern day websites? A Google Map component!

With this component you can now simple drag and drop a map onto a page, then click the edit button to enter the address that the map should display.

The process to build the component was quite easy, as follows;

1. Write (ok.. steal) the HTML code to make Map appear in a browser
2. Create a new component in CRXDE in the Apps director (using the wizard)
3. Copy / Paste my working HTML code into the created JSP file for the component
4. Test the compoent works as is (it should by now start showing up in SideKick – assuming you go into Design mode and allow the component to be displayed.. eg in parsys)
5. Add a nice icon
6. Create a dialogue (or copy and modify another one from something like the title component like I did)
7. Tweak the code to pull the values from the dialogue.
8. Test, package, share on your blog!

I have several enhancements as well as new components I need to complete, but if you have requests please let me know in the comments below.

Download my Google Maps component for ADEP WEM / CQ5!

GoogleMaps-1.2 component for ADEP / CQ5

Adobe is hosting a full day of briefings for our customers and partners in Sydney, Melbourne, Hong Kong & Singapore to introduce the Adobe Customer Experience Management Solutions and new Adobe Digital Enterprise Platform.

The morning session is open to all Adobe customers, prospective customers and partners and will focus on best practices and case studies from Adobe Solution Partners in customer experience, digital campaign and content management.

The afternoon session is exclusively for current and prospective Adobe Partners. We will discuss the new opportunities for partnering with Adobe in Web Experience, Customer Experience and the Digital Enterprise Platform.

Dates are as follows;

Melbourne – Tuesday 9th August

Sydney- Thursday 11th August

Singapore – Tuesday August 16th

Hong Kong – Thursday August 18th

There is a great line up of international Adobe speakers and local Adobe Partners attending and I know the content is fantastic.

I’ll also be attending both the Sydney & Melbourne event so drop by and say hello!