Serge Jespers

When I grow up I want to be @joshuadavis #w3conf

— Serge Jespers (@sjespers) February 22, 2013

That’s what I Tweeted after I saw his presentation at W3Conf last week. I’ve seen him present a couple bunch of times now. I think I first saw him at FlashForward in San Francisco (Or was it New York? Or both?) in 2000. I remember being envious of and inspired by the type of work he was doing and felt exactly the same after last week’s session. Check it out below. (FYI: If you’ve never seen Joshua present… His language can get ehm… colorful (his own words) :) ).

Check out his work on joshuadavis.com.

I know that over the last couple of weeks I’ve been teasing you a bit with notes about some of the new technology Adobe is working on. PixelTone is one of those technologies.

PixelTone is a proof-of-concept program that lets users adjust images using a combination of gestures and their own voices. Adobe Research collaborated with the University of Michigan to create PixelTone, which made the news last week after a post on John Nack’s blog. Learn more about the thinking and the team behind this fascinating innovation in this blog post.

For more peeks behind the scenes at Adobe make sure you check out peek.adobe.com. Peek is a glimpse inside Adobe, at what we make and how we make it and a place to share the very best of what inspires us to build great software.

Yikes… I was just looking at my calendar and realized that MAX is only about 10 weeks away… 10 weeks! I hear screams in the office. I think I may have just freaked out a bunch of people… Including myself ;-) Internally we’ve seen a bunch of sneak peeks over the last couple of weeks. Adobe is working on some pretty amazing new things. Some of which I think is just plain voodoo magic!

So… 10 weeks. I better start coding up this new game I’m building for MAX. If you attended last year you may have seen those QR codes all over the venue. We’re going to repeat that this year but the app itself will be more of a real game. By scanning the QR codes at the venue you’ll get power ups, extra levels, etc., and of course you can win some cool prizes! More on that later!

I’ll also have to start preparing my MAX session. In this session you’ll learn how to work with Adobe Edge Tools & Services to design and create content for mobile devices. I’ll walk you through building a mobile application using the tools and services in the Edge family. In this 1 hour session we’ll go from Edge Animate, to Edge Reflow, to Edge Code, to adding PhoneGap API calls, to testing the app with Edge Inspect and finally building the application installer with PhoneGap Build. I’m really excited about this session even though I must be crazy to try and cover all of that in 1 hour but I think it’s important to show you how all these new tools can work together!

So… Have you registered for MAX yet? The conference pass includes 1 year of Creative Cloud for free! Early bird pricing ends next week! See you there!

This week is Adobe’s Tech Summit. Tech Summit is a yearly internal event where Adobe engineers from all over the world gather and show what they are working on. If what I saw today is any indication of what we’ll be showing at MAX (and I have a strong suspicion it is) I can only recommend you register today!

This morning we got a sneak peek of all the new goodies the Creative Cloud team is working on. I guarantee you’re going to love it! The Creative Cloud team is working on [redacted]. Oh… Yeah… I guess I’m not allowed to tell you just yet. What I can tell you is that it’s very obvious that the Creative Cloud team is just getting started and with the recent acquisition of Behance I’m sure you can imagine some of the work that’s going on.

The last session of the day was just pure Adobe magic… It was an hour long sneak peek session of new imaging technology. I’m sure you’ll see a lot of these demos during the sneak peeks at MAX.

And this was just day 1 of our Tech Summit. I can’t wait to see what they’ll serve us tomorrow!

So… Have you registered for Adobe MAX yet?

It’s hard to believe but After Effects is 20 years old today! To celebrate After Effects’ birthday Adobe TV just published a set of testimonial videos from users that showcase how After Effects has impacted their careers.

The After Effects blog also has a few stories from users and employees and they would love to hear your After Effects story as well!

But that’s not all. We will actually be celebrating the next 3 months. Keep an eye on our Facebook page to access all the festivities!

By the way… Did you know that After Effects is also available in the Creative Cloud? Oh… And you can still get 40% off your first year on Creative Cloud!

One of the last things you want to read in an email on a Sunday morning is that your Wordpress install has been compromised. Sadly… That’s the exact thing that happened to me yesterday.

I’ve always been careful to update my Wordpress installation whenever a new update was available. I’ve also been very careful about which plugins and theme I use and making sure they are up to date as well but someone still found a hole somewhere and injected some malware resulting in a Google malware notification. And so it was time to do something else.

I know I haven’t been very active on my blog lately but I really want to get back into it. That said… Wordpress has been bothering me for a while now. Not only the constant security risks but also the fact that it has become really really slow. I should note that my Wordpress blog was hosted on Rackspace Cloud Sites. Before moving my blog there I had my own dedicated server. While I loved being able to install and do whatever I wanted on my server it also was a bit too time consuming. And so I moved everything to Rackspace a few years ago. Cloud Sites definitely had it’s flaws from the start but I just didn’t want to spend too much time on keeping my server up to date. Over the years I saw Cloud Sites’ “node unavailable” message more and more (The Rackspace support reps kept saying it was Wordpress’ fault) and eventually I just got fed up with it. I had originally planned on moving my Wordpress blog to an Amazon EC2 instance but that plan has now also changed.

When I took my blog offline I tweeted about my Wordpress disapointment. It was Kevin Suttle who pointed me to Octopress. Octopress (built on top of Jekyll and runs on Ruby) definitely isn’t for everyone. They call it a “blogging framework for hackers” and you should take that very literally. I got everything up and running on my Mac thanks to this post.

The biggest advantage about Octopress is that it generates static HTML pages. So no more need for a server side language or databases. In fact… My blog is now hosted on Amazon S3. So it should be blazing fast now (and probably/hopefully a lot cheaper too). It’s also secure as the actual page generation happens on my local Octopress install. Adding & editing posts is very different than in Wordpress but luckily Sublime Text understands markdown so I can now actually write my posts in Sublime Text.

It’s probably going to take a bit of getting used to but so far I really like it. I’m currently using the Slash theme but I’ll probably make something custom over the next coming weeks. I’m not sure whether or not I should try to import my old Wordpress posts. If you think I should do that then make sure you make your voice heard by posting a comment (using Disqus) on this post.

I’ve been working on this video for a while and I’m glad it’s live now. I always wanted to do a “kinetic typography” video and this was the perfect opportunity.

Brackets is a new open source project founded by Adobe to push tooling on the web forward. Brackets is completely open source and built in JavaScript, HTML and CSS. But… Just watch the video ;-)

For more information about Brackets check out the Brackets blog.

Last month I was in Amsterdam for a few hours. At the CS6 Launch event I interviewed a couple of the speakers. I’ll be posting these videos over the next couple of days.

First up: Joshua Hirsch - Minister of Technology - Big Spaceship

I can describe the HTC One X in one word: A-MA-ZING!

But before I continue… A little disclaimer: I was given a free HTC One X as a member of a special HTC community program. I was under no obligation to talk about this product or company. I get no additional benefits for talking about the product or company.

Now that we got that out of the way I can finally tell you about this amazing new HTC phone. I’ve been an HTC-fan since I was given a Nexus One 2.5 years ago. I was an iPhone user before that. In all honesty… I hated it at first. I hated the UI but immediately fell in love with the hardware. It was so much better than the iPhone. A couple of months later I flashed a Sense ROM on it and was hooked from day 1. HTC’s Sense UI is their UI skin on top of Android. It makes Android much more user-friendly and a lot less geeky. It’s probably the best UI skin on the market.

I replaced my Nexus One with the Desire HD the day it came out. And later I replaced that one with the Sensation. When I moved to the US I was given a couple of phone options. An iPhone, a Motorola Atrix and a Samsung Galaxy. I don’t like Samsung’s UI layer at all. I just don’t like all the bubblegum colors. I didn’t want to go back to an iPhone and so I went for the Atrix. I hated it. I was completely lost on that phone mostly because of their UI layer. I went back to using my Sensation even though I couldn’t get 4G on it. AT&T didn’t carry the Sensation but after a bit of Googling I found that the Canadian Bell version of the Sensation had the same radio frequencies that I needed to get 4G on AT&T. It was just before MAX and so I asked my Canadian colleague Duane Nickull to bring me one.

Fast forward to February. Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Everyone knew HTC was going to announce new devices and when they did they got a lot of buzz at the show. They announced their new One series. I was lucky enough to play with one of their demo phones at their booth and knew that that was going to be my new phone. Being on AT&T I had to wait and see if AT&T was going to carry it and I’m glad they did.

Fast forward to last Friday. A package from HTC arrived at home. I felt like a kid who just got a new train set (kids still play with trains, right?). When I opened the box and took the One X out of the box I thought they pranked me and actually sent me a dummy phone. It’s that light! Points++!

This weekend I took it out for a photo walk. The 8MP camera is extremely impressive. The 4FPS burst mode is just amazing! You can actually take up to 99 photos (20 by default) by just holding the camera button. When you let go you can just select the best shot and choose whether or not you want to keep the rest of the photos. You have to see this to actually get how amazing this is. Even more amazing is that you can take photo while you’re recording 1080p video! I uploaded a few photos on Flickr.

[slickr-flickr set=72157629943852879 search=sets]

The One X’s 4.7 inch screen is also absolutely gorgeous. It’s actually the first phone I can use in direct sunlight!

The international version of the HTC One X has been available for a few weeks now but this one has LTE. This is my first LTE phone and I had no idea what to expect from it. The speed of AT&T’s LTE network here in San Francisco is amazing. In fact… The internet on my phone is now almost twice as fast as my connection at home!

Obviously I was also worried about battery life but I was also pleasantly surprised by that. I go on a lot of long walks or bike rides on the weekend and my phone used to die before I got back home. So I was pretty anxious to try out the HTC One X on last weekends urban bike ride. I got about 11 hours of battery with moderate to heavy use! I use my phone on these trips as my camera, for music, to text/Whatsapp friends, to lookup routes, … and so again a great surprise to see how well the battery copes with that.

Beats Audio is now also available for every app that outputs audio to your headphones and it really does make a difference. I recently bought a set of Bose earphones (not sure why I haven’t bought these before ‘cause they are really great) and while they already sound fantastic Beats Audio makes them even better. I can now hear frequencies I didn’t even know were there.

The HTC One X is one amazing device… but it may have one flaw. The AT&T version only comes with 16GB of internal storage (and no MicroSD slot). That’s not really a big issue but I never had to think about storage before with the 32GB MicroSD card in my Sensation. A possible solution may be HTC’s partnership with Dropbox. You get 25GB for free when you sign up for Dropbox on your HTC One X (existing accounts get upgraded). Dropbox has the ability to automatically upload any pictures you take with your phone. So in theory you can almost immediately delete the photos from your device. With Google Play Music I could just stream my music library or temporarily sync it to my device. In other words: with so many cloud services available now and with the speed of LTE the storage limitation is probably not going to be an issue at all.

The HTC One X is my new favorite device! I’ve been showing it around the office and now have a lot of jealous colleagues ;-) I give it a 5 star rating and can’t recommend it enough! This is how you do an Android device! Oh… For those wondering: AT&T’s HTC One X is available from next Sunday!

Just came across this interesting infographic put together by Intel.

Every minute 639.800 gigabytes of data get transferred globally, 240 million emails are sent, 47.000 apps are downloaded, 30 hours of video get uploaded to YouTube and 1.3 million videos will be watched on YouTube. Pretty amazing numbers…

Intel also estimated that by 2015  the number of networked devices is expected to be double the world’s population. And by the time we reach 2015, it would take five years to view all the video content crossing IP networks each second.