The Pixel Code » General

150 Days Away From Blog. To Inspire

Mohammed Khan — Thu, 17 Jun 2010 05:31:36 +0000

Ah, actually I am sneaking out at work to post this, and the reason been is that I feel guilty of not keeping the blog running the way its suppose to. Anyways I somehow broke away from the ignorance, but what kept me away is something I have been thinking about since one of my colleague asked me “Khan, is your blog dead ?”, I wasn’t sure what to respond to him. He knows my work schedule, knows very well how I have been traveling and endowing three different roles within the same organization, I didn’t expect to be questioned by an insider. But I guess he did it right, at least it got my attention and made me realized how ignorant I have been.

Official designation, Principal Consultant, in last 150 days, I have been working as part of the Consulting Business Development Team, heading Product Development, and conducting the signature ACE Training Program of Esberi #ACE45 in Chennai. Amidst all these I have to run between Chennai & Hyderabad often, and frequently fly out of country to propose or work with Adobe Enterprise Solutions along with clients and partners.

Too much to handle, but I AM LOVING IT, why ? Of all the three roles, I get to interact, travel and inspire people, how ? Inspire clients and partners to adopt Adobe Enterprise Solutions and how it can solve their business problems, Inspire internal product team to deliver beyond their expectations, and Inspire trainees to learn/adopt Adobe development tools, make them feel passionate about technology & their skills, and vision out the possibilities in life. Recursively of all what I do, it Inspires me.

Hope I continue to do what I do best and not stay away from posting this long. By the way what’s your take on Adobe vs. Apple ? From Business point, I favor Apple, from community and developers stand, I am in favor of Adobe’s motion. #DoubleStandards.

Contextual Applications: Be Aware & Adapt

Mohammed Khan — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 13:25:03 +0000

With today’s release of Flash Player 10.1 Beta, Adobe has made delivering Contextual Applications for Mobile possible. In theory Contextual Applications are Smart Rich Internet Application, practically these applications adapt to the execution environment. If an application needs to adapt to certain factors, firstly it should be aware of them. And the guidelines set for developing Conceptual Applications are based on three awareness context.

System Aware: Adapt to hardware specific factors, resolution, interaction mechanism and extended features of the hardware such as Accelerometer, GPS etc.
Network Aware: Adapt to bandwidth, and optimize content delivery mechanism. Also determine state of connection (Online/Offline) and accordingly switch instances for persistence.
User Aware: Adapt to User’s preferences and social circle, and accordingly suggest/deliver content.

On the Adobe Labs you can find an AIR app called WorkFlowLab, and in the pre-installed workflow templates you can find the Contextual Application Workflow developed by Ryan Stewart, which pretty much gives the outline of the whole design & develop toolset for working with Contextual Applications.

Contextual Application Workflow

With Flash Player 10.1 on Mobile, it would be possible to design and develop using Flash CS 4/5 platform, that would make applications understand various soft and hard context, and accordingly adapt. Further to this note, it would be exciting to see collaborative and contextual applications hitting our devices and hence making the Rich Unified Applications theory much more practically possible.

A Pixel born out of a Code

Mohammed Khan — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 11:46:20 +0000

Been working for last three years with RIA platforms, it was hard to share stuff at personal level with the community, though I was posting at my company’s blog engine, satisfaction never came. The thought of creating a personal blog site has been around for last one year on my mind, but work always kept me away from thinking and organizing ideas for the blog. Finally this month (my workload was a bit at ease, thanks to slowdown), I made up to have one in place.

The first thing to work was on the content theme, what will I share with the community and how will I organize it ? It was not easy for me to figure out because by profession I work in capacity of Project Director for RIA domain, but by virtues I design apps and hardware interfaces, and sail out the development. So the managerial and developer instincts contradicted within me.

Finally after some help from friends at work in form of a brainstorm session over the coffee table helped me shape the blog. Right from domain name to tag line, to content, I had to evolve my thoughts around the end users. Because whatever you do on web has to be shaped according the user’s perspective, even if it gonna be your own personal blog. User centric thinking has always helped me to architect and deliver the right solution to clients, and I believe its gonna be the same story here. If I can’t deliver content according the user’s need then I don’t think this blog should exist. What disturbs now as I write is, “Isn’t blog suppose to be medium of personal expression ?”, and the justification my mind throws to me is “Dude you are not working on a social blog, its gonna be technical, only place where you can express is in the Design category”. This is fine with me, in coming time I would bring out my thoughts on design and development here and I wouldn’t be satisfied till there isn’t any feedback, which I believe will help me refine my content. So kindly comment and lets have meaningful discussions !!!