Prologue: Tom attended the Flash in The Can 2010 event in San Francisco and has documented his experience. The opinions and/or views expressed in this series of posts are his own and do not necessarily reflect the views of Springbox.  

I love technology, especially when it comes to my iPhone. I also love public transportation, and what better place than San Francisco to find an easy and cheap commute from the hotel to FiTC. Or not. First, the buses couldn’t keep up with people walking on the sidewalk due to all the construction going on. Second, the iPhone mapping failed to inform us of closed streets, so we had to backtrack in order to make it to the conference. I know, cry me a river. 

I was a little surprised at the small amount of attendees. The last conference I went to for Microsoft development had probably 10 times the number of people. (The dark side is strong.) It actually ended up being advantageous, as it was easy to ask questions during the presentations and you got to know other people in the field. Matt and I broke off. I went to check out a presentation, gave it about 5 minutes and realized it was a dud, then headed over to a different topic on (breathe) creating cross-platform mobile apps in Flex with OpenPlug ELIPS Studio. It’s a very interesting tool that allows you to create one Flash application and deploy it to several phones. It comes with a price, but is worth looking into.

Mobile is the hot item at this conference. It’s no surprise. The developer community as a whole was pretty upset given Apple’s rejection of Flash. We are nervous and excited to see what Adobe will do about it.  The Keynote address was next, put on by Kevin Lynch, the CTO and VP of Adobe. Unfortunately no mountains moved, nor did any bridge sway or building crumble. I wanted to hear the “F*** APPLE!” speech with crowds roaring and shaking fists. Alas, Kevin only skimmed over it and didn’t use a single F-bomb. I decided this was probably best. It made Adobe look like the better man, not taking cheap shots at someone who so publicly shot them down. What also struck me are Adobe’s actions since this big Apple debacle. They aren’t just sitting around doing nothing. They left Apple doing whatever Apple does, and focused on another platform: Android. It’s taking a market share larger than the iPhone, and it’s a ripe time to start developing Flash content for the smartphone. Droid 2, to set themselves apart from Apple, is even providing Flash on their phone right out of the box. That’s bad ass. The other key item to note is AIR 2.5 will support publishing as an Android application. Capital BAD ass. Listening to these speakers today, I get the strong sense that the market for Flash is about to get bigger… and fast. 

After the conference was over we headed to Slide, a small basement club a few blocks from our hotel. Disney was hosting a party there, and when you walk in, you literally take a slide down into the club. What a perfect fit for a club on 6th Street in Austin! Except, well, there are no basements in Austin. We ended up meeting a few developers at Disney Parks and overall had a great time with these guys. They too are facing the challenge of the iDevice and are developing plans to tackle it. After a couple of drinks, we walked over to Chinatown for dinner. I absolutely love Chinese food, and unfortunately the Austin selection is weak at best. My friend Lindsey Simon who lives in SF and works for Google suggested we try the R and G Lounge. He was across the street at some Chinese dive where you have to have an invitation to get in. But whatever, the R and G proved to be way above any standards in Austin. Chef’s Special Beef melted in your mouth, and the Peking duck was a greasy mess of decadence. We closed the night listening to Willie Nelson with Mark at his Buddha lounge around the corner. What a great guy!  And kind of crazy.

Need quick access to website test tools? Look no further than your web browser. Firefox and Internet Explorer both have developer toolbars for Web QA professionals to download and utilize for QA. I have found both to be useful during QA in identifying image attributes, metadata, links and Flash validation.

Helpful browser tools to QA by:

Internet Explorer Toolbar (Add to Explorer)

1.    Selecting elements – Find> Select Element by click, allows you to select an element of the page and view the highlighted code in the Developer window at the bottom of the page. The benefit of this function is that it isolates a section of code instead of viewing source and having to parse through it all.   

2.    Link validation – View> Link Report, allows you to view all the hyperlinks in a list. This comes in handy for verifying whether a link is supposed to pop up a new window.

3.    Identifying images and image attributes

a.    Identifying images – Images>Disable Images, turns off all the images in order to identify and differentiate images from the CSS, which is helpful if you need to report and distribute the bug to the right person. You can do the same by selecting Outline>Images.

b.    Image sizing, click Images>Show Image Dimensions and select dimensions, file sizes or image paths.

c.    View alt text only – Images>View Alt Text, to view alt text for all images on the page, saving time instead of mousing over each one.

4.    Verify background colors – Tools>Show Color Picker, useful for verifying background colors or validate design changes if the color change was just a small variation from what it was before.

Mozilla Firefox Toolbar (Add to Firefox)

1.    Form Validation – a very quick way to test forms in Firefox is to select Forms>Populate Form Fields. The browser will auto populate the entire form minus doc uploads, which will reduce QA time by manually completing the form. Another useful toolbar command is the Forms>Clear Radio Buttons for testing a radio buttons on a form since the only way to “de-select” these form options is to refresh the page or close the browser and start over.

2.    Link Validation – Tools>Validate Links, similar to Explorer, Firefox has an option to validate links. They both use the W3C link checker, which is invaluable for quickly finding 404 links, redirect links to pages that have been removed and details regarding anchor links.

3.    Display Information – contains a large variety of commands regarding links, elements and tables to name a few. Information>View Color Information provides thumbnails of the images that make up the page along with their hex values if colors need to be verified. Another option under Display information is Information>View Metatag Information, which displays the page’s metadata.

4.    Miscellaneous – Don’t let the title fool you. The Miscellaneous option on the toolbar includes several options helpful for QA. Miscellaneous >Display Ruler is useful for quickly measuring images or other elements on the page via the cursor, which turns into a crosshair. Once you have selected an item to measure using the crosshair cursor the coordinates display above with the dimensions.

5.    Resize Window – In lieu of changing your screen resolution, Resize>Resize Window, allows you to change your screen resolution through the browser.

The ability to quickly parse information during QA is so valuable — especially with tight deadlines.  These two toolbars are must-haves in your QA toolbox.

We recently launched the Sweet Leaf Sweet Spot contest — and a few interesting technologies went with it. We wanted users to enter the contest through Twitter or a form on the website, and vote for their favorite entries using either tweets or likes to determine the prize winner.

We used the Twitter API to both find new entries and count votes. OAuth allowed us to securely communicate with Twitter and tweet to users to let them know their entry was received. Pretty quickly, we ran into a small problem: hitting the limit that Twitter has for calls to the API. To solve this we white-listed our application with Twitter so we could make as many calls per hour as we needed.

Twitter @Anywhere was used to allow users to tweet a vote directly from the contest website. The @Anywhere feature allowed us to work smoothly with both the Twitter API and OAuth to increase voting functionality and usability.

Finally, we used Facebook Like functionality so users could vote by liking an entry in Facebook. The Open Graph API allowed us to retrieve the number of likes each respective entry received and count them as part of that entry’s overall score.

All in all, a little extra effort for us adds up to many easy ways for users to participate.

As the power and proliferation of mobile devices increases, mobile applications are increasingly an effective and easy way for companies to extend their services or products to existing customers — and obtain new ones.

iPhone apps are often the first thing people think of when talking about mobile applications, but there are numerous other options. And, as the power of these other options increase, it becomes just as a good idea to make apps for other devices as it is to make an application for the iPhone.

Let’s say you have a website that provides a service. Instead of producing an iPhone app, it might be better to develop a mobile web app, an application that runs in a mobile browser. A mobile web app would reach almost every mobile device because almost all mobile devices have a browser to access the internet. And with most mobile browsers being just as powerful — if not more powerful than desktop browsers — it’s very easy to make a version of your web app into a mobile app.

Technologies such as HTML5, CSS3 and SQLite simplify the process. Yes, many mobile browsers have database support built in, so you can store and retrieve data using JavaScript. Frameworks such as jQuery make it very easy to create powerful, more streamlined mobile apps.

Android mobile devices are increasing in popularity because virtually every cell phone carrier offers an Android-powered smartphone. Tools such as Appcelerator make it easy to create Android apps in no time. Plus, the Android Market has no wait time to have your app ready for users to download.

Up to this point, I’ve only mentioned smartphones. They’re only part of the mobile device equation. The next time you’re thinking about a mobile app, consider some devices such as:

• PSP
• Amazon Kindle (yes, you can now create apps for the Kindle)
• iPad
• iPod Touch
• Zune HD
• Tablet PCs