Correction: apparently Amazon does have Flash Out of the Box in stock. Apparently, they got a shipment, sent copies to all those who pre-ordered the book, and are now down to one copy.

So, I went to Las Vegas to hang out with my aunt and uncle for Thanksgiving, and was stupid enough yesterday afternoon to park at Mandalay Bay. I used to live in Vegas and I still know my way around there pretty well, but when I was trying to leave the parking garage, it seems the universe decided to once again point out the importance of user-experience.

Trying to get out of a parking garage is often a painful experience, but this one made me suffer.

Upon reaching the exit of the parking garage, I was given a choice: turn left, or turn right. Simple enough. But I was facing a street that was not the Strip. So I looked around for a sign to tell me what street I was on, or which other streets were in which directions, or, at the very least, which hotels were in which directions. There was no such sign. So my simple choice was now one of pure luck, so much like the rest of Las Vegas. Hmmm. Left? Or right?

To paraphrase the old guy in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, I chose poorly. I turned right and got stuck in traffic. And the traffic was moving in the wrong direction. Of course, I didn't find that out until 15 minutes later when I finally saw a sign to tell me where I was. I ended up on Industrial Road, which runs parallel to the Strip on the West side of Las Vegas Blvd, heading North instead of South. At the next available opportunity, I turned around and headed South. Twenty minutes after I left the Mandalay Bay parking garage with the intention to drive away from it, I was once again heading towards Mandalay Bay. Eventually, I got to the East side of the Strip, away from traffic, and headed back to the house. But I got there almost an hour later than I planned, which means, in turn, that we left Las Vegas an hour later than we planned, got back to Phoenix an hour later than we planned, went to sleep an hour later than we planned, and ended up with an hour's less sleep than we would have liked, making today just a little bit tougher than it needed to be. All this happened because the contractor assigned to build the parking garage didn't think to put up a sign, and no one bothered to check his work by testing the user-experience.

If you think user-experience is not important, think about how many times something like this has happened to you.

My book is now featured on the homepage of O'Reilly's web site. O'Reilly's staff have all been saying really great things about it, but I guess it never really occurred to me that they would put such marketing power behind it. That page gets roughly one jillion page views per month. Yes, a jillion.

Amazon still lists Flash Out of the Box as unavailable, and the Border's bookstore I was just in does not yet have it on the shelf, but it should be there any second now. I got my copy about a week ago, so printed copies are being distributed right now - just in time for the holidays!

My review of MAX 2004 has gone live in Macromedia's "Logged In" section.

It's called gotoAndPlay(): A Developer's Take on MAX 2004.

This Is Broken offers an interesting look at user-experience by exploring things that have such bad user experiences that people actually take the time to photograph and review them.

My personal favorite is the write-up about the playground slide that delivers willing participants directly into a graveyard.

Um ... yeah. Good thinking, folks!

The MXNA WebService API is really easy to use - this only took about an hour to do, UI and all - and that's only because I kept fidgeting with different layouts. Basically, this little app connects to the MXNA web service, grab the posts from my WidgetMaker feed, and displays the most recent post. Simple as that.

If you'd like the FLA, download it here. After installing the MXNA ActionScript 2 Web Service API, just plug your own blog ID into the ActionScript contained in the FLA (clearly identified in the code), replace the graphics with your own, and publish.

I'm very happy to report that I received the first copy of my new book, Flash Out of the Box, via FedEx yesterday. It should be on shelves any time now, and Amazon should be shipping pre-ordered copies soon.

Many thanks to my editor, Bruce Epstein, for helping me make this book as good as it can be. Bruce has worked with the best of the best (Colin Moock, Phillip Kerman, etc) and I'm fortunate to have had the opportunity to work with him.

The book starts with Flash design basics and moves on through to some intermediate-level ActionScript. The beta readers who tested out the book, many of which are seasoned Flash developers, learned quite a bit from it, and one person from O'Reilly reports that she learned Flash from reading my book. Even if you work with ActionScript every day, you can learn all you need to know about the design features of Flash from this book, and you won't waste time doing it. Even more important is the fact that, instead of just learning how to use Flash, you will also learn when and why to use it.

If you or someone you know is in a position to review the book, please contact me and I'll get a review copy out to you.

For those of you trying to keep Jesse James Garrett's User Experience development model in mind, this might be just the thing you need.

Elements desktop: 1600x1200
Elements desktop: 1280x1024
Elements desktop: 1024x768

I hope JJG doesn't mind - I just want to help spread the word.

If you haven't already seen Jesse's work, check out his site at JJG.net

So, it turns out you can get an RSS feed for new Blogger accounts, but you have to go through FeedBurner, which converts an Atom feed to RSS on the fly. As a result of discovering this free service this morning, WidgetMaker is now being aggregated at MarkMe.com. Many thanks go to Christian Cantrell for getting this set up so quickly.

I'm happy to finally be part of the MXNA universe, and I look forward to connecting with the community even more than I already do.

After seeing so much cool info on mobile devices during MAX, I decided to swing by the nearest gadget store and pick myself up an HP iPAQ, running Pocket PC, so I can start playing around with (er, um, developing) ... mobile apps.

Macromedia.com features several sections on mobile development, including one dedicated solely to Pocket PC applications, so I'm going through all of it now, downloading the CDKs (Content Development Kits) for everything and breaking open FLAs to see how it all works.

I've been interested in diving into this for a while now and haven't done anything about it. Then, during MAX, I heard a statistic that pushed it to the front of my mind. The stat comes in two parts.

1) Roughly 60 million people are currently using the Internet.
2) Roughly 1.4 billion (that's right - I said billion) people are using mobile devices.

That fact is enough to make anyone think this is a good market to jump into, and I'm no exception. So with my iPAQ in hand and a CDK on my desktop, I'm off to see what I can do.

During a meeting I waas fortunate enough to have at MAX with three members of the Flash Player team, I was told that Macromedia is hard at work making ActionScript adhere more strictly to ECMAScript. And in response to my question about performance improvements for XML parsing in Maelstrom (Flash Player 8), they whipped out a hardcopy version of the ECMAScript for XML Specification and said, without going into much detail, that this document would be playing a large role in the near future.

Major advantage? Instead of clumsy statements in which you search for the node values of child nodes and such, we'll be able to hard-target data within the XML tree by name.

I haven't read the spec yet (it's not exactly my idea of casual reading), but it seems to promise something like this:

var myNode:XML = myRootNode.myFirstChild.myNodeValue;

I look forward to seeing this in action, and also to the day my employer starts letting us develop for Flash Player 8, despite the fact that this probably won't happen for another two years (our clients lock down their networks, making it very difficult for them to update the Flash Player, so we're generally one version behind).

Anyway, thanks to Paul Betlem and the other Flash Player geeks for meeting with me.

It looks like the MAX review I promised will, in fact, appear in Macromedia.com's "Logged In" section. As soon as it's up, I'll post the link here.

If you haven't seen Community Vision on MarkMe.com, now's a good time to check it out. The two photos of the 3-gallon Hurricane (one of which is shown above), taken by Ben Forta, really illustrate the MAX experience. Yup - that's me (in the blue baseball cap), Stephanie Sullivan, and several members of the Macromedia Product Support team.

... And this one, on Macromedia.com, has the entire video from both general sessions.

Josh Dura has posted the video from the Sneaks preso at MAX last week. All kinds of good stuff to see here ...

It's amazing what you come across when you let yourself be led from one site to another in search of some simple truths.

While checking out Jeffrey Veen, who wrote The Art and Science of Web Design, one of my favorite design-related books (Veen led the Blogger redesign - he's quite good), I rediscovered that he works for Adaptive Path with Jesse James Garrett, who wrote ... you guessed it ... a book about User-Experience Design.

Garrett also created The Elements of User Experience Design, a one-page PDF that outlines the major elements of good XD. And you should read it.

All I can say is ... wow.

In the five years I've been in this business of web design and development, I've been primarily concerned with, and have exceeded at, a few core topics: usability, layout, UI design, and Flash design and development. I've studied each of these subjects throughout my career and have always put the user-experience at the top of my priority list.

What I did not realize until recently is that my particular set of interests and priorities have become a field of expertise with its own job market: the field of "Experience Design" (also known as "XD"). The XD work that I've apprently been doing is particular to the web, but XD is being recognized more and more across many other disciplines.

So, today I was googling for XD info and came across Nathan Shedroff's site, nathan.com. This site contains a wealth of information about experience design, and I've been finding a ton of useful insight there, such as this:

"Most technological experiences-including digital and, especially, online experiences-have paled in comparison to real-world experiences and have been relatively unsuccessful as a result. What these solutions require is for their developers to understand what makes a good experience first, and then to translate these principles, as well as possible, into the desired media without the technology dictating the form of the experience."

Well-said, Nathan.

Now that I know this field has a name, I'm going to start using it - the "Experience Designer" title explains what I do and care about better than any title I've seen yet. Also, aside from building widgets, I will also be spending more time on this site discussing the finer points of XD and doing what I can to help out all the UI/UE geeks out there.

To gain some extra perspective, I'd like to share the mantra I've used over the last several years to sum up my beliefs about the web. It goes like this:

"With so much information available about usability and user-experience, why do so many web sites still suck?"