Day 2 Is Always a Doozy

I made myself a logo this morning! :)

I didn't forget everyone yesterday, I was exhausted and literally fell asleep studying. Studying?

Yes.

Yesterday I:

• Figured out WHY my Indesign --> Flash --> Adobe Air application on my Kindle Fire First Generation kept continuously blinking between the two spreads. I didn't know I needed to go in and assign a STOP command on each "frame" (InDesign, pages are spreads. When you export them to Flash, they become frames). I tried it out and it worked by copying the code in the Slideshow Template included in the Flash Pro New Document Android Library. 
• I once again checked my market and didn't find a independent magazine featuring digital content and articles aimed at the "I use technology to make life more enjoyable, but I don't enjoy the technical aspects about it" demographic.
• I began working on a shell type master design for an app. After trading some great chatter back and forth on the Kindle boards with John R. Henderson, I like his idea of certain shells as far as functionality goes and then I'm just updating the content rather than re-inventing the wheel every month. Also, from a UX (a very cool acronym in the app developer world that means user experience) perspective, continuity across my app properties will make things easier for readers. So win-win. It's more efficient and better design. So I've made a Master Page in Indesign that is landscape layout, 1024 x 600 (I need to actually make it bigger I found out later last night to the biggest kindle fire screen size specs because you can scale down with ease, but scaling up, well that's just nasty in most cases). But the basic design is two slim black panels along the left and right sides for navigation icons, the top left and right have triangles that are programmed to previous page and next page, but I will have other icons that take readers to specific parts of the app.
• I compiled my "textbooks" for this project:

Okay, yes that is about $125 worth of Kindle Books. But what I'm doing is probably a number of college courses worth of education.

Starting all the way to the right, the red Classroom in a Book is a series done by Adobe that I really enjoy. For roughly $20, they have an electronic copy available for all of the CS6 products that walk the user through 10+ different projects. It's hands on training for pennies on the dollar compared to me going to a local community college two or three days a week for 10 weeks and sit through the demonstrations. I'm prefectly capable of watching videos and learning on my own accelerated time frame. And, the Classroom in a Book series comes with the ability to DOWNLOAD the project files, both start and finished product for reference, plus videos of the lessons. Again, $20.

"For the things we have to learn before we can do them, we learn by doing them."Aristotle

The ActionScript books I have not begun using yet, but they were recommended in the green Android Appplications book (get to more about that in a minute) and I'm familiar with the O'Reilly brand and their cookbook tomes. I used an VB cookbook 10 years ago when I worked for Alcoa and was teaching myself macros for excel to take an 8 hour process of data entry down to a 1.5 hour process. :0)

The Dummies book is another series I love for learning new skills. I used Writing Fiction for Dummies religiously when I wrote and published Cancelled and it helped me put out an excellent product for a newbie. I plan to read that AFTER the Android Applications for Air book, with the ability to skip over anything I already learned in first book.

Developing Android Applications with Adobe Air

Read 5 chapters last night, have 3 pages of handwritten notes! :)

The flash programming language is Actionscript. Now, I tried to learn Java for about 2 weeks before moving to Flash, and I gotta say, I enjoy reading ActionScript code more than Java. When I look at Java code snippets, my face makes a frown in the eyebrow/forehead area because there are just a ton of acronyms and abbreviations that to regular programmers are second nature, but to me, might as well be a foreign language. From the code snippets I've looked at that are written in Actionscript (albeit, intro projects) I am able to better follow what the commands are saying because they are mostly written out.

var dp:DataProvider = new DataProvider();
dp.addItem({label:SliderDirection.HORIZONTAL});
dp.addItem({label:SliderDirection.VERTICAL});

Okay I know the above is a little scary. I know "Var" means vairable (Java has that too, but it has all of these types of variables too), and I don't know yet what dp. means at first, my guess is dataprovider, and I understand addItem as a concept, and label:SliderDirection, yes, I get too that we're going to have one label that's for the horizontal sliding and one for the vertical sliding.

I just feel more confident trying to make sense out of ActionScript than I did trying to learn and read Java. Who knows, maybe AFTER I become well-versed in ActionScript I will take better to Java. :)

I also learned yesterday that there is a website called SafariBooksOnline (about $20-$50 per month) where I can access a ton of technical manuals and IT type publications like O'Reilly etc. This will be an investment I make down the road because here's the thing, as I'm reading Developing Android Applications with Adobe Air I know some things have already changed! That's right, when it comes to software, releases are every year to a few years, features change, interaction between programs change. This is where a living, breathing digital library of these titles would be worth the cost.

I also learned about Lynda.com because I was watching a ton of tv.adobe.com tutorials from an Adobe Evangelist named Paul Trani. I like his teaching style and so I looked up his personal website and learned he also teaches via Lynda.com where I can subscribe for $25-$40 a month and watch and get the files of over 1500 tutorials on there! Again, once I get through this library I have above, I will likely see what's on Lynda.com so I am better informed to follow along the tutorials.

TakeAways So Far from DAAwAA

Adobe Air application are installed as STAND ALONE programs on almost ALL platforms.

• This means my little magazine can have the code made once, then then with a few modifications, eventually deploy on desktops, iPads, Nooks, Kindles, and Android Smartphones and Tablets. All I can think is Pinky & The Brain, that I'm trying to take over the world. LOL!
• Software like the Android operating system is global, meaning the smartphone in India is running Android just as the smartphone in Brazil is and the tablet in Italy.

***The Kindle First Generation (the model they RAN OUT of in late August 2012 just before they released the NEW Kindle Fire base model and HD models) does NOT support Adobe Air. Yeah. This is a problem for Kindle App Developers like myself because there are millions of those devices running around out on the market and we have to develop for the lowest common denominator. Now, in my Kindle Developer documentation on the Amazon Developer Services site, there are ways to target specific devices in my code, but I don't quite understand that yet, so I'm going with lowest common denominator and will package the Air Runtime (it's the shell in which an Air application runs in) with the app. Oh, and it took me like 3 hours to figure out this information the other day when I was trying to get my own homemade app to even install and boot up on my First Generation Kindle Fire.

MY NON-CODING FRIENDS, FEAR NOT!

Feedback I am increasingly getting from other creative, writer types in my sphere of freinds is along the lines of how what I'm doing is just sooooo out of their comfort/ability zone. PPPPPFFFFTTT!!! You think this isn't hard for me, too? It ABSOLUTELY IS! I see words I don't remotely understand in these learn how to program books that I'm constantly having to look up and figure out what the author means by a phrase like

"Copy and save your assets to the public library folder in the vars folder on the applications project screen."

Huh? No, not even huh, many times I'm going WTF?!?!?!! I scratch my head, make the frowny face that will probably give me plenty of premature wrinkles, and then go to the glorious thing that is the internet and try to decipher the sentence. Other times, I acknowledge the sentence isn't FOR ME to understand yet, and just exposure to terminology etc. that I will understand more once I DO a few projects.

So no more reading this thinking, well Elizabeth can do this, I never could. Oh for crying out loud, BUCK UP! Below is what our world IS, it's time as authors that we consider how many OTHER ways we can get our stories and ideas into the hands of readers.

 Maybe you're not ready to learn to make apps, but do something else technology based to increase your abilities as a PUBLISHER of kick-ass, smile inducing, content. Put together a package of books like I did on learning HTML so you can make/optimize your author website (I did this myself 5 years ago when I first began web writing), or learn how to format your OWN ebooks, even if you do still hire it out, you will have a better base knowledge to keep up with the growth and increasing expectations of devices and readers. OR, learn how to manipulate images, which has MAJOR applications for a self-published, self-promoting author. You can make banners, cute funny memes on your social media etc.

Off my soap box. Unfortunately, there was much, much more I learned in DAAwAA, but I'll save that for post 3 because it will tie into my UX designs. I am out of time (my playlist is over, I use those to set myself timers for tasks), Yesterday, I also took a much needed 3 hour break from working on this project by getting out of the house with my daughter. It's important for those of us who work from home to step away, especially as most of us enjoy what we do, we could work on it all the time!