Looking for “Help”

Ha, ha, what a clever title, a pun about Flash Help.  What a comic genius.

If I’ve spoken with you in the past 2 weeks, and you’ve heard the term Flash (even not in the Macromedia/Adobe context), I’ve probably asked you the question that has been tormenting me: what happened to Flash Help in CS4, and specifically, the help files that third-party extensions (like my components) add to Flash?

If you haven’t seen Help inside CS4, Adobe moved the default Help to its LiveDocs, so when you open the Help screen, Flash opens a browser and points you to the LiveDocs page.  On the surface, I think there is a good idea there: to keep the documentation as up-to-date as possible.  Seems like a great idea that should have been refined as an option through alpha and beta testing.

In Flash CS3 and prior versions, a component or extension developer could add Help books and documentation when the user installed the extension.  Now that the Help by default goes to Adobe’s site, that won’t be possible.  So surely Adobe anticipated this (or a tester saw this coming)?

Apparently not.  Several people have shown how to turn off the Web help and use the local file system (BTW, open Windows > Other Panels > Connections, then in the top right corner, click on the icon and choose the Offline Options entry, and follow the text).  However, even when Flash uses the local help files, our dear extensions’ help files are not there.

I figured that I must have been missing something, surely something as big as dropping third-party help files would have been picked up by this time.  So I went around the web looking for discussions about the new Help.  As expected, the results were not particularly complimentary.  Here are three links that pretty much have most of the responses from other places this comes up:

• Adobe Flash Forum
  
• Jay Armstrong’s blog, an informative post about Flash CS4 Help
• Flash CS4 Help topic from Google Groups

I received word from Adobe recently that I was correct about the third-party help disappearing (I just thought I hadn’t looked hard enough, a plausible explanation).  They say that this item is back on the radar and so they will try to think of what can be done.  Stay tuned, I will update this post as I find out more!

Formulating a Framework for Interpreting Show Features

I’ve now made contact with most of the virtual trade show vendors, and of course all were eager to demonstrate their platforms.  Most have some type of event occurring around now, so the best thing to do is to visit them during those events.  I know firsthand that there is a big difference seeing the features in a sterile environment vs. seeing the actual flow of people and their use of the platform through an event.

Since the show is going to be in mid-2009, perhaps June-ish, I know I need to get materials together for a decision very soon.  The association needs time to evaluate my recommendations and then spread the word to their base.  This association is fortunate because it is a pretty tight group (they know their vendors and their attendees, and both are very motivated to exhibit and attend).  It seems like 5-6 months is a minimum amount of time before the show to be getting in gear, even for this tight group.

It became clear to me that, rather than go from demo to demo initially, I should put together a basic list of feature areas, and then engage the vendors.  I don’t mean to create an RFP, especially before seeing more demos, because I also have firsthand experience as a potential bidder knowing what a pain it is to respond to RFP’s (and, although it’s a bit cynical, many times RFP’s are used really to justify the author’s selection not a real competition).

So here are my initial thoughts.  I will revise them over the coming days as a I review web site materials from the vendors.  I don’t expect to dump them on vendors and expect the vendors to answer — I figure I can review their web sites to get a better picture of their platform, start filling out the various areas, then double-check my observations with the vendors.
Overall
•    Are non-English languages supported, and how is it determined on show, vendor, speaker, or attendee basis?

Show Administration
•    What types of tools are available for managing vendors, speakers, attendees?

Vendor/Exhibitor Administration/Setup
•    Variety of booth types
•    What is platform for customizing booths?
•    Can the booth integrate Adobe Flash?
o    If so, which versions (ActionScript 2 or ActionScript 3)?
o    Can Flash extensions access booth features, such as initiate Chats, open documents
•    What types of videos and/or multimedia can be used?
•    Any e-Commerce facilities/functionality?
•    What formats are acceptable for the booth?

Speaker Administration
•    Is there live streaming?
•    Is there pre-recorded broadcasts?
•    Are Q&A’s (following) sessions all text chat, or mixed?
•    Are Q&A’s recorded for later use/review?
•    Can the speaker share his or her desktop, or other WebEx-type functionality (white boards, polls, etc.)?
•    Can audience members speak (audio) or take the microphone?
•    What does a speaker have to prepare o
•    What formats are acceptable?
•    Can there be multiple speakers/presenters, and from different locations?

Attendee Administration
•    Platforms (Win/Mac/Linux)?
•    Require any browser plug-in?
•    Browser or other compatibilities (e.g., Windows Media, etc.)
•    How intrusive is sign-up?
•    How intrusive is login?

Talks/Presentations
•    What browser and software does an attendee need to participate?
•    What kind of support is given during the conference for attendee problems?

Exhibit Hall
•    How does a participant “see” the possible booths or vendors?
•    Are there booths of different sizes?
•    What kind of interaction can an attendee have with a sales/booth rep?
•    What kind of tracking is kept for an attendee?

Attendee Networking
•    Does it integrate with networking after the show?
•    How do attendees network?
•    Is there a place like a lounge where attendees can network?
•    Why does an attendee want to hang out in the lounge?

Reporting/Tracking
•    What kind of reporting is done, and how is that accessed?
•    Can extensions or loaded content hook into tracking (read/write)?

Support
•    What kind of support is available before the show, for
o    Vendors
o    Speakers
o    Show Organizer
•    What kind of support is available during the show, for the same groups as above, as well as Participants/Visitors?

Pricing/Costs
•    Pricing/cost structure

Beyond the Show
•    How can the show creators get value after the show?
•    How can exhibitors get value after the show?
•    How do participants get value after the show, for example, social networking?

Other Features
•    ?

And In This Corner…

I have been tasked to help coordinate a virtual trade show next year.  Obviously on my list are the big two players, Unisfair and InXpo.  I’ve also got Design Reactor, On24, GoExhibit, and iCongo on my list.  While I have been in contact with some of them, I only have really participated (as a vendor and visitor) to shows run on InXpo’s platform so far.

I have been trying to find comparisons of each, as well as other platforms, to give my client a run-down of which would fit best.  Searching on the web, I have found some posts here and there, but pretty little as far as I imagined.  So that was the genesis of this and a few more future blog entries!

As I get more information about the various platforms I will discuss them here.  Right now, it’s just the beginning.

From what I know, both Unisfair and InXpo use AS 2 (Flash 7/8), but I’m going to find out if they’ve updated their system to AS 3 (note: requirements for both of these list Flash Player 9, so maybe they’ve taken the leap–stay tuned).  In the last trade show I exhibited at, I used Flash extensively to customize the booth, and, according to the organizers, did some things that no other vendors were doing in terms of building out interactions.  I will discuss some of this in future posts.  I think this is a huge potential area for interactive marketing, but honestly the reactions I’ve gotten so far from Unisfair and InXpo have been lukewarm at best.

Of course web conferencing software like WebEx, GoToMeeting, etc. can have similar functionality in some areas, so I will need to go through some of those to see how they might fit the needs.

One of the trickiest things to find out, of course, is pricing.  From my investigative work, it seems that the starting price is in the neighborhood of $30,000, but it’s onward and upward from there.

Even with the limited investigation I’ve done, I keep seeing people talk about Second Life as an environment for business.  I made a character there last year and tried moving around to get a sense of what’s there, but I’m very skeptical that it can deliver results anywhere near what a dedicated platform can do.

Some discussions like this talk about “improving the level of reality they offer in the virtual environment.”  While the statement is sufficiently vague so as to obscure what really needs improving, it sounds to me like a throwback to when the virtual shows started — they wanted to imitate real trade shows.  I would argue that this can be a red herring, and this is why I’m skeptical of Second Life.  The online trade show should exploit the medium to offer visitors and vendors the right level of detail, not just imitate reality more closely (there are a lot of things in live, on-site trade shows that are not particularly efficient).

Here are some links I’ve found that relate:

• It’s All Virtual, a vendor-neutral blog about virtual meetings, shows, etc. by Dennis Shiao
• Forbes: Kill the Business Trip (talks about Webinars, not virtual shows)
• Folio Magazine: A Perfect Storm for Web Events
• Business Week: Virtual Conferences’ Home Advantage
• ON24 Launches Virtual Tradeshow Platform (ON24)
• Trade Shows Go Virtual (Unisfair)
• First Impressions of The InformationWeek Virtual Trade Show (InXpo)

Web Services in AS3 and Charts

I’ve been working on a user interface to our behavioral metrics system as an easy project to get more into AS3.  Our system uses web services to communicate with the back-end DB, so when I opened up CS4 I went looking for the WebService class.  Much to my surprise, I couldn’t find anything.

A few searches later, it appears that the WebService class from prior Flash versions is no more.  Very odd, kind of like the missing 3rd-party help in CS 4 (still can’t figure that one out — how could Adobe drop such a feature?).

Anyway, I came across this web service class library by Carlo Alducente, which is fabulous.  It saved me a lot of time and it was free.  Thank you so much, Carlo!

On the subject of plots and graphs, I found a great, basic set over at Yahoo, the Yahoo Flash Astra Components.  It has a set of bar, line, and pie charts which are easy to adapt and use.  Then there are a bunch of other components in the set, such as for canvas layout.