jonnie hallman - one man dev team - flash and the city 2011

8/6/2019 Jonnie Hallman - One Man Dev Team - Flash and The City 2011

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Jonnie Hallman destroytoday.com

adobe / destroytoday


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we got our first computer in 93, a mac performa 476, 25mhz, 4mb ram


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Jane Blob

i got really good at clarisworks.jane blob story, couldnt change license name.i didnt know much about how digital stufworked (apps, games, etc)...


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I was really into video games and made websites for video game cheats/moves usinggeocities & angelfire, but they always had banners....


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dad noticed my interest, bought me jonhallman.com and hosting for christmas


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$300 for lifetime of hosting - he still sends me the $0 invoices


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tried really hard to brand myself, but was never happy with the result, so the websiteremained a coming soon page for months


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it was around this time that i learned about flashi was the tech person for the middle school morning announcements


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we needed an intro and i made an animation using shape tweens.


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macromedia had a free 30 day trial for their apps, so instead of buying them...


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i would reinstall OS 9 every 30 daysdidnt take too long for a 5 gig harddrive


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how i got started

i was inspired by flash gods like joshua davis...


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...and robert hodgin, so i made experimentsthey had such cool names, so i thought i needed one myself


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jonhallman.com wasnt cool, so i also got first-in-line.net, possibly the worst domain name toremember


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inspired heavily by praystationim the kind of person who feels empty when im not producingalways had a stack of loose papers with sketches on themcoded the ideas when i got home from school each daysuper lame, had multiple email addresses for no reason


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around flash mx 2004, i had enough and gave up on it...I got deep into PHP and made dynamic web apps, like jpixel


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it takes a 100x100 image and blows it up 10x, using dot patterns to represent each pixel


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i got into graphic design during pre-college at risd and mica and turned my digital work intoprintI tiled outputted JPixel images, making huge 12x10 ft prints


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started working for a small studio called shaw jelveh designfirst thing they asked is whether i can make flash websites


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they had me design and develop 3 sites in my first 2 monthswith tight deadlines, i learned how to code fast, esp since i worked 10 hours a weeki also learned to keep things simple


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produced a dozen websites in less than a yearsome of them, i only had a week or 2 before they were due


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on my friends birthday, I was at his house and I challenged myself by coding lukes site inthe duration of high fidelity


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in my junior year, I heard about AIR and fell in love with the idea of apps rather than websitesI replaced most of my gd classes w/ independent studies


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apps became very personal


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requires many rolesI was ready because of shaw jelveh


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what takes 1 hour for each person will take you 4 hours


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i took a photo imaging class.


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we used flickr for critiquingi hated the site - white background, static pages, very slow to navigate


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i thought of taking this opportunity to make my own app using flickrs apii started sketching and brainstorming


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since i was new to UI design and had such a heavy background in web design, the app lookedjust like a website, but on the desktop.


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(sorry, Ryan)

and i wasnt an icon designer by any means, so i took inspiration from CS3, since most of mydock was adobe apps.i later met the icon designer during my adobe interview.


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the end result was an app that had a better environment for photos (dark background)it was very fast because it only needed to load the imagesyou could page through hundreds of photos in seconds with animated transitions


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i tried to make features that were unique and that I would get a lot of use from, like drag anddrop downloading.you could drag a handful of thumbnails and it would download the hi-res versions.


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I took it a step further and made it so you could drag and drop a contact to download theirentire photo library


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i released it for free and shared it with friends and famthe install count went from 30 to 3000i started getting tons of emails. some reported bugs, others requested features, and some

just said thanks.I tried to respond to every single one.

many didnt realize I was one guy.someone even gave me a ps3


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flickr caps the api at 1 query per second, once destroyflickr reached that, instead of throttlingDF...


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they interviewed me


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on top of that, i won an adobe design achievement awardi knew now that maybe app dev was a good direction


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enhance!


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enhance!


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many didnt use it because they thought it would delete their account.at the same time, many used it because of the name.


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youll miss essential features and ux will sucki didnt use flickr much, so i missed essential features like sets/groups


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memory - not a concern for web, but definitely for appskeep track of everything you allocate memory for


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a feature like this shows complete disregard for memory


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selecting all the glyphs you want to embed doesnt mean the font has those glyphsarial ms unicode is the only font with (almost) every glyph


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i thought all i needed to do was check these boxes


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i didnt go to school for programming, so i didnt know any design patterns or any of theterminologyuse an architecture framework (mvcs, robotlegs)follow a common coding styleotherwise youll spend more time refactoring when you discover your way doesnt work well.


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since I only ever devd by myself, I didnt really know what good code looked like.the style I used was based on what I found useful and it was soooo bad


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if you want to continue developing an app, keep it current with your librariesI was able to develop DF fast because I had a lib for common classes, like images, text, etc.i forgot to update DF with my libs, and it was too late


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To me, Twitter is a background service, like IM. Its not fulltime, like Photoshop or FlashBuilder. When I want to tweet, Ill open it, tweet, then hide it.All the current apps were bloated and cumbersome, so I made DT super light and superintuitive. Hotkeys galore.


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spent a day researching others, jotting down pros/consthen coded v1 in 10 days over christmas break


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(old people dont use Twitter)

so it didnt scare people as much


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also made it easier to respond to users, instead of emails bottling up


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i knew to use a proven framework, like Robotlegs


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It was my first persistent appopen for long periods of time. Because of this, I paid extraattention to memory and CPU usage.


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And once I got the basic Twitter functionality down (tweeting, streams, etc), I started addingspecial features I wanted.Because of unfollow drama and events, I added filters. DMs and unfollow notifiers makethings awkward, and ive been confronted


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Since Twitter is reading-intensive, people want it to be easy for them to read. For some, thatmeans black text on white, for others its white text on black, so I made themes. Now no onecomplains.


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With so many users, you have thousands of opinions. Everyone wants the app to workdiferent, so I added preferences when anyone wanted something a specific way. It quicklyoverflowed the preference pane.


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Place a file called debug here to receive RTEs with full stack traces.I set up a script to email users stacktraces to me.


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support a resizable window


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a bug will always existhttp://http:// story


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...


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I kid you not, this is what my version control system was.I didnt know version control existed, so Id zip the folder.


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backwards compatibility


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(especially teen professionals)

free quality engineers


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working alone on something for too long makes you too familiar and you miss things.go open source or set up code reviews. everyone learns.


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we use code collaborator at adobe


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since youre just one man, the more you set up to run automatically, the more time you haveto be productiveuse build scripts, unit testing, continuous integration, make a common lib


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use jenkins


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(especially alone)

think years and make sure youre ready to invest your time and energy


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if you code all day for work, the last thing youll want to do is code all night.your work will use up all of your creative juices and you wont have much left for your apps.


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Enjoy what youre working on.


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website destroytoday.com

email [email protected] @destroytoday
mailto:[email protected]:[email protected]

jonnie hallman - one man dev team - flash and the city 2011

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