A busy project at work has taken me to San Francisco three times in the last two months. Each time has been for a week. We’ve been working with some folks in Macromedia Consulting to build the next version of one of our applications in Flex.

A couple of things about this process have been very new and rewarding. The Macromedia folks are user experience experts. Its been good to see the process of learning how our clients use our application, understanding how it might be extended to incorporate it more fully into their workflow, and to see how design is instrumental to usability. I am amazed at how fun the process has been.

We’ve had usability tests and designed prototypes, proof - of - concepts, and put out more documentation than I’ve ever seen in any project. And we aren’t even to the development phase yet!

And finally, programming has become fun again. Doing things in ActionScript is so easy, I’m enjoying the Java (at long last) that makes up the server-side middle tier, and designing GUIs in mxml is just plain fun.

As far as the trips are concerned, I’ve put up two sets of pictures in the photos section: Tiburon, September 25 and San Francisco 2005. Enjoy.