From June to October of 2010 I worked on a really interesting project that a whole new spin on the hiring process: Unrabble. What made this so interesting was the way it automated the hiring process to cut down on the time spent shifting through a ream of resumes. In a way, it’s like the ‘iTunes of job boards’ as it ranks candidates based on skills that the hiring manager decides are most valuable — so if you’re looking for that mysql admin with java skills and cobol experience, that applicant would be pinned to the top of the heap.

It also incorporates google searches and social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn directly in the hiring process as applicants’ experience and information would be right there for the hiring manager to see. Along with a great visual timeline of experiences is what they call ‘Brags’ — little boasts about achievements (i.e. “I singlehandedly brought in 3 million of revenue to my company”) — the candidate can ask colleagues to confirm as true and verified bring a whole level of micro-referencing to the application process. It’s quite brilliant actually.

Even at the onset of the application process from the applicant’s perspective Unrabble asks all those questions that aren’t *directly* part of a job but have a huge bearing on a company culture — if they prefer to work in large vs smaller companies, or what they’re passions lie.

Much like iTunes the hiring manager can continually rate an applicant through questions and interactions, changing needs of the job, sharing an applicant’s information with a colleague or finally through meeting. The best candidate will always bubble up to the top.

The interest in Unrabble has been hot; along with being named one of the hottest startups at DEMO Fall 2011, the Next Web named it as one of their favorite startups. It’s also been featured in the Financial Times, Venture Beat and Portfolio — you can read more about these at Unrabble’s blog.

Here’s Kevin Watson speaking at DEMO Fall 2011:

or take a look at all the examples of use on their YouTube channel.

A few good videos by Doug Winnie showing the steps from inception, wireframing to handing off the UI to a developer:

All the episodes can be found here.

Adobe recently announced that Flex will now be known by Flash Builder; my feelings about this are mixed however.  There were many times I had to explain the differences between Flex and Flash (and, saying ‘Flash’ in that sentence I mean the capital ‘F’ Flash CS4 authoring vs the little ‘f’ flash which is the compiled output), as well as explain in the end that there really WAS no difference as it was all flash in the end (note the little ‘f’).

But at the same time being an old Macromedia Director developer who remembers when Flash was still FutureSplash, was part of the Flash 3 and 4 beta team and was one of the first using Flash inside of Director for my work for Marvel — I still shy away from saying I ‘do Flash’.  Why? Because my experience with Flash (big ‘F’) as an authoring environment has been painful to say the least.  FutureSplash originally was just a little vector graphics drawing and animation package; there was never really any room for any scripting other than the most simplest imaginable.  When Macromedia bought it and renamed it Flash, Actionscript 1 was things like the old ‘goto(20)’ stuff; Flash was still very much an animations package and tied down to the use of a timeline.  Even coming from Director – where one could use the MessageWindow to create objects in memory and manipulate them without ever committing anything to a script as such (and common now with things like Ruby and the irb) Flash seemed like a step BACKWARDS.  Director had objects – Flash didn’t.  Director had bitmaps. Flash didn’t. Vector graphics? Really? Why then was Photoshop the standard and Illustrator not so much?

But for the web, Flash started to grow, to overtake it’s big brother. Now I could go off on Macromedia’s choices in this and why this happened (the difference with the plugin installs, Director’s unfocus in regards to platform, it’s shirking of really interesting technologies such as Beatnik which I have strong opinions about, how Macromedia just kept glomming onto a busted engine without re-writing it) but irregardless of grandpa’s tirades, it DID happen.  Flash became the standard, and I left Director behind. But it was painful; having seen what an (almost real) programming tool could offer, Flash 4/MX/CS3 was just…urrrgh.

But then I picked up Flex and it was …. different. In some ways I’d say it was BETTER than Director — ok in a LOT of ways. Here was a true programming language (either with ActionScript3 or MXML), and EXTENSIBLE in ways that Director never was. A real skinnable interface.  Things that originally were first in Director (bitmapData) were now in Flash. Now once in awhile I do still miss the MessageWindow but on the whole, I’ve drunk the Kool Aid and found that it was good…

At AdobeMax in 2007 I got to see what was coming – Gumbo (Flex 4) looked fantastic, and Thermo took photoshop and allowed designers to add the rudimentary logic to an interface. I’ve been waiting…

And so Gumbo — I’m sorry, Flex 4 — I’m sorry, Flash Builder beta has just been released.  And I’m still drinking the Kool Aid.  I’ve had a little bit of a poke around it today (I’ve got work I gotta do!) and there are some really cool things I’ve found..

First off, while scripting I found you were given hints and additional information while adding components; this will save time if a developer just needs some quick information rather than have them open up the full help. Another huge time saver is having the IDE generate additional functions automatically either while scripting or in a component’s properties window for all the scriptable items.

Themes are huge as well – especially after developers like Juan Sanchez of ScaleNine and Degrafa fame brought Flex’s skinning engine the attention it deserved.  Though I really don’t like the new default ‘spark’ theme (it seems like we’ve gone back in time to retro computer land) support for the extension, creation and packaging of themes are stronger than ever.  Working hand in hand with Flash Catalyst the skins output can be selected with Flash Builder’s new theme browser, with single items still being customizable.

I’ve yet to really play yet though; I want to dive into the CSS support; I was confused by the previous incarnation of Gumbo’s CSS editor — it seemed as if one couldn’t get to the visual representation of the ui elements as one could in Flex 3, but it might have been my bunglings… I had a weird issue with this version of Gumbo – the Flash Builder beta — when ‘tab’ wasn’t finishing the autocomplete, but was instead tabbing out of eclipse, but again, suppose that was my fault as well…

Strangely enough, I’d probably have more time for play from work if I was using ‘Flash Builder’ – as I’m dealing with skinning issues in Flex 3. The universe mocks me.

A quick test of the current Flex interface for iDesign communicating to the Creston control system 2 states away..
Using the Flash Crestron SDK, no longer is e-Control tied to a windows only system. Created in such a way that the subcomponents listen for their own joins, the Flex UI loads in the XML that is created by the installer and displays the proper devices listening on the system.

The amp audio channel templates are programmed in such a way that it is repeated for the amount of audio channels the amplifier has; iDesign created the joins in such a way that the channels are iterated 21+ for every channel so that the system can ‘find’ itself.

Added more flexified goodness for the Flex to Crestron interface I’m building for Abercrombie and Fitch that I described here.I have to say, being an old Macromedia Director guy  that migrated to Flash (grumpily as the world did) I find Adobe Flex to be …well… it’s a joy to work with; I’ve actually become very excited about coding again.

Yahoo already has some examples, screencasts and other fun bits.

And to think, I was just visiting Yahoo to grab their latest Flash and Flex components.

** originally posted on scribemedia