The short answer, both. You can develop a great product, but without good design it will fail. Conversely, you can have a great design, but without a good back-end/front-end architecture, no one will be able to use the product. Good advice, and often thrown to the side by many, Putorti and Patzer suggest you have the engineers and designers sit in close proximity to each other and talk, thus facilitating collaboration. They say,  “You don’t throw stuff at engineers and tell them to build something. They aren’t code monkeys.” Basically engineers plus designers equal a great team.

Ryan Stewart, Developer Evangelist Adobe and Scott Fegette, DreamweaverProduct  Manger, show off some new tools in Flash and Dreamweaver CS5. Fegette’s run through consisted mostly of the new live preview built into the latest version of Dreamweaver giving the user, well, live previews of their content as they would appear in the browser. Not only that, it now has multi-screen previews built in, allowing the user to create profiles for mobile phones, tablets and PC based browsers based on width and height. You can then create css profiles that respond to these widths and load custom css files for each. He also gave a short preview of their browser labs project allowing you to view and test across multiple browsers and OS’, which can be found at browserlab.adobe.com. Here you can use the 1, 2 and 3 keys to switch between a 1-up, 2-up and 3-up onion skinned view to see how your pages flow will change across multiple browsers.

Stewart showed off the new iOs and Android export tools now built into flash and did a quick preview of their new project called Wallaby. A tool that will take very simple timeline animation, and I mean simple, and export out a banner using a comination of html, javascript, jquery and svg. Although it is simple now and, they do have plans to expand on it and allow it to convert actionscript to this form.

Where does the FCC come into play in net neutrality? While they can’t seem to argue their way out of a paper bag in court, they are trying to implement set set of principles for keep the internet open and allowing us to connect with our choice of device and access the information we want to access.

So what the FCC tried to do in 2008 was to define and implement a few “principles” to what the open internet means, and here they are:

• Open applications: Consumers should be able to download and utilize any software applications, content, or services they desire;
• Open devices: Consumers should be able to utilize a handheld communications device with whatever wireless network they prefer;
• Open services: Third parties (resellers) should be able to acquire wireless services from a 700 MHz licensee on a wholesale basis, based on reasonably nondiscriminatory commercial terms;
• Open networks: Third parties, such as Internet service providers, should be able to interconnect at any technically feasible point in a 700 MHz licensee’s wireless network.

Now, they are trying their best to keep the idea of one internet, not seperating it out into tiers or separating it into landline vs. wireless. These tiers would charge you a base access costs and then layer on top 5 dollars each for acces to more entertainment, news and social networking sites. So the tweeting and facebooking many of us depend on for keeping up with the crowd, or the online news subscription you pay for are in danger of costing you a lot more.

It’s the biggest First Amendment battle of our time. Net Neutrality, what does it mean and why should we care? It’s one of the most clouded and confusing topics of right now and Al Franken took it down a notch and delivered a speech we could all understand. Net neutrality is what we have right now, a free and open internet. He said if the conglomerates have their way the internet as we all know and love will cease to exist.

Franken argues that the current state of the internet is the “small d,” where one must rise up above the rest to stand out with a better voice, a better better slogan and a bigger deal all delivered at the same speed. These companies want to tier the internet, where only their email, their product is delivered at a faster rate, leaving the independent musician, artist or the common developer who helps create jobs, stuck in internet traffic, choked off from the mass market.

If they succeed, rest assured you will be paying more for your connection and those free online service we all no and love will be gone. Franken says that the anticompetetive rules these companies are trying to push on use are in direct violation of antitrust laws and should not be allowed to pass.

So what can we do to help? “Use the internet to save the internet,” Franken says. Be more active in your community, don’t turn a blind eye on this subject, and email the powers that be who are out there to make sure the internet stays free and open.

Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to remove,” Edwarde Tufte. Being a creative director with Microsoft and involved in the UI design of Windows Phone 7, Mike Kruzeniski believes the world of print design can heavily influence our interactive world. With web pages becoming more and more clutered with information, he says we are ready to let the UI get out of the way to bring the content forward. Take notes from Swiss typography designers, learn to love the whitespace and force a flow of the page or the experience of the site, the high res displays we are currently using can now handle it. So how do we convince a client this is a good look when we constantly hear that a web design is just repurposed print? He argues that print designers have been perfecting their craft for 400-500 years or more, shouldn’t they know what looks good and how to get a message across to the end user? I’m guilty of this myself, but why can’t we reinvent the look of the web or mobile apps? He says it’s time to remove the ornimental designs and overall fakery. Let’s move on and make the web beautiful.