Mads Djurhuus: Developer spotlight

What (Adobe and non-Adobe) technologies are you currently using?

Adobe Creative Suite 3 and 4 Design Premium. A little Adobe AIR. A lot of PHP/MySQL/Apache. All Windows. And I am one of the lucky ones who can take full advantage of the entire suite (except Fireworks, to be honest). We are fortunate enough to be growing so I am fast moving from the typical jack-of-all-trades role of the small start-up to the more specialized role of the grown-up. My tool is Flash.

What is your most recent project you've built and what (Adobe and non-Adobe) technologies have you used?

We have just finished a Flash Lite based project for a national charity. The idea is to donate a thing instead of money—you donate a goat to a village in Africa instead of x dollars. This has been a great success in recent years and creating the mobile extension of this "brand" was very exciting. We used Flash (Lite) and PHP/MySQL to get it running. Production time from securing the account to distribution start was six weeks.

What excites you, inspires you, or makes you say, "Wow that's really cool" about the technologies you work with?

When someone in the real world—someone I don't know—actually uses our "products." For example, knowing that a widow in Africa will have a better future partly because of something I helped make or when a festival-goer sends a message to his friends on the big screen using my application. Those kinds of things make me go "wow" inside.

Where do you get your information about technology?

All online. Printed news is dead to me. I love books, but I get my updates online. Also, I am fortunate enough to know a lot of talented people with the same interests as me.

What are some of your favorite community resources, websites, or blogs?

The Flash Lite group on Yahoo! is great. Bill Perry (flashdevices.net) and Mark Doherty (flashmobileblog.com) both do great blogs as well as the venerable Adobe XML News Aggregator. For discussions in my native language, I go to flashforum.dk, which also serves as the forum for the Danish User Group. Forum Nokia is also a fantastic source of information. And of course, Google knows all.

What is your favorite or most useful electronic gadget that you own? How about one that you want, but don't own?

Buying a GPS unit in the US for all my travels over there has probably saved me countless psychotherapy lessons. Being able to navigate foreign lands like a native is cool. It's the cheapest unit that Wal-Mart had to offer but it hasn't let me down yet. Apart from that, I still feel envious every time I see one of those flashy Mac notebooks; my clunky HP with extra external battery doesn't quite measure up.

What's the one thing you'd love to see in web technologies in the future?

The complete adherence to W3C standards by all browser manufacturers.

What was the genesis/origin/history for your existing work?

I started using Flash when it was called Future Splash. I thought that animated buttons were an absolute must on my website and I didn't know enough JavaScript to create a rollover (still don't, by the way). Then I got heavily into CD-ROM production for a few years (using Macromedia Director) but the CD-ROM market quickly died away. Along with traditional print and design work I did Flash and Dreamweaver work for number of years until the advent of Flash Lite.

What's next for you? For technology?

We have recently landed several long-term, mobile-related contracts, which gives us stability and peace of mind. I look forward to begin deploying truly rich experiences on mobile in the near future. So next for me is getting used to the fact that the work I do is paid for by an actual client.

For the technologies I work with, the future is bright. The capabilities of Flash Lite seem to evolve exponentially and the handsets I develop for keep getting more and more advanced.

So what's next? More of the same but even faster and better.