Konductor Blog

How does Konductor work? How can I make parts of my site editable? Can you manage menus dynamically? Questions like these are common to hear from designers new to Konductor. Yesterday, if you had asked us one of these questions, we would have sent you to our help documentation. Starting today we can now show you how to do what you need to do with Konductor.

Over the last few weeks we’ve produced a number of tutorial videos that we’re now pleased to release to you through our YouTube account. Everything from downloading the tools you need to how to work with links and anchors within content regions is covered. Here are two of the playlists we’ve put together, one for designers and one for your clients:

Designer tutorials playlist:

Client tutorials playlist:

We hope that you enjoy and learn lots from these videos. If you have any requests or suggestions for new videos, feel free to leave a comment. And don’t forget that we’re still here to help one-on-one as well, so if you have any questions that aren’t covered in a video, someone will be sure to get back to you pronto.

Just a quick post this time—we recently posted a video on YouTube showing how quick and easy it it to cut the Firefox website over to Konductor, complete with managed menus and styled regions with no modifcations to the code:

Below is all the major steps we took to make this video:

1. Save the site using the “Save Complete” Firefox add on
2. Add editable regions using Adobe Dreamweaver
3. Modify content using the Konductor application
4. Preview the results in Firefox

The video was actually bit over 5 minutes long, but we decided to speed it up a little and get the point across a little faster Also, one of the cooler aspects of the process was that DJ Earworm gave us permission to use “United States of Pop 2009 (Blame it on the Pop)” as the sound track to the video! Big thanks for letting us use your track! Be sure to check out his videos.

One of the most requested features we get is galleries. So I’m sure many of you will be happy to hear that we have posted our first tutorial about implementing galleries to our tutorials section of the extension help.

From the beginning we have adopted the attitude that doing one thing to a very high standard is much better than doing everything poorly. We do content management very well—and we decided to leave galleries to the experts, Flickr.

You’ll get all the meat of the technical stuff in the post, but a couple of years ago, a full featured gallery would only have been possible using your favorite server side scripting language with a mish-mash of SQL. And it would have required much more code. Now, we can get access to all of Flickr’s functionality using a minimal amount of jQuery and JSON.

The above may or may not mean much to you, but it does illustrate nicely how easy integrating sophisticated services into your own designs has become. And that means we can help you integrate with many more top class web services; next in line is MailChimp for newsletters.

Anyway, let us know what you think about the tutorial, and also what else you would like to see Konductor integrate with.

The fruits of our ideas and labor are growing. We’re pleased to announce that the Konductor Extension for Dreamweaver is currently the featured product on the Adobe Dreamweaver Exchange! Thank you to all 7,400+ people who, at the time of writing this, 10,000+ people have downloaded the extension and are beginning to see and express just how valuable Konductor can become to their design business.

We’re really happy to be receiving great responses from designers all over the world. Keep the feedback coming and know that we’re here because we support what you designers already do, without making your life more complicated.

Another interview has been posted with Derek Zarbrook, this time with The Digital Scene at Adobe MAX 2009. If you watch closely, you’ll even get a little sneak peak of what’s to come with Konductor in the near future. Enjoy.

RedMonk has posted a great interview with Derek Zarbrook on Konductor’s unique use of Adobe AIR. Included below is the interview and a nice demo of the system in action as well.

Michael Coté:

Thus far, most examples have really just been web pages on the desktop that, at best, have off-line modes or are closed-up video players. It was nice, then, to find a use of AIR that took moved beyond these uses in Konductor’s AIR client.

Read the full article.

Thousands of people and hundreds of demos later, we’re finally back in wet Vancouver after Adobe MAX 2009. We had a really great time down in LA, and we want to thank all the people that came out to say hi and check out how far we’ve come in the last year. We’re finally out of beta and the response we’re receiving from designers and others is really exciting!

The show itself was great, everything from the sessions to the food to the special events; we had fun and learned lots.

Konductor also got some nice press exposure as well regarding our launch:

• PC World – Hosting Service Helps Web Designers Stay in Control
• PC World – AIR 2.0 Will Flow to Flip Cams, Local Apps
• The Flex Show – Episode 88: Interviews from Adobe Max (Konductor interview @ 43:45)

But now the play time is over and it’s time to get back to pushing Konductor further and refining the solid start that things are off to. We have a lot of great ideas in the pipeline, so stay tuned for updates.

We also had time to take some snaps at the show. Read the rest of this entry »

So what’s Konductor all about anyways? Why bring another CMS into the mix? How does a designer benefit from using Konductor? These are all great questions that we hear often, and we now have a fancy way of summing up the answers.

Introducing the brand new Konductor promotional video! We’ve worked hard on it, and we hope you like it.

Well, we made it through Round 1 and we’re now in the race to the finals.  InsideRIA‘s Best RIA of 2009 semi-finals are now open for voting!  If you like us (we sure hope you do), please take a few clicks out of your busy day to head over and cast a vote.

The top 3 RIA’s of this round will head to the finals, which will be voted on in October at Adobe MAX.

Side note – official introductory pricing for Konductor will be announced soon, stay tuned (by tuned, we mean RSS feed’d).

Ok, so I’ll admit it, there’s a few geeks here in the office. Most of us here use Macs, so today was a big day for us with the release of Snow Leopard. Seeing as the Apple Store is not too far away from the office, I decided to head on over and see if I could grab a couple copies to see how the Konductor platform worked on it.

Well, after waiting in line for a few minutes, and then waiting for everyone to stop clapping when the gate to the store raised (not sure what that’s all about) I was able to grab some copies.  The installation went really well; very quick and straightforward.  From there it was time to see how the Konductor tools worked on the OS.

We hear that CS3 doesn’t work with Snow Leopard, but we’re using CS4 so we weren’t too concerned. To our delight, the OS seems really polished and both Dreamweaver CS4 and AIR work flawlessly on it.  So being, both the Konductor Dreamweaver Extension and the Konductor AIR App worked just as expected.  It doesn’t get much better than that, a refined OS that works perfectly with the tools you need.