Dr. Eve Marder, Professor and Head, Division of Science at Brandeis University will be speaking at A Look Ahead XVII on April 29, 2014. Eve Marder pioneered the understanding of neural circuits, particularly how their properties and dynamics give rise to specific behaviors. During her talk "Individual Variability and Robustness in Neuronal Circuits" she will address her own transformative research and the opportunities ahead.

One of the big challanges for large companies, especially in the digital age, is establishing and maintaining brand consistency. A corporation like Sony for example, wages a daily war to ensure consistent communications across five continents.

Although we often think of publishers to be exclusively involved in news and magazine industries, all corporations typically publish thousands of documents per year; they include websites, microsites, reports (statistical and financial); there are point of sale promotions, internal communications, instruction manuals and legal documents. Increasingly, for reasons both economic and environmental, the emphasis is being placed upon digital delivery and especially mobile delivery.

Today Adobe announced that they’re integrating their Digital Publishing Suite with Adobe Experience Manager, in an effort to capture a larger market share of this growing sector.

DPS and Adobe Experience Manager make it significantly easier for publishers and brands to produce consistent, rich content for customers on mobile and the Web. — Nick Bogaty, head of digital publishing, Adobe

Adobe believe that the integration of the two platforms as part of the Adobe Marketing Cloud, together with the combination of Adobe Analytics will streamline delivery, speeding up production and reducing costs for thousands of digital content publishers worldwide.

Centralizing assets is not a new idea. From the dawn of the Internet, corporations maintained extranets as repositories for multi-Mb PSDs featuring board-authorized stock photography and artwork. Designers would simply access the resources, regionalize it, and publish. Even now, companies use services like Dropbox to host assets available by invitation only. Many large companies, Twitter for example, even host public repositories of key assets such as their logo together with usage instructions, in an attempt to maintain brand integrity.

The difference with Adobe’s approach, is that they are serving the assets directly. Templates are designed allowing content authors to drag and drop assets—from text right up to video—into new editions of publications, from where they can be pushed out in a fraction of the time of the traditional process. Digital Publishing Suite is already being used by the likes of Condé Nast to speed up production, reduce costs and ensure consistency.

Adobe DPS is the go-to solution for publishing our magazine apps on mobile devices. The integration of Adobe Experience Manager not only enables us deliver a consistent Vanity Fair experience on multiple platforms, we have advanced our on-sale date by five days. — Emily Smith, director of operations for corporate editorial, Condé Nast

Initially this may appear to be another attack on the design industry from a large company intent on WYSIWYGing a design process. In reality, it empowers designers by limiting the role of artworker, providing a system that needs to be designed, and reducing the repetitive board-room approval process that plagues in-house teams.

It also strikes a blow for those arguing that a responsive solution isn’t always the best option by enabling native apps, distinct from a core website, to achieve similar levels of consistency.

It’s unlikely that Adobe’s latest move will affect the working lives of most freelancers or small teams, but in-house designers and consultancies that work with global brands can anticipate it playing a big role in the next couple of years.

Are you planning to use Adobe’s DPS in conjunction with AMC? How do you maintain consistency across platforms? Let us know in the comments.

Remove Image Backgrounds with PhotoScissors (Win/Mac) – only $9.97!

It's been awhile since we've seen any updates in the editor space. The last big splash was made by Sublime Text which took the web development community by storm, especially once Package Control came around to serve as the package manager for the editor.

Well, GitHub is looking to shake things up with the beta launch of a new editor called Atom. I got my hands on a beta and wanted to give you a rundown of what it offers. One thing to note is that the documentation is a bit sparse, so it was tough trying to determine what every feature did, but I'll be touching on the important aspects below.

A Hackable Text Editor for the 21st Century

The first thing to keep in mind is that this is a beta version; things are going to change and some things aren't going to be in this release. For example, I didn't find a way to create a project out of a directory, which is kind of important to me. It's not ideal, but I'm also being realistic about the status of the product.

The next thing to bring up is that this editor was created completely with web technology. For example, the underlying architecture relies on Chromium (yes the basis for Google Chrome), making every window a locally-rendered web page. Why didn't they just build it as a browser-based IDE like Cloud9IDE? Because, despite a lot of progress in file APIs for the browser, there are still limitations in terms of file system access, so building it as a desktop app made a lot of sense.

Yep, that's the Chromium Developer Tools running within the editor and I'm highlighting an element with it. It's pretty freaky to be able to modify the code within my editor with the Chrome DevTools, but it goes to show that the underlying engine is web-based.

They also leveraged Node.js to allow for file system access and provide tremendous flexibility and extensibility in their packaging system basically making Atom highly customizable and giving it incredible access to a ton of npms.

Ultimately, this statement explains best why they leveraged web technologies:

With the entire industry pushing web technology forward, we're confident that we're building Atom on fertile ground. Native UI technologies come and go, but the web is a standard that can only becomes more capable and ubiquitous with every passing year. We're excited to dig deeper into its toolbox.

When you first drop into Atom, it looks strikingly similar to Sublime, making it easy from a visual perspective to slide into it.

One of the first things I wanted to check was language support. While I primarily work in JavaScript, I have a burning desire to get into Ruby on Rails so ensuring broad language support. Not only does it support Ruby syntax but also the Rails framework along with:

• Python
• CoffeeScript
• Go
• Sass
• YAML

and a ton of others.

The breadth of coverage is very comprehensive and on par with any editor I've seen.

But it's more than just supporting languages. Atom also supports syntax shortcuts (called snippets) that allow you to quickly create code blocks with minimal typing.

For example, if I type in ife followed by a tab, I'll get the following:

if (true) {
    
    } else {
    
    }

And simply typing in a lower case "f" followed by a tab gives me a skeleton for an anonymous function:

function () {
    
    }

Products like TextExpander and other editors have done these for some time, so it's good to see GitHub including it day one.

It's Customizable

One of the things that still irks me about Sublime (even v3), is that many of the configuration settings need to be adjusted manually. In Atom, it looks like all settings are available and customizable via a settings panel, giving you the ability to update things such as:

• Font family and size
• Line numbers
• Themes
• Packages

As well as easily disable packages that you've installed.

Personalizing an editor is one of the first things any program does, especially the theme since it's what you'll look at every day. Atom comes with five themes by default, in both light and dark variations, but via it's packages manager, you can add more to suit your taste:

I was happy to see the "Monokai" theme in there since it's my personal favorite.

Now, remember how I mentioned previously that you had access to the developer tools and that Atom editor windows are basically rendered web pages? Well, what this means is that you have a ton of flexibility in customizing the look and feel of things, because you're able to inspect DOM nodes and see what styles have been applied to them. Atom allows you to define your own styles in a LESS stylesheet called styles.less, giving you really granular control over the look of specific types of elements. Getting to the stylesheet is as simple as going to Atom > Open Your Stylesheet and making your changes in the appropriate section.

.editor {
    
      .meta.tag.sgml.doctype.html { font-size: 26px; }
    
    }

In this case, I updated the .editor class by adding the classes that define how the DOCTYPE of a file will look inside the editor. I made the font size 26px to be purposely large. The following image shows how this update affected the rendering of my HTML code:

As you can see, you can really dig deep into Atom and customize it to your heart's content since it's basically HTML and DOM under the hood.

Along with being able to install new themes, Atom also provides a built-in package manager that allows you to extend the functionality of the editor. This is analogous to Sublime Package Control, except it's already baked into the editor itself as opposed to being forced to install a separate script to get it.

Installing a package is as easy as clicking the Install button. The editor provides a list of "featured" packages along with a search functionality that pulls from the main package registry.

If you want to do this via the command-line, Atom provides a CLI for it called apm (Atom Package Manager) that allows you to install any package with the following command:

apm install <package name>

So installing the autocomplete package would look like this:

Currently, the number of packages available is small, but that's to be expected at this stage.

You'll be able to find great packages though for things like:

• Previewing Markdown
• Going to a specific line
• Autosave when your editor goes out of focus

And many more. I can't imagine it'll be long before GitHub recruits all of the Sublime package creators to port their work over. In fact, there's already documentation showing how you can convert your TextMate Bundle over to Atom. Since many TextMate Bundles are compatible with Sublime, it seems conceivable that some Sublime packages may be able to be converted over, but don't hold me to that since I haven't tested it out myself.

This is also a good opportunity for contributors to jump in and offer up new packages. While Atom has most of the basics, it's missing some important ones, like linters and syntax highlighters. That's a void that needs to be filled and I can imagine it happening in short order.

Key bindings are also customizable using the local ~/.atom/keymap.cson. You can open this file manually or by going to the Atom > Open Your Keymap menu option. Opening the file will show you some examples of how to edit the key bindings.

The one key binding you'll need to remember is Command-Shift-P, which pops up the command palette and displays all of the possible key bindings with associated functionality.

The Getting Started guide offers you some basic guidance on how to use Atom and is worth the read. But just know that the project site is a bit sparse on documentation right now, so some of the editor's capabilities you'll have to learn by trial and error.

Stacking Up Against Other Editors

Many of you are probably asking how it stacks up against your favorite editor. Since Sublime is my personal choice, I can say that Atom is a fairly decent beta product, but not something I'd switch to immediately. Sublime's built-in functionality plus extensive package ecosystem makes it a very mature editor to work with.

Having said that, Atom is backed by GitHub and that holds a ton of weight. There's major geek cred there and I'm pretty confident we're going to see a major run on new packages, especially considering the extensibility that Atom provides via Chromium and Node.

For now, GitHub is offering Atom free during the beta period, giving developers a chance to tinker with it and get their hands dirty. If they can keep pricing competitive and rapidly build up the package ecosystem, I think Atom will end up being my new editor of choice.

Interview with Michael Sabo of DB Networks

Rooms To Grow

UMBC alumni, professors and students find new spaces and places for innovation.

Photography by Marlayna Demond ’11

* * * *

Much of the journey of creation takes place in the space of the human mind. Yet that journey is not a solitary one. Intellects require companionship. Great ideas spark new approaches – and more new ideas – when they are tested by conversation and forged in collaboration. And those combinations require spaces to encourage and enhance their work.

A research university such as UMBC excels in creating such spaces. Not only do its professors and students create them on (or nearby) the campus, but the university’s alumni carry that spirit of exploration into our community.

We invite you to take a closer looks at these spaces where the next great ideas in numerous disciplines are being developed or taught right now by members of the UMBC community.

THE CYBER HIVE

Proximity. Potentiality. Coffee.

This morning, you can almost hear the first two qualities over the hiss of the coffeemaker as the employees of Integrata Security watch a presentation by their CEO, Mike Geppi in the CyberHive – a joint project between bwtech@UMBC, the Maryland Department of Business and Economic Development, Corporate Office Properties Trust (COPT) and Merritt Properties.

The Cyber Hive is a collaborative space with four tenants (including Integrata Security) and six affiliates. Tenants have dedicated office space and access to the common areas, while affiliates have access to the common areas. “It’s very high tech,” says Geppi.

Integrata Security is developing technology for secure wireless networks. The National Security Agency (NSA) was interested in how to make wireless networks secure, and after a survey of commercially available solutions, the agency determined that none was secure enough. So the NSA invented a new technology, which Integrata has licensed and is developing for commercial and government use.

For Geppi, part of the CyberHive’s allure is its location. “Being close to the NSA is fantastic,” he says. “Not only is the location of the CyberHive great but we also have access to the talent on the UMBC campus.”

Ellen Hemmerly, president and executive director of bwtech@UMBC, says that combination was just what she and her team had in mind with the venture, which will further boost the research park’s already burgeoning presence in the cybertechnology field.

“It adds to our cyber program at bwtech@UMBC by providing co-working space and meeting space that will facilitate the growing of our affiliate program, which houses cybersecurity companies that don’t need a dedicated office space,” she says “We also hope it will facilitate partnerships between cyber companies, UMBC faculty and students.”

Geppi says the design of the Cyber Hive makes it a naturally collaborative environment. “We do interact with other companies and that’s a real benefit. Having startups talk with each other. It typically leads to opportunity. We can develop strategic partnerships or find customers. Some of the entrepreneurs here are going through the exact same thing I’m going through and it’s good to be able to compare notes.”

While Geppi meets with his team, Tyler Simon and John Linford meet in a private office.  They are both research scientists for Paratools, a software engineering firm.  Simon, who is also a research scientist in the computer science and electrical engineering department at UMBC, agrees with Geppi about the Cyber Hive’s possibilities for collaboration.

“People are more likely to collaborate because they just walk by,” Simon observes. “It’s better than just a bunch of closed offices.”

Linford concurs: “It’s the first incubator I’ve been in that has that feature.”

– Nicole Ruediger

For more information about the Cyber Hive: http://www.bwtechumbc.com/pdf/cyberhive.pdf

Summer Training in Alcohol Research

The University of Kentucky offers a 10-­week, paid laboratory experience for talented undergraduate students interested in gaining research experience in alcohol-­related disorders such as alcoholism, fetal alcohol syndrome, cancer, and pain. This is a competitive program designed for students considering a career in a science, technology, engineering or math-­related fields, but especially graduate study. Opportunities range from applied psychological approaches in humans to basic cellular mechanisms of alcohol action in cell culture. Students will spend the summer performing independent research under the supervision of faculty mentors, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows, give a scientific presentation that describes their accomplishments, and have the opportunity to contribute to front-­line research in either of these areas.