We are refreshing our servers. You may encounter some temporary problems with accessing your projects on July 22th. The good news is that all visits are being recorded so you can review them later.

We are happy to say that you can start implementing Use It Better™ right now as we have just opened our first plan for broad audience. The best part is that it’s completely free!

With Use It Better™ Free Plan, you can record and replay user actions on your Flash website (ActionScript 2 or 3). We will record up to 50 user sessions a day for a Free account. To start, visit Plans and Pricing page and follow the instructions.

We are working very hard on Paid Plans, which are still in Beta. Paid Plans will have much more functionality as described on Plans and Pricing page. If you would like to participate in free testing of the Paid Plans, sign up for our continued Beta.

The upcoming Adobe Max in Los Angeles is going to be quite extraordinary. It’s a rare occasion to attend so many great events in just 4 days. As if Adobe Max itself wouldn’t be enough there are FITC and SoDA unConferences too! Not sure it it’s a coincident but there’s also Adultcon these days in LA :)

Below you will find agenda of Lukasz Twardowski who is Creative Director at Cookie and our project leader. If you are coming to Max and want to hook up, mail him: l ( at ) cookie.pl

Sunday, Oct 4th

SoDA 7:00 pm – 9:00 pm
SoDA Adobe Max Digerati Mixer

Monday, Oct 5th

Adobe Max 9:30 am – 11:00 am
General Session at Nokia Theatre L.A.

Adobe Max 11:30 am – 12:30 pm
Digital Agency Best Practices Presented by SoDA

FITC 12:30 pm – 1:00 pm
“Step Away from the Computer” by Joshua Hirsch

Adobe Max 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
GPU Acceleration in the next Flash Player

SoDA unConference 3:00 pm – 4:30 pm
Ethics and Issues: The Dark Side of the Digital Agency Business

FITC 3:30 pm – 4:00 pm
“Custom Event Reporting from Flash to Google Analytics” by Joseph Labrecque

Adobe Max 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
What’s New In Flash Player

SoDA unConference 4:30 pm – 6:00 pm
Masters’ Class: Designers and Devs from top shops in the country discuss their craft.

Adobe Max 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Workflows for the Flash Platform

Adobe Max 8:00 pm – 10:00 pm
Meet the Teams

Tuesday, Oct 6th

Adobe Max 9:00 am – 10:00 am
What’s New In Flash Player

SoDA unConference 9:30-10:30
Debate – Rich Media vs. Standards: Is Flash right for your site or your client?

Adobe Max 10:30 am – 12:00 pm
General Session at Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE

Adobe Max 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm
The Business Value of User Experience

FITC 4:30-5:00
“Large, Physical, Flash” by Thomas Wester

Adobe Max 4:30 pm – 5:30 pm
Agile and UX: An Unholy Alliance?

FITC 5:00-5:30
“Flash-Jazz-Combo” by André Michelle

Adobe Max 5:30 pm – 7:00 pm
Sneak Peeks and 2009 MAX Awards Nokia Theatre L.A. LIVE

Adobe Max 8:00 pm – 11:00 pm
MAX Bash TBD

Wednesday, Oct 7th

Adobe Max 9:30 am – 10:30 am
Top Secret Flash Player Session

Adobe Max 11:00 am – 12:00 pm
A Deep Dive into Ten Innovative Projects for Flash

FITC 11:30-12:00
“Visualizing Voice: Using the Flash Microphone for advanced interaction” by Chuck Freedman

Adobe Max 2:00 pm – 3:00 pm
Roadmap: Flash Platform Servers and Services

FITC 3:00-3:30
“User-Centric Design within the Digital Agency” by Sean Scott

Adobe Max 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm
Panel Session: Combining Great Design with Technology to Engage Customers

Adobe Max 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm
Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and Adobe AIR

These are the up-to-date results of our Beta sign-up survey. Perhaps you’ll find them interesting.

Who are you?

Majority of sign-ups (91%) came from digital agencies like us, which was quite predictable. 46% of you declared that analysis are very important part of your work, quite often admitting (10%) that you don’t use any tools to analyze Flash projects.

We are happy to say that we got quite many sign-ups from developers of Flash web apps. Among them are some of the coolest apps around as well as new-comers.

Read the rest of this entry »

Some of you may be interested in how is Beta going on and what are the new developments.

First of all we would like to say big THANKS to all of you who send feedback. We have learnt a lot.

The most popular request we get from you is to enhance Replay module to enable rewinding or skipping to a specific point in time. It’s not that easy and, to be honest, quite impossible to make, because the replay works on a real website. But we are working hard on a Fast Forward feature, which we hope you to find satisfying. It will enable you to reach interesting moments in a replay faster by increasing the speed of mouse movement or even skipping mouse movement at all.

You also asked us to make filtering a little easier. Now in uPanel you can find a little magnifying glass icon next to an event or a session attribute. It allows you to find specific visits with just a single click.

Of course there were some bugs you reported. Hopefully, we have eliminated them.

We’re looking forward to more feedback from you. We are especially curious of your thoughts on our ActionScript framework. Tell us… do you find it hard to make Use It Better work?

Today we are sending invitations for Use It Better™ service preview for everyone that has signed up for our beta.

The service preview gives access to 3 demo sites. You can play with them and then see the exact replay of your session. You can also log in to our uPanel to see your session among all the sessions recorded so far.

If you have already signed up to Use It Better™ beta and you’re curious to see it in action, just go check your mailbox. If you haven’t decided to sign up yet, why not sign up now?

The beta will launch very soon, so stay tuned and feed us back!

Those who follow development of Use It Better know that this moment has been postponed many times.

There is still a lot to do, but it seems that current version is quite stable and have all the crucial functionalites. We are happy to invite all of you to sign up for beta testing.

Use It Better™ is a tool that enables you to track how people use your Flash website and what’s the user experience behind it. Is there anybody actually interested in the content of your website? Is the Flash navigation fully usable? These are only first of the questions that we wanted to be answered by Use It Better™.

Cookie, as a web shop, has been constantly trying to push forward interaction and bring some fresh ideas to user experience. Our portfolio includes many Flash projects which may be thought to be too bold or too demanding for users.

Read the rest of this entry »