I’ve been on vacation since mid-last week and still have a couple of days left, but I was really excited about this so I wanted to make sure I posted about it. I’ve gotten some budget from Adobe to help contribute to the Drupal Services module to help get it ready and compatible for Drupal 7.

If you’ve done any work with Drupal and Flash you know that the Services module is a pretty key part of the integration. After talking to Greg Dunlap, the mastermind behind Services, it was pretty apparent to me that helping contribute to his effort would go the longest way towards making sure Drupal 7 works really well with Flash in addition to helping the wider Drupal community.

I think there are a lot of places where Drupal can benefit from Flash. My colleague Mihai has done a couple of blog posts around creating Flex apps for Drupal and I think that LiveCycle Collaboration Service integration is something that a lot of Drupal users would benefit from.

So I’m stoked about Drupal 7. I want to give a big thanks to Josh Kopel and Jared Stoneberg for making the initial introductions and being so helpful with my Drupal questions. The Seattle Drupal community is fantastic. And this wouldn’t be possible without the great folks at Palantir, especially Tiffany Ferriss who dealt with my delays and back and forths.

I did a quick semi-informal podcast today with the guys from Android Central on Flash Player and Android. It was a lot of fun to do and special thanks to Phil and Jerry for having me on.

The feedback after the Android Summit we had has been great and I have to say, I think the Android community is as great as the Flash community when it comes to smart, passionate and fun people.

FITC was an absolutely awesome event. Props to Shawn, Rick and team for another great event. I’m looking forward to them coming back to San Francisco next year. Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. I got some great questions and as I said in the sessions, if you have anything cool you’re doing with mapping and Flash, drop me an email.

Below are the slides I used and I’ve also posted all of the code for the demos I did. I haven’t really cleaned them up at all, but if you have any questions, let me know.

Thibault Imbert just blogged about the release of Flash Player 10.1.82.76, which includes support for H.264 GPU decoding on the Mac.

You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature. For more details about it, Tinic already posted about this.

Some of you may remember talk of a Flash Player “Gala” that was put out as a beta right before Flash Player 10.1 was released. The GPU decoding didn’t make it into the 10.1 release so we had to wait for a security release to add it. That security release is here and it should make quite a bit of difference for Mac users who are playing H.264 video through Flash Player.

Next week is FITC San Francisco. FITC is one of my favorite Flash conferences of all time and having it in San Francisco means that a bunch of Adobeans are going to be out in force. It also means you get the big guns. Like Kevin Lynch giving the keynote.

It is an incredibly interesting period for Adobe and Flash developers. The word I keep hearing is that we’re in a period of “hyperchange” with the drive for multi-screen and an increasingly app-centric world. But all of this is good for Flash developers. While HTML5 is fantastic for a lot of reasons, it’s also not fully baked yet. It will be, I’m not worried about that, but the hype surrounding it hasn’t caught up with the reality of how hard it is to make the jump to mobile web content. Or create complex applications/content.

So this is a pretty pivotal FITC. And I think a lot of us at Adobe are looking forward to talking with you guys and providing some context to the stories you hear. Adobe is going to be a busy place over the next year and there’s a lot that should excite Flash developers. FITC is a chance to get a taste of that.

So go register!

I got a question via Twitter about how to get access to old copies of Adobe AIR. I tried Googling around but couldn’t find anything that looked official so I asked around inside of Adobe and was pointed to this link – Archived Adobe AIR Runtime and SDK Versions. So if you need older versions of AIR for any reason, there they are.

Google Wave is no more. For those who remember the sound of the jaws of the tech mainstream dropping when Google showed the demo at Google I/O, that may come as a shock. For those who tried to use it, it’s probably less of a shock. I kind of liked ReadWriteWeb’s take:

Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don’t call it an “email-killer” (and you shouldn’t) then you’d have to call it a “product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration.” That’s daunting and proved accessible to too few people.

To say that people don’t get collaboration or that Wave was ahead of its time is a cop out. Wave IS an awesome product. Real-time collaboration IS changing how the world works together. On the Flash side that is one of the reasons I’m so excited about Collaboration Services; real-time collaboration is fantastic.

But this was a case of Google’s user experience coming to bite them. Some people love the minimalistic experience of Gmail. And it worked a few years ago when it was first introduced, but the iPhone has shown how critical a great user experience is to user adoption. And frankly, Google’s user experience hasn’t changed much since the Gmail days and the applications are starting to feel dated. That’s not a big issue when you’re doing something as straightforward as email, but when you’re trying to completely change how people communicate, you need to provide a user experience that abstracts the technology and just makes it easy. Have we seen that done before?

Exactly. Wave was a great technology showcase but it was not a great product. Google had the chance to fundamentally change communication on the web but they didn’t have the design chops to put it in a package that was useful to people and instantly easy for them to dive into. You can’t do an 80 minute demo for something that’s this big of a shift in thinking.

Hopefully Google takes this to heart and realizes that technology isn’t good enough. When you’re being revolutionary you have to design a user experience that makes the technology feel second nature.

One of the things that I’ve found to be a bit of a pain is structuring data correctly so it’s easy to chart. Luckily there are some things you can do within the charting framework in Flex to make that a bit easier as well as some things you can do with the Zend Framework to send data in a way that’s easier to chart. I cover the basics in a new post on the Adobe Developer Center.

There is a cool workshop being given by Jamie Kosoy called No Flash? No Problem and he had a great quote in the description:

There’s a long list of common complaints about the use of Flash, but many of the criticisms just aren’t true. Detractors say that Flash isn’t search engine friendly; Screen readers can’t understand Flash content; You can’t deeplink to specific pages…

You know what? They’re wrong. These criticisms are symptoms of misunderstanding by developers on the ways different technologies work together.

I think this is one of the biggest problems that Adobe has. Technology and development choices tends to be borderline religious in nature. And technology in general loves to have good guys and bad guys. That means the communities are very siloed and there is some resistance to incorporating or looking at other technologies. It’s HTML5 versus Flash, Microsoft versus Google, .NET versus Java, etc.

It’s also become a lot harder to be a generalist. Developers get rewarded (at least in terms of attention) for becoming experts in their niche. They’re asked to speak at conferences, they get better gigs, so becoming an expert has direct financial and publicity benefits. Who has time to dive into other technologies when there are so many advantages to drilling down into your own?

Because of that, I don’t think we’re seeing technology at its best. And it’s not limited to Flash. PhoneGap has been very successful by combining the iPhone with HTML/JS. But Flash suffers more than most. There are a lot of great integration points between HTML and Flash. We’ve got the Flex/Ajax bridge for Flex that lets you expose Flash methods to JavaScript and vice versa. We’ve got deep-linking support with SWFAddress that uses JavaScript and Flash. There are a lot of integration points but they don’t seem well publicized or well used. And there are no shortage of areas where Flash can augment JS/HTML to solve problems. File uploading, Webcam/Mic support, and charting.

But I also think Adobe is at fault. I don’t think we’ve done a good enough job of making it easy to integrate Flash and HTML. Even now internally you hear things like “HTML strategy”, or “HTML versus Flash” and I haven’t heard a lot of talk about how we’re going to take what we know about RIAs and web apps and apply that to both Flash and HTML.

But I think that’s changing. So part of the post is to give heart. We recently had a big re-organization and most of the Creative Suite web tools and the Platform (Flash/AIR/Flex,etc) are together in one business unit. I think that means you’re going to see a lot of Flash-knowledge applied to our HTML tools and hopefully you’ll see a lot more about using Flash and JavaScript together so we don’t need sessions like Jamie’s a year from now.

With the web design tools and developer tools in one place, I’m looking forward to talking a lot more about rich web solutions that provide some innovative examples of technology working together and encouraging HTML/JS developers to look at Flash where appropriate and Flash developers to think about HTML/JS when it makes sense. The easier we can make that for developers the more success we’ll have and the better applications we’ll see.

This hits two of my favorite things; Flex applications and in-browser RIAs. Picnik, the Seattle-based startup that was purchased by Google a little while ago built one of the coolest photo editing applications on the web and were very early users of Flex. I always loved the customization work they did to Flex and stopped by their offices a few times to talk with the founders and meet the team. I was really happy when they were bought by Google (they also moved closer to the Adobe offices in Seattle).

So it’s really cool to see the announcement today that they’re integrating with Picasa to allow Picasa users to edit their photos using Picnik. Combine that with the blog post by YouTube about how they’re using Flash and I think there is a lot of momentum for Flash at the worlds biggest web company.

And hopefully that means a lot more great browser-based RIAs. Google loves the browser and is pushing it further with things like ChromeOS. I still think the browser is the best way to deliver applications and content. Picnik is a great example that you can take Flash and build something very powerful with a great user experience but with all of the freedom and flexibility of the browser. That’s clearly the model Google likes and they’re moving forward on that front with whatever technology works best for the problem.

It’s going to be a good future.

And for those who like history, John Cook pulled up the original email that started Picnik where they discuss Flash and compare it to other technologies. It’s a cool trip down memory lane.