Today Google announced the availability of a Google Maps API for Flash which means you can now use Google Maps right inside of your Flash applications. Big, big stuff. I built an AIR application that used Google Maps and had to go through the HTML control but this will make all of that obsolete.
It’s great to see Google continue to use Flash and at least bring some of their APIs up to parity with Flash. With things like the open screen project Adobe is working very hard to be a friend of the open web. In my mind this is a pretty good example that Flash is becoming just as important on the web as JavaScript. From the Google blog:
So, what do I like about the API for Flash? Smoothness and speed are a big part of it. We’ve designed it so that Flash graphics can be used for each tile layer, marker and info window - opening up possibilities like dynamic shading, shadowing, animation, and video. When the user zooms the map, magnification changes happen smoothly and place names fade in. After the user drags a marker, it gently bounces to a halt. Generally, Flash allows for much greater embellishment, and, well… “flashiness.” I get excited just thinking about the creative ways developers might take advantage of having a Flash API for Google Maps.
NJ on the Thermo team has been working on a little AIR application called Snackr built with Flex that helps you keep track of your feeds. It’s a little ticker that runs at the bottom of your screen and then displays random RSS items from feeds you subscribe to. Instead of a traditional reader in which you crank through each post, Snackr will help give you a random smattering of news from your feeds.
It’s a really cool concept for reading RSS feeds. You point it at an OPML file and just watch the items go by on the screen picking the interesting ones to check out in more detail. And because you’re getting random items from your feed you can catch things you might have missed. I’m using it to subscribe to things like AXNA and Technorati/Google Blog searches where there is a lot of noise but a lot of great posts hidden in between.
All of the evangelists at Adobe had an offsite today in New York and it was one of the coolest days I’ve had at Adobe. Obviously I can’t get into a bunch of what we talked about but the team had really great in depth meetings with a bunch of products that are semi-public and that you should already know about. We had meetings with the Thermo team, the Pacifica team, the CoCoMo team, and some inter-evangelist presentations on ColdFusion and LiveCycle.
For me as an evangelist and Adobe employee it was great because we got completely free access to ask questions of all these teams and got a full picture across many business units of how all of our technologies are coming together. For you as developers and designers I think there are a bunch of interesting things on the horizon.
Adobe does so many damn things that sometimes it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on. The fact that we picked those three teams to talk to should tell you something. They’re all on the cutting edge of Adobe’s plans and should enable you guys to take RIAs to the next level.
Thermo I’ll start with Thermo. You’ve heard a bunch about Thermo, so I won’t try to rehash all of that here. We’re building a tool that we think is going to appeal to a wide range of designers - even those not building Flex applications today. Thermo is also a way to help get the Flex Framework out to more people. Flex makes it easy to do some very powerful things with RIAs. Thermo will let designers bring a new level of expressiveness to the framework so that you’ll be able to create very visually appealing applications but with a lot of “under the hood” functionality. Being able to essentially customize Flex applications at the level of our Creative Suite tools is going to let you combine a great rich data story with a great user experience and bring all parts of Adobe’s platform together. Think of all the stuff Flex does well on the developer side, then think about being able to let designers in that process. Thermo is going to be a big tool for the platform.
Pacifica The second meeting was with Pacifca. High quality voice inside the player is a big deal by itself. And our goal is to let developers bring that into their applications very easily. We want voice to be as much a part of the experience as text is today. A lot of RIAs could benefit from easy, high quality voice. It won’t be a fit for every application but if you can call voice APIs just as easily as you can call Math APIs then you can start to expand your own RIAs quite a bit. Not to mention the ability to call outside phone lines right from Flash. Merging the telephony and technology worlds is something that’s been popular for a long time but making that accessible to web developers hasn’t really been done before. I wasn’t trying to slight Ribbit here. They’re showing how cool this can be when you enable telephony and web developers. I was thinking more about point-to-point voice but that wasn’t clear. Sorry guys, Ribbit rules.
CoCoMo Our CoCoMo meeting was also great. Connect is a really solid product. Half of my “sales” as an evangelist have been just showing off collaboration inside a Connect meeting using the Flash Player. By taking that and turning it into components that developers can use we’re going to help make real time collaboration a part of RIAs anywhere that it fits. You can just as easily add video chat or whiteboard functionality as you can create a new Panel in Flex. Think about the combination of Flex, Thermo, Pacifica, and CoCoMo inside of your applications and you’ll be able to create a real-time, collaborative experience that goes beyond text and video to be not only good looking, but more personal with voice and teamwork.
ColdFusion and LiveCycle We also had Adam and Greg present ColdFusion and LiveCycle respectively. ColdFusion is in for some great things. Coté and I have talked a bit about an RIA middleware in our RIA Weekly podcasts and ColdFusion is making huge strides in that direction. One of the best quotes of the day was from Adam in describing ColdFusion as “instant SOA”. ColdFusion combines so many different aspects of technology and brings it together in a way that’s accessible anywhere. You can expose an SMS gateway as a REST service, use Flash Remoting to talk to XMPP or any other combination you can think of. LiveCycle takes that to the next level in a lot of ways. I always thought of LiveCycle as primarily a Document server (and that’s a big part) but it actually automates the workflow for basically anything you want to do. You can set up a process to receive an email and then based on the content do something with a PDF, send a Twitter message, or fire off an FTP command. It lets you work with a bunch of different services together in one workflow and create processes around it. It’s kind of cool to think about being able to take data and then turn it into a protected PDF, a Twitter message, or send it to a Flex application in one big sweep.
Most of this is already here and what isn’t here is coming pretty soon. The power of AIR, the Flash Player, and the Flex Framework enables a lot of very powerful data stories as well as a great user experience. Bringing our design tools, services, and developer technologies together means that all of this will be accessible to you to use in your own applications. Being able to take an application and add interactivity not just at the UI layer but at the data level is a huge leap. Our goal is to make that really easy for you so that you can quickly plug these things into what you’re doing today. Lowering the barrier to entry is half the battle and I think we’ve done that. Over the next few months I am excited to hear what you think and see what you build.
Congratulations to the SlideShare team which raised another $3 million in funding. They’re a really great use of Flash and they’ve shown that you can take something that seems fairly boring - like powerpoints - and create a community around it, making it more interesting and valuable than ever. They also simplified the user experience so that anyone could find any presentation they wanted to, share it, comment on it, and interact with it. I hope we get closer to that model with Adobe Share.
TechCrunch’s article about the news seems to write-off online presentation applications as being not simple enough but I think the popularity of SlideShare shows that what’s really great is the community around something. One of the reasons I’m excited about the future of Adobe Share is that we’ve got a huge ecosystem of things like Buzzword, Photoshop Express, Connect, and LiveCycle - a series of online services and server products, that when you combine with a community opens up some really great possibilities.
Adobe Share doesn’t have near the reach or freedom that SlideShare has, but as we start tying all of our various products together I think it will be valuable that you can share assets from Photoshop Express or collaborate on a document in Buzzword with Adobe Share as the hub. You can create living documents or presentations and then allow people to interact with them in different ways. Sometimes that will be tagging, commenting, or rating. Other times it could be actually editing the document with Buzzword. It could be discussing and marking up the document in Connect. It could be downloading it in a number of formats (PDF, PPT, etc) or embedding it on your blog with Flash.
Collaboration and workflow on the web are still in their infancy. As the technologies have gotten richer we’re starting to see new ways for people to work together. SlideShare is a perfect example of how great new, simple, community-based ideas can be for “knowledge workers”. But RIAs are going to let us do a lot more in this area down the road.
VentureBeat has a story about the fact that we’re releasing Flickr support in an update to Photoshop Express. I’ve been pretty impressed with Photoshop Express but I’ve been using Flickr more and more for my photos so the lack of Flickr support was killing me. If you’re in the same boat then have no fear. It’s still not there in my account and I wasn’t aware we were adding it, so I’m not sure when they’re rolling it out.
The VentureBeat story also has some impressive numbers about the service:
Since the release a month ago, there have been hundreds of thousands of users registering to use the software and they have uploaded over 65,000 public web albums. Photoshop Express works with any web browser. It is currently available only in the U.S., though overseas users can try it with likely limited performance.
LINQ is a pretty cool concept that I don’t totally understand all of the nuances for. It essentially makes it really easy to get bits of data. G-uniX’s code sample illustrates it pretty well. You can use SQL-like syntax on an Array or any other data structure:
private var q:GAIQL = new GAIQL()
private var result:Array = q.Call("FROM myarray GET thevalueiwant" ,this);
This would be great to have for AS3 so if you’re interested in the project, let him know and he should let you in on the early bits.
Chuck noticed that Twitter’s ActionScript3 Library is gone. They’ve moved their API stuff over to a Google Groups but AS3 no longer appears on the list of libraries. That’s odd considering how big AIR and the Flash Player have been for Twitter. I also noticed that they’ve locked down their crossdomain.xml file to a few companies. Is that the reason they ditched the AS3 API? Was it because of the changes in the Flash Player?
If anyone knows, I’d love to hear the story. Seems crazy that Twitter would just ditch AS3 like that.
Mike just posted an interview I did with Jeremy Baines of AlertThingy (Crunchbase) at our on AIR event in London. It’s a pretty short interview and what made it fun to do was the fact that the team from Howard/Baines (the company behind it) hadn’t ever built an AIR application before and didn’t originally plan on building an AIR application.
We also cover what their workflow was in creating the application. It’s all XHTML, CSS, and JavaScript, so there’s no Flash involved at all. One of my favorite quotes was “it takes longer to get a Thawte Certificate than it does to build an AIR app.”
Some of the employees from Mozilla flabbergast me. I realize that they want to be seen as defenders of the open web but I think posts like this, by Asa Dotzler, and statements like this, from Tristan Nitot, show that they’re not interested in being constructive. Rather than engaging with companies like Microsoft and Adobe, parts of Mozilla seem to be hell bent on criticizing us at every turn despite the moves towards openness that both companies are making. The web is not under attack. In fact, I think you could make a very valid case that Adobe and Microsoft have helped light a fire under standards bodies to help get things like the video tag implemented in HTML5. The web is too big for any company to control and treating it as a something so fragile it could be taken away or broken by any combination of proprietary technologies does it a huge disservice. The web is a big place and one of the things that makes it great is that it spans so many companies, ideas, and underlying philosophies. That said, Adobe is always working to be a better web citizen, so I take it personally when what we do seems to get dismissed so quickly by people who say they support the open web.
Dave McAllister has a great post about how much Adobe is opening up. Can you flip a switch at a big company and open source everything? Absolutely not. But we’re getting more open. Having the SWF spec open means that even if Adobe goes away tomorrow, theoretically someone can implement the spec and ensure SWF content still renders. Is it the same as open source? No, but it’s a big step. Adobe also has made the open web a core part of our technologies. I don’t know why Asa is comparing Adobe AIR and Silverlight, but one of the great things about AIR is that it lets you use all of those open web technologies (HTML, JavaScript, CSS, etc) to create desktop applications. Included in Adobe AIR is WebKit, arguably one of the most innovative and advanced HTML rendering engines out there. Adobe wants to be on the cutting edge when it comes to Flash AND HTML with our technologies. We’ve open sourced projects like BlazeDS, the ActionScript Virtual Machine (which we contributed to help improve JavaScript performance), and Flex, one of our core technologies.
Diversity in ideas is one of the great things about the web. And I like the fact that there are so many people willing to speak up about the importance of the open web. But scaremongering and implying that Adobe is trying to take over the web is silly and ridiculous. The web can’t be taken over. It’s a thriving ecosystem that we’re all a part of – open and proprietary. Innovation comes in many forms and we can all learn from each other. Adobe works differently than Mozilla, that’s just the way it is. But frankly, when you dismiss what we’re doing with an “our way or the highway” attitude, you make it harder on those of us inside these big companies trying to push in a more open direction.
In case you haven’t seen the news, MXNA is back up as feeds.adobe.com. Christian has all of the info and background and he has been the one putting in the work, upgrading it to CF8, and making sure it’s super speedy (which it is). I think the feeds automatically redirected and I assume we’ll be redirecting the old weblogs address soon.
Thanks a lot to Christian. It’s been tough having MXNA gone.
NJ on the Thermo team has been working on a little AIR application 