Monthly Archives: March 2006

RIP NYSE

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Today at the close of trading the NYSE has ceased to exist in what is essentially the form it has had since it’s inception 213 years ago. As a result of its merger with Archipelago, the big board is now a publicly traded company.

While I’ve always preferred the rainy, entrepreneurial spirit of Seattle to the snowy, hyper-tense atmosphere of lower Manhattan, it’s a bit nostalgic to watch this change. Partly because I think it is be the beginning of the end.

The NYSE/Archipelago merger was driven by technology. Archipelago had it, the NYSE didn’t. It looked like a dinosaur compared to the NASDAQ (albeit a very highly regarded dinosaur) but it realized it couldn’t compete in today?s 24-hour tech-dominated world without some backup. They found some in Archipelago, but it’s clear that the old days of stock trading are fading fast and are being replaced by all electronic exchanges.

Open Laszlo – A Tactical Retreat?

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I had mixed feelings about the news that Open Laszlo planned to extend their platform to support AJAX and DHTML. On one hand, there really aren’t any tools out there to make AJAX easy, and by moving into the space, they’re even more focusing on their niche, which I would say is making hard technologies easy. They did it with Flash before Flex came along, and now they’re doing it with AJAX. In addition to that, I think it shows how far Flex has come. I don’t think that they can compete head to head with Flex in the XML-based-flash space because of the announcement that the Flex Framework is going to be free.

On the other hand, I thought the competition was good for the Flex team. Open Laszlo is a cool technology and I have to think that some part of the Adobe’s reasoning to make parts of Flex free stemmed from the fact that Open Laszlo was free. Without some of that push I wonder what advancements we’ll be missing out on.

Now I know that this is simply an extension to OpenLaszlo and that they will continue to support Flash, but I think that they’re saying that Flash is taking a back burner on their priority list. The high-profile partnership with IBM lends some additional credence to this.

So what does this mean for the Flash Platform? I have always felt that the more people who use Flash, the better, and this is a bit of a blow to that user base. In addition to projects like OSFlash, OpenLaszlo brought Flex-like power in an open format before Adobe did. That allowed smaller hobbyists at home to experiment with Flash and check out what it could do. It’s those hobbyists who will ultimately drive the platform. Big corporate projects are cool, but they’re also left at the VPN door. The more small, “fun” developers the platform has, the more likely it is that Flash will change the web experience for the average user.

Laszlo Systems, I think it’s a good move to go into AJAX, but I hope you don’t move away from Flash entirely.

Adobe at O’Reilly Emerging Tech Conference

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The O’Reilly Emerging Technology Conference started today in San Diego and the list of speakers looks pretty impressive including a couple of sessions by Adobe folks. Kevin Lynch is speaking on Rich Internet Applications and the Service Oriented Client and Michael Gough is talking about Expressive Applications. While neither focuses on Flash/Flex specifically, the two sessions cover the major principles behind the two technologies.

Hopefully the conference will be a hit. In looking at the sponsors, it seems like most of the big players are represented (minus Google and Microsoft) and there’s a wide array of web companies. It’s always good to see Adobe at these conferences, and because they have both speakers and an exhibit, I think Flex should get some press.

If anyone is going to the conference, I’d be very curious to hear what you think of it.

Flash Platform Week in Review (Feb 25 – Mar 3)

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Adobe was busy this week with the release of some ActionScript 3 libraries. Christian Cantrell, the product manager for Developer Relations provided the news. We also saw that Flex Unit was updated for Flex 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0. For help using it with Flex 2.0, Darron Schall has a nice tutorial.

Most of these releases were timed to coincide with FlashForward here in Seattle. Jen deHaan has a good writeup of Kevin Lynch’s keynote.

Matt Chotin posted two news items. One was a presentation by Christophe over at Jon Udell’s Screening Room in which he talks about Flex 2. I didn’t see anything new, but it’s always fun to watch.

Matt also posted about working for the Flex Enterprise team. They have a Dev and QA position, both in Boston, MA.

As far as general interest posts go, there were a couple I wanted to point out. Christian Cantrell posted about the many faces of Flash. The comments are also an indication that Flash is everywhere.

Om Malik did a podcast with Naill Kennedy on Web 2.0 applications. The full transcript is here and if you skip down to the middle you can read what they have to say about Flash. It’s always good to get a different perspective from those of us in the MXNA community.

Lastly, Steven Webster has part 3 of his Cairngorm Article, “Architecting the View“, up on Devnet. I’ve always liked Cairngorm, and this series has been fun to read.

Adobe’s Apollo – “Yes, yes. Yes. Without the “oops”. Thataway.”

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The FlashForward Conference provided us with a little more insight into the universal client that everyone knows as Apollo. StreamingMedia.com and Jen deHaan of Adobe have very good write-ups. From Kevin’s comments, it’s obvious that Adobe knows they’re on thinner ice than they’re used to when it comes to putting Flash on the desktop.

I didn’t use Central, but it seems to have been a bit of a miss. And when they describe as Apollo being a combination of PDF and Flash, everyone instantly envisioned a FlashPlayer that took 10 minutes to load whenever you wanted to view a SWF. Kevin saying “We?re not going to screw anything up, such as putting the entirety of Acrobat into Flash” doesn’t exactly fill one with confidence, but perhaps it’s a start.

But all of the pieces are coming together that could make the Engagement Platform not only a reality, but a viable product. Despite my personal best efforts, it does appear that offline content is in demand :) . Being able to deploy Flash applications to the desktop that can sync with data online and also take advantage of some powerful APIs within the OS would be a Flashers dream.

Making Flash better and streamlining the PDF reader creates possibilities in multimedia, enterprise, mobile, and web applications that if used correctly, could have a huge impact.

Adobe absolutely needs to tread carefully as they move forward. There is a lot of room for mistakes, as there always are when you’re dealing with a powerful product. But in this case, they could easily take the simplicity out of Flash and alienate developers. I hope they don’t.

Fox, Please Don’t Mess Up Goowy

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I just read over at TechCrunch that Fox Interactive may be buying companies like I used to buy Super Nintendo games – in copious amounts. Dan Farber broke the “story” (which isn’t really a story yet) and it seems to go like this.

The President of Fox Interactive, Ross Levinsohn, mentioned that they had just bought one of the companies at the Under the Radar event. He wouldn’t say which one, but he went on to boast that Fox Interactive will probably buy five more companies in the room.

That is quite a bit of buying. So what are the companies in the room? Tagged.com is out, so the list is as follows:

AirSet, Box.net (Flash), Browster, BubbleShare, CalendarHub, DabbleDB, Dogster, Eurekster, Flock, Goowy (Flash), Kaboodle, Loomia (Flash), Meetro, Mosuki, NowPublic, Popist, Rallypoint, Riya, Rollyo, SimplyHired, Simpy, Skobee, Sphere, Spy Media, TagCloud, TailRank, The Form Assembly, Top 10 Sources, Wink, Zoho and Zvents.

Now, I think the odds of Goowy being bought are pretty slim, but there are some other Flash companies on the list. By purchasing MySpace, Fox Interactive made themselves a player, and if they do buy Goowy, it would be a big boost to Flash.

Social Networking Sites = Out, Social Networking Applications = In?

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Viacom announced today that they’re jumping into the tangled web of social networking. The general consensus is that Social Networking is in a housing-market-style bubble. Even more than the Web 2.0 bubble, the social networking bubble is ready to burst. And that’s partly true. We need another social networking site like we need another memetracker, which is to say, not at all. But if we think about a social networking application then the market looks considerably less frothy.

Social networking is here to stay, but as it evolves, because of the demographic and the spread of broadband, it will come to rely heavily on multimedia and a great experience. If you’ve checked out MySpace or The Facebook you know that they revolve around photos and in the case of MySpace, customizing your space with embedded music and some videos.

Flash would be an ideal technology to use for a social networking application precisely because of it’s multimedia capabilities. Imagine having the ability to drag and drop your favorite contacts, or using real time messaging to comment on a video with your friends, or visualizing your social networking using the charting components. I can almost hear the pre-teen giggles from here.

Which ActionScript 3.0 API Will Make you Money?

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The big news yesterday was that Adobe Developer Relations released a series of open source APIs for ActionScript 3.0 (Christian’s annoucement, Brian’s announcement are the ones on top of MXNA). While it’s very cool to see APIs for Flickr and YouTube, the biggest API is by far the RSS and Atom libraries, and that’s what will make you the most money.

It’s great that they made these open source. In looking through the API, it looks like it will be easy to customize for SSE or even OPML down the road (or maybe OPML would be a separate library). At this point I realize that everyone has to make their technology accessible to RSS, but that doesn’t mean it should be taken for granted. At some point someone is going to figure out how to monetize RSS or one of its derivatives in a big way. I hope it’s a Flex developer, and now we have the tools right from the start to make that happen.

Not Much Flash – Business 2.0 Breaks Down the Next 25 Biggest Web Companies

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I usually tend to like Business 2.0, but I was a little disappointed with their list of “The Next Net 25“. The only Flash based application that made the list was YouTube, which I really like, and does a great job of showing how Flash can be used for good things and not the evilness it’s flirted with in the past.

They break the companies down into 5 categories: Social Media, Mashup and Filters, The New Phone, The Webtop, and Under the Hood. All the regulars make an appearance including Digg, Newsvine, Bloglines and Technorati. In addition they have an “Incumbent to Watch” in every category. For The Webtop, they chose Microsoft, which seems more out of default than anything else.

I think what most disheartens me about this list isn’t the lack of Flash applications on it, it’s the lack of Flash applications they can draw from. Jesse Warden (cool sight redesign, Jesse) made a comment someone’s website that all of his projects are hidden behind company intranets. That’s a shame.

I know that’s where the money is, but it isn’t where the fun is and it isn’t where the buzz is. Fun and Buzz have trouble putting food on the table I know, but you’d absolutely want to invite them to your bachelor party. Hopefully in the group of people using the Flex 2 beta there are some who just want to make cool applications without worrying about the money. Hopefully they’re planning the bachelor party, if you will.

Changing the Syntax Colors in FlexBuilder 2

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Dark Syntax for ZornI can’t take credit for this, because someone told me how to do it, but I don’t have access to that e-mail, so I can’t give them credit. (If you see this, let me know and I’ll post an update.)

I like to do all of my coding on a dark background with light colored text. CFEclipse makes this very easy, but in FlexBuilder, they haven’t exposed the colors as a Preferences option, so I was stuck until someone helped me out.

If you have any desire to change the syntax highlighting, here’s how to do it:

  1. In your Zorn folder, look for a folder named zorn.editors.common_2.0.xxx and look for a file named common.jar within that folder.
  2. Rename common.jar to common.zip and open the zip file.
  3. In the zip file, go to zorn/editors/common/color and pull out the Colors.xml file.
  4. Open Colors.xml in a text or XML editor and set the hex values to your custom values.
  5. Put Colors.xml back into the zip folder and rename the zip file back to common.jar.
  6. Run Eclipse with the -clean switch and you should be off and running

If you want my color scheme, which you can sort of see on the right, you can download the XML file here.