Monthly Archives: May 2006

Flash Platform Week in Review

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A few quick items that I picked up over the week.

Mike Potter noticed that all of the Flex Developer Derby entries are online over at labs. Check them out, and if you can do better, submit an entry.

Peter Elst attended Adobe Fusion and it sounds like they talked some about the Adobe/Macromedia product integration. He also has a link to Koen De Weggheleire’s site which has a more in depth write-up. It’s going to be cool to see what Adobe cooks up between their product lines.

We marked 10 years of Flash this month, and deconcept has a good post about the state of Flash now.

I’m a very big Cairngorm supporter, and I think this has a lot of potential – Steven Webster of Adobe Consulting wants to hear about your Cairngorm Stories. If you’re using Cairngorm, head over to his site and let us know how you’re using it.

There is a great article by Craig Babcock talking about why you would use Flash for site development. I think there are times when Flash is good and times when it’s overkill, and I thought his post made some good points. The comments are also quite good.

Mike Downey pointed to a good Flash Insider article which talks about the now ABC video player with Flash Player 8 and Flash Media Server.

There is a very cool demo by Sho that’s worth checking out.

Also, there is a new Flex Evangelist at Adobe. Big congratulations to Ted Patrick on his new position. Flex and Flash are exciting products to be evangelizing and from what I hear about Ted, he’s going to do a fantastic job.

Last, but not least, I just noticed the ActionScript CheatSheet site, which has printable pages of ActionScript 3 syntax. Bookmark this as they add new sheets every once in a while.

Guss What? Flex is Free AND Cool

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I was talking to someone two nights ago about some of the cool things Adobe is doing and how they compare and contrast to what Microsoft is doing. I haven’t studied a lot of what’s going on over at Microsoft, but with the ZDNet blog I’ve begun paying a lot more attention. They have some interesting (if not always original ideas) but they often fail in the execution. Adobe has a different problem. They come up with fantastic ideas, usually have good execution, but no one hears about it.

This post by Rey Bango was exasperating. How can someone as smart and tech savy as Rey not have heard about Flex being free? I’m not faulting Rey in any way, I just think that Flex is such a great technology that it’s a shame more people don’t know about it or have misconceptions. Kevin Hoyt did an awesome job of clearing it up, so maybe we need to give Kevin a bigger microphone.

The conversation from the other night got me really pumped about the next few months. Everyone who sees what’s coming is going to be very, very impressed, but I’m anxious about how all of us can make that number bigger. Microsoft is huge and everyone follows what they’re doing, so they get a lot of publicity. Often that publicity is negative, but people are still talking about the company. Flex is a great way to deploy applications, Flash video has taken off, but the buzz level is low.

With all that said, I’ve seen the Flex ads, so Adobe is definitely making a marketing push. The Flex Developer Derby entries are going to provide some great inspiration for would-be developers, and some of the bigger sites are starting to follow Flex development. We just need to get the word out.

A Big Thanks From Me, and ZDNet Update

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It looks like my blog over at ZDNet has been activated and all that’s missing is my mug shot on the blog page. You can check it out by visiting http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/ or subscribe to the feed here. I’m hoping to get the feed added to MXNA (or AXNA?) so that you can follow it without too much extra effort.

I seeded the blog with some of my past posts, and I wanted to give a huge thank you to everyone who has read and commented on this blog. As I went through those posts I realized that I have a lot more comments than some bloggers and that the comments always created interesting conversations. Those conversations have been invaluable in helping me hash out my ideas. So again, a big thanks for reading and participating. Here’s to many more mind-expanding conversations.

Flash Video Revolutionizes Media

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Today saw the launch of ABC’s Full Episode Streaming and along with it a glimpse of how Flash is going to rock the future of the internet. For a long time “video on the web” has been the next big thing, but it wasn’t until Flash came along and showed how easy it could be that people really started taking notice. Flash allowed content providers a way to easily stream high quality video across any platform and nearly any device. Once people realized how powerful this tool was, it was just a matter of time before the big companies picked up on it.

So now we have free episodes of good shows from ABC as well as the potential for bigger things. The ABC site is well done and incorporates Flash not only for the video, but to make the experience better. It’s easy to zoom around the site and select an episode to watch. Flash also allowed ABC to brand their site in a powerful way. One look at the commentary by people like Mike Davidson and paidContent.org shows that Flash is a big winner.

However while Flash won today, JD brings up a good point, that Flash has become so prevalent and so easy to use that people fail to realize that they’re using it. On one hand, this is exactly how it should be. People from any device and any OS should be able to load up a Rich Internet Application or movie and not care why it works. On the other hand, Adobe has a lot of momentum in the video arena and should really stand up and shout about how great they are. Macromedia was very bad at that – great products without a lot of PR, and I hope Adobe can do better. You want the experience to be invisible, but you also want to brand that experience. If people know Flash is behind all of the “cool stuff” then they’ll be more likely to download the newest version in a timely manner and develop their own dreams using it.

Macromedia.com is Really Gone

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The moment we all knew was coming has arrived – Macromedia.com now redirects to Adobe.com. Adobe has turned out to be a great partner to developers, and I’m very excited to see what the next few years bring. However it’s still a bit sobering and I think the most appropriate quote was by John Dowdell: The fifteen Pagerank 10 sites have shrunk by one tonight.

Cheers to the great things that were and cheers to great things that will be.