Monthly Archives: June 2006

Flex 2 is Real! What do I do now?

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I’m on Pacific time, so even though it’s way past my bedtime here in DC, I’m still up so I’ve been catching the news on MXNA and various email lists. Flex 2 and Flash Player 9 are finally out and in the wild. This is a pretty awesome day, and I’m sure CFUnited will be buzzing tomorrow.

But for right now, the first thing you need to do is head over to Flexcoders.net and list yourself as a Flex developer. I hear from Tariq that he’ll have numbers up in the near future so all of us can brag about when we were number 37 on flexcoders.net after it hits 1 million.

Secondly, go grab Flash Player 9 and tell your friends to get it.

The next thing to do his hit the brand new Flex.org site which has a ton of Flex information. For tips, you’re still better off with Cflex.net but it looks like Flex.org is going to be a great central resource for Flex info. While they need to work on their blog list (Where’s Kevin Hoyt!?), I’m sure the kinks will be worked out in the next few weeks. And it’s the place to find all of the info on downloading the FREE Flex 2 SDK as well as purchasing Flex Builder 2.

Huge congrats to the Flex 2 team and everyone at Adobe. I’m excited to see what kinds of applications start showing up now that we’re live and it’s a big, big day for Rich Internet Applications. Next stop – Apollo.

I Beg of You – Don’t Use Flex to Build Your Web Site

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You can tell we’re getting closer and closer to a Flex 2 release. Why? Because everyone is taking crazy pills. I’m reading more and more posts about Flex web sites and ways to incorporate Flex into a web site. Here’s my advice – don’t. Flex is a fantastic tool, and I’m obviously a big supporter. But if you use Flex to build you’re website, you’re making all of us look bad.

Flex should be used to build web applications. That may not be the party line, but that’s how it should be. It’s going to be awesome at that, and we’ll start to see a lot more web applications out there. If you build your web site in Flex, you’re just going to be feeding the people on Slashdot and Digg that hate Flash. And they’ll be right – you’ll be bringing us back to the Skip Intro days.

So please, when Flex 2 comes out, resist the temptation to Flexify everything. There is no reason to have a loading screen on your blog. There is no reason to build web forms using Flex. The web will be a better place and your fellow Flex developers’ reputations will thank you for it.

This public service announcement was brought to you by “People for a Better Flash Experience” a non-profit organization.

Today’s chosen site: Canadian Pharmacy

Do We Get a “The Making of Flex 2″?

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This is a fun video if you haven’t seen it before. So after watching this, and thinking about how close we are to Flex 2, my natural question is: Do we get a “The Making of Flex 2″ video? With the public release on labs.adobe.com, I’m sure that 95% of the video would be reading through bug reports. On the other hand, we might get video proof that Matt Chotin is a robot who runs off of Flexcoders posts.

Being a “Journalist” is Pretty Damn Hard

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It’s been a crazy and bizarre week. I always try not to take myself too seriously. I started this blog a year and a half ago just because I wanted to talk about Flex. I can still remember getting the email from MXNA that my blog was going to be aggregated and thinking how cool that was. Then a funny thing happened – people started reading my blog. People started commenting. When I moved to Seattle, I got dinner with Hans just because he read my blog. Then when I heard ZDNet was looking for bloggers, I emailed them on a whim and offered up my services. When they gave me a shot I had to step back and make sure there wasn’t some other Ryan Stewart they were talking to.

Since then it’s been awesome. I’ve had amazing conversations with people at Adobe, at Microsoft and a ton of cool companies making use of RIAs. Every day there’s something interesting in my inbox, and I love it. But every once in a while I feel like I’m in over my head. I’m just a guy who really likes RIAs. I see so much potential out there and my naïveté allows me an almost unnatural amount of enthusiasm about what’s possible. But now I’m in the maze of PR firms and journalistic integrity. It’s a crazy world, and I hope I don’t lose the enthusiasm. This week I got caught up a bit and started taking myself too seriously. Jeff Houser (whom I owe a beer next week at CFUnited) once left a comment that said “I read yours [blog] because you’re the most optimistic person I know”.

With everything happening right now, it’s hard not to be optimistic. Look at Apollo, Flex, WPF, the Mobile World, broadband penetration, Web 2.0, hell even Ajax – the web is cool! But I’ve spent too much time trying to be a “real” blogger and not enough just writing about the cool stuff. I need to do more of that.

Part 1 in my ZDNet Series on Building RIAs – OpenLaszlo

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Part one of what will become a series in “Building RIAs” is up on my ZDNet blog. Part one covers OpenLaszlo, which if you’ve never seen before is worth checking out. And for another 6 days, it’s the only option that is commercially available. A big thanks to the OpenLaszlo team for answering all of my questions and working with me on the piece.

It’s been really informative for me to have a dialogue with all of the people creating RIA solutions, so I hope this first article is a success. My plan is to follow up with Flex, WPF/E, WPF and end with Apollo. If you have any suggestions, or want to see anyone else covered, drop me a line.

Check out Apollo in Action

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Ted Patrick posted that the developer week sessions from last week are posted online (seriously, how many times can I use ‘posted’ in one sentence), so if you didn’t get to check out the Apollo session, it’s now up for you. The demos don’t show a whole lot, but there is a ton of information in the questions and you do get to see a few apps running on Luis’ computer. There are also a ton of other good sessions that are worth looking into. I found the LiveCycle one to be very informative.

Flash Video = Everywhere, But Still Not Bigger than WMF

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MercuryNews.com has an article about Flash video penetration in the last two years (catchy title over at eweek). It really is amazing to stop and think about how quickly Flash has become the ultimate video solution. As Kevin notes in the article, the hard part in the beginning was getting Flash adopted. Now that it’s on nearly every computer on the web, there is a lot of potential. I used to wonder if Macromedia “got it” that Flash could be a driving force for so many initiatives, but I don’t doubt that Adobe does. I just hope they can solve the DRM issue soon and do it in such a way that it doesn’t cripple Flash.

The one thing that warrants mentioning is that Flash still has a ways to go. Accustream iMedia Research says that Windows Media Format still has 60% of all streaming video traffic while Flash has a much smaller 19%. Flash is getting bigger, but Windows still has a chokehold on the numbers. Of course Flash has more high profile users including ABC, YouTube and Yahoo. If they can expand on that growth, and I think they can, those numbers could be reversed in a couple of years. That would be quite a coup d’etat for Adobe.

ColdFusion and Microsoft Exchange – One Step Away from a Flex Outlook?

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Over the weekend Terry Ryan posted instructions and source code for integrating ColdFusion and Exchange. With the code you can create contacts and appointments directly from ColdFusion. There was talk about this being in the next version of ColdFusion, but Terry has the code right now. I’m really excied about what this might mean for Flex developers because now that we have a way to send data to Exchange, it would be relatively simple to create a Flex 2 replacement for the Outlook Web Access. Very cool stuff!

Unofficial Apollo FAQ Updated

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I took a quick break from my Sunday night to update the Unofficial Apollo FAQ with more information. I added the SiliconValley.com article I mentioned on Friday as well as some of the questions that Ikezi Kamanu pulled from the Adobe week session (big thanks Ikezi!). If you have anything you think I need to add, drop me a line. Until Adobe has an Apollo section up on Labs, I want to make sure that I have all the info anyone could want on Apollo.