I just noticed that Mike Melanson is on Techmeme for his recent post about the status of the alpha/beta for Flash Player 9 for Linux. It’s really good to see more Adobe bloggers on Techmeme – congrats Mike!
Tweet
Mike Arrington has an interesting post over at TechCrunch which covers Dave Winer’s recent attempts to bring web content to the mobile phones. The juxtaposition of the two viewpoints is telling. Dave’s solution involves stripping things to the bare minimum and giving that to users in a plain, readable way – a noble goal. Because of the load times associated with bringing web content to mobile phones, and the horrendous experience that exists now, this idea could gain a lot of traction. However on the other hand, you have Mike Arrington, a man who lives and dies based on the advertising. Mike’s quote is gold:
Check out NYTimes, BBC and TechCrunch in Dave’s new, stripped down format. I’ve been reading TechCrunch this way on my phone for a couple of weeks. Most of the graphics and (sniff) all of the advertising is stripped out, but at least it keeps the reader sane.
Mike, it really doesn’t have to be that way. There is absolutely no reason why viewing web content has to be bad, and lacking in the full experience of your brand. This is where I see the glaring hole that Flash Lite can fill (or even the theoretical Flex Mobile). As it is put on more phones, there will be more opportunities for people like Mike, with high profile websites, to provide their content to mobile devices with the general experience in tact. With Flash Lite, you can take the content, brand it, and present advertising alongside it in a way that isn’t obtrusive. With Flash Lite, you can build the experience from the ground up and not have to worry about the limitations of the mobile browser.
With the importance of advertising to sites like TechCrunch, that is a powerful use case.
[tags]TechCrunch, Dave Winer, Mike Arrington, Adobe, Flash Lite, Flash Platform, Mobile[/tags]
TweetWhew, busy night for blogging tonight. I didn’t get a chance to check out the Flash Tenth Anniversary Microsite until tonight, but man, it is impressive. Obviously a lot of time went into this thing, and you could spend a couple of hours just looking around within the site. Luckily for you, I’ve summarized my thoughts. However, I can’t guarantee that these will be helpful or meaningful in any way shape or form. Enjoy.
Thoughts while experiencing the anniversary microsite:
The Flex guy is fat and German? ( Nectarine video )
Sweet, Seattle is enshrined in Flash history. (1996)
Mike Jones, I owe you a beer. (detection, 1997)
I was 17 years old when there were 1 million Flash Player installs. (1999)
That’s right, the Pacific Northwest is responsible for great Flash (Robert Reinhardt, Flash Bible, 2000)
Whoa! An actual picture of John Dowdell? Who knew! (Valleywag Silicon Valley hotties, here I come!) (2002)
Breeze 1.0 came in 2004 – Remember that date.
That NTT DoCoMo deal was huge. (2005)
Hey, I think we can all agree that I’m a pretty big MACR/ADBE nerd, but seriously, almost driving your car off the road? That’s just silly. (2005, ADBE + MACR promo)
Buckhannon, West Virginia? Awesome. (2006, sqladmin)
Weak! No Flash Player 9 stats – that would have been a great way to announce it (click on the star).
TweetJesse Warden is presenting what I think could be one of the best sessions at MAX (tied neck and neck with the Apollo sessions). Jesse is presenting Flex for Flash Designers: How Flex and Flash Work Together. But what strikes me as odd is that it isn’t in the Rich Internet Application category, but rather the web design category. Why do I find that odd? Because if you really want to build Rich Internet Applications, you need to integrate Flash elements into your Flex application.
Flex is a great tool, but for all the power it bring developers, it lacks in the design aspect. There isn’t anything wrong with this, Flash is meant for designers and Flex for developers. But if you really want to build new experiences on the web, and build rich, interactive applications with Flex, you need to involve a designer and you need to understand the strengths and weaknesses of both tools. Jesse’s session will do that for you.
I have the same level of Flash skill and design ability as a stuffed elephant, but I love developing in Flex. My problem is that when I want to do something really cool in Flex, I need to turn to Flash. Usually this isn’t a pretty sight. I’m not saying that all Flex developers need to go out and become design aficionados, we can’t all be Jesse Warden, but Jesse’s class should give you an appreciation for using Flash to extend your Flex applications. For all of us coming from a development background, that’s going to be invaluable down the road.
[tags]Max2006, Jesse Warden, Flex, Rich Internet Applications, Flash, Adobe[/tags]
TweetI caught Lux3D, a 3D Flash engine built in AS3 over at Campbell Anderson’s blog. As Campbell says, it is an excellent specimen of the Flashious3Dhacium in all its crowning glory.
I think 3D is very important, and we just had a conversation about this over on my ZDNet blog. It’s awesome to see the community take up the charge of implementing 3D in Flash. With the performance gains in the new VM, quality 3D experiences could become a reality for the Flash Platform.
[tags]Flash, 3D, ActionScript 3[/tags]
TweetFound via FlashCanon, according to Forbes, Toan Tran, an analyst with Morningstar believes that that Adobe’s biggest threats are going to come from Microsoft and Ajax. This is exactly the kind of thing that shows some analysts have no idea what they are talking about.
The threat to PDF (in the form of Microsoft’s XPS) may be founded, but I’m not sure how that will play out. I am very curious to see what Apollo has in store for PDF. Adobe has put a lot of energy into LiveCycle, which makes PDF a much more complete solution than just the format. I don’t think Microsoft is trying to compete at that level yet.
And as for Ajax? The quote is a doozy:
Tran also warns that Ajax, a free and universal technology, could eventually supplant Flash as the standard platform for Web applications.
Ajax will supplant Flash when I win the Miss USA pageant. But hey, I will take their “valuation” to the bank.
TweetMatt Voerman pointed me to a very, very not safe for work advertisement/catalog for the French clothing company, Shai. Gawker covered the ad here a couple of weeks ago.
While blogging about this particular content is not something I plan to do often, this caught my eye simply because of the way it uses Flash Video to build an experience around products (and yes, I said that with a straight face). The catalog is essentially a Flash Video with hotspots that you mouseover to find out more information about the clothes. In this case, the video has nothing to do with the product, as they quickly shed the clothes that Shai is selling, but I think this is a good example of how Flash can enhance a brand and provide an experience that no one else can.
Multimedia is absolutely the new frontier, and for building interactive experiences around multimedia, there is nothing like Flash. It embeds easily, has a small footprint, and is viewable by almost everyone.
Update: If you know of a G-rated site that does the same thing, I’d like to hear about it.
Tweet
There is an interesting comment thread as a result of a post I made on ZDNet regarding the difference (or lack thereof) between Rich Internet Applications and Rich Enterprise Applications. I see no difference, but the comment thread gets into the theory of what role the browser plays with regards to RIAs.
When Apollo first came out, I was extremely skeptical, because I thought that all along, Adobe/Macromedia’s “play” was for the web. The web is great; it’s ubiquitous, it’s established, and it has solid underlying technologies. Then Apollo came along and took the web out of the Flash Player. The way I see it, at the ripe old age of 24, everything is going to be connected. The idea of a desktop application seemed short sighted to me, and I figured the shelf life of Apollo would be limited at best. I’ve slowly changed course, and today, with the help of David O’Malley, everything coalesced in my mind like the Colorado river meeting the Green River, which is to say, Grandly (if you get that reference, I owe you beers for life).
Now don’t get me wrong, I’ve become a big Apollo convert. The ability to solve the online/offline problem is going to be great (but again, when we’re connected everywhere, who cares?). The ability to tie in closely with the file system and provide a security sandbox for RIAs are both invaluable. But it’s something else, and I’ve talked about it a lot, but never put it together. Apollo presents RIAs as they should be.
The browser is a broken, but comfortable delivery medium for RIAs. People are familiar with the browser because that is how they have always interacted with the web. Ajax brought on the idea of web applications, and they work within a browser (after a number of hacks). Even the Flash Player runs within a browser, because that is how people access the web. But this is backwards. The kinds of things happening on the web now shouldn’t require a browser. Sure, we will still read blogs and search in a browser; but for the kinds of web apps we are seeing, using a browser is like trying to fit a square peg in a round hole – it won’t work well.
Apollo (and technologies like WPF) take those applications and extract them from the browser. The power of the web is still there, but people are no longer going to have to interact with these applications inside a browser. There are going to be some difficult growing pains – people are going to resist at first. But change is good, and Apollo is an evolution of software development. We have seen the power of the web, but Apollo can make better use of that power by breaking the chains of the browser.
TweetFrom Valleywag: “Adobe Flex, a platform for “rich Internet applications.” Read: “We want startups as customers.” Major bubble risk.”
Good thing Flex has all of those applications that none of us are allowed to see keeping the revenue rolling in.
[tags]Adobe, Flex, Valleywag, Web2.0, Bubble[/tags]
Tweet
I took a quick break from some Flex development (I know, crazy, right? Who can pull themselves away?) to put the finishing touches on converting my blog from Ray’s fantastic BlogCFC to WordPress. In doing so, I remembered how much I miss BlogCFC and how easy it is to customize. I’m a PHP dummy, so I don’t have the luxury of editing away at WordPress. Luckily, there are some awesome plugins that make my job easy. I ran into a few issues while converting.
Technorati now hates me.
I follow my Technorati ranking a little bit too closely. Over at http://www.digitalbackcountry.com, I have a rank of 22,018 with 366 links from 110 blogs. Now? At http://blog.digitalbackcountry.com I have a rank of 220,670 with 36 links from 13 blogs. I have moved down in the world.
Mapping posts.
Importing my old posts was pretty straight forward, but what was I supposed to do about everyone searching my blog and seeing those old posts? Mapping directly was going to be almost impossible, so I think I did the next best thing. BlogCFC includes the date of the post in the URL, so I took that url and sent them to all of the posts for that day. So if they went to a post I wrote on October 3rd, 2005, I automatically direct them to the page for October 3rd, 2005 on my new blog. They may be a bit confused, but hopefully they can easily find what they are looking for.
Changing the Feed
This was easier than it could have been. I’m sure you can argue the merits of letting someone else control your feed, but because I’m using FeedBurner, I just changed the source of the feed and everything was fine. AND, it didn’t even spam MXNA. My only worry was that I had a “technology” feed that some people subscribed to and I no longer update, as well as the old rss.cfm feed that I had when I started.
Tweet