I just caught this over on MacNN: SWF Movie Player is being billed as a “smart” Flash Player for MacOS. When I first saw the post, I assumed it was something like Gnash, which is an entirely separate Flash Player built from the ground up. But it looks like it is simply an enhancement for Flash Movies. I don’t know if it runs as a SWF, or if it somehow interacts with the browser to enable the functionality.

The idea of a separate Flash Player is interesting. A lot of folks hope Gnash, and open source SWF movie player, can come up to speed with the current Flash Player so that Linux folks have an open source alternative to Adobe’s player. SWF is an open standard, but because of the license associated with the SWF SDK, you can’t use it to reverse-engineer the player. For Adobe, having a bunch of fragmented players around that all display Flash movies is a very bad thing because it can make for a poor user experience if the players aren’t consistent.

I am in the process of setting up an interview with the person behind Gnash for ZDNet, because I’m curious to get his thoughts. This product seems entirely different, but it’s based upon the already established Flash ecosystem. If this takes off, I think it could have mixed results for Adobe. Worth tracking.

[tags]Flash, SWF Movie Player, Flash Platform, Gnash[/tags]

I’m confused about this, but I wanted to highlight it because it’s very important to Flash, and I’m hoping someone out there knows a bit more than I do. I saw today via Mashable that Bunchball, a Flash game company, raised $2 million dollars in venuture funding. Taken by itself, it’s great to see more companies using Flash technology get funding for making the web a more interactive place. But the interestin part is in who led the funding round:

The Bay Area-based company raised the funds from Granite Ventures and Adobe Ventures, having previously received an angel round.

At first I thought this was the very first instance of money being given out by the $100,000,000 fund announced at MAX. I knew that Adobe had done venture deals before that, but when you google “Adobe Ventures” the Adobe page comes up 404.

The other company in the round, Granite Ventures, is listed in the second spot of the Google search above, so the Granite/Adobe relationship seems to be a pre-existing one (they are lilsted as strategic partners). So is this one of the last investments by Adobe Ventures? Is Adobe Ventures going to continue to exist, but the $100,000,000 fund set aside to focus on Apollo will be separate?

I’m hoping to talk to Adobe about the VC fund announcement later this week, so that may shed some light on this, but I thought it was interesting news.

[tags]Bunchball, Adobe, Adobe Ventures, Flash[/tags]

I’m sitting in the hotel after a great conference. We saw a ton of great announcements for developers, had some great sessions, and I got to meet a lot of people for the first time. Aside from being sick for what was arguably the most fun night of the week, MAX was fantastic. We got to see a lot of new technologies, MAXUP helped showcase what developers are doing with Adobe’s products, and there were some big announcements for developers.

Apollo was the biggest winner of the conference in my opinion, and Marco has a great run down of all the information from the conference. Every developer I talked to was excited about the possibilities and were blown away by the examples. What struck me the most is how much buzz there is for a product that is barely in alpha. There were 6 Apollo sessions at MAX and it was the talk of the conference but we are nowhere near a release. That means that the community can play a big part in how Apollo shapes up, and I think that’s going to make the product better. Make sure you give the Apollo team your ideas.

We also saw a lot of cool Flex examples in the keynote and in some of the sessions. Flex has been out for just a few months, and finally applications are starting to come in from the dark and people are doing cool things with it. The application by Virtual Ubiquity that Kevin Lynch showed in Day 1 of the keynote looks like it has a lot of promise.

Another technology that got some attention was LiveCycle. I remember taking a look at the product when the Adobe-Macromedia deal was announced because it was Adobe’s only server product. It has been a big beneficiary of the two companies joining forces and there are a lot of synergies between Flex and LiveCycle that are only going to get deeper and more mature as the products grow. LiveCycle has the potential to bring Flex into the enterprise in a big way and also put it more in touch with the “real world”. Web applications make life much easier, but there are still cases in which the information locked in the application needs to take a paper form. LiveCycle enables that and a lot more.

The keynote and the sneaks showed off how the designer/developer workflow is going to benefit from the new round of tools from Adobe. Flash and Photoshop are going to work easily with each other, Illustrator and Flex are going to enable unique looking Flex applications (something that is lacking right now) and Adobe is empowering video providers with technologies like Flash Video, Flash Media Server, After Effects and Premiere.

We saw a huge boost the mobile ecosystem with the announcement of the Verizon partnership and the announcement that Adobe is earmarking $100,000,000 dollars to invest in companies using Adobe technologies. Both of those are going to help expand the developer base and get more people to take a long hard look at the Engagement Platform.

Overall it was a great conference, and I’ll be digesting it more over on ZDNet and hashing through what all of the announcements mean.

[tags]max2006, apollo, flash, flex, livecycle[/tags]

I just woke up from a nap because I was really sick at dinner. It wasn’t a fun kind of sick, I just couldn’t keep anything down. Normally this would go in the too much information category, and I wouldn’t be spamming you with my intimate details (though if you want those, you know my email address ). The big thing was that I missed out on the Palms event. I was hoping to get drinks with Brian, hang out with Sim, finally get a MAX-beer with JD and hang out with some of the Apollo guys. It really sucks to miss an event that was going to be kick ass, and judging by the missed calls, it looks like it was (is?) a blast.

I’ll be in touch with you guys tomorrow when I’m not drinking Lemon-Lime Powerade at 10:30 at night to put some electrolytes in my body. This sucks.

I’m sitting safely in my hotel room after getting all registered and finding a few folks I knew to say hi. Thanks to Simeon (and Kevin’s comment) I didn’t even have to mess with the baggage disaster that is McCarran airport. I’ll be at the reception event tonight, so if you see me, stop by and introduce yourself.

This is slightly off topic, but one of the guys I work with here in Seattle is inovled in JibJab’s Great Sketch Experiment and his group is one of the 6 finalists that they announced today. If you like sketch comedy, head over to JibJabs site and check them out. Their sketch is Tom and Tina, which happens to be Michael Arrington’s favorite. I think it’s pretty and if you enjoy it, throw them a vote.

I am a huge, huge fan of Techmeme. I think the value at large is debatable, but I check it a few times a day to see what’s going on in the tech world, and I think a lot of “tech-influentials” also see it as the newspaper of the tech blogosphere. However often times the news is dominated by Google, Microsoft and Apple with a few venture capital deals and startups thrown in. Part of the reason for that is the blogs that Techmeme was tracking just didn’t have Adobe on their radar. If they weren’t linking then the news wasn’t being bubbled up. As a result, when Adobe news broke, it never ended up on Techmeme. But recently, a lot more Adobe bloggers have been popping up on Techmeme, and I think it’s a good first step to getting Adobe products more exposure to the blogosphere at large. By my count, here’s the list of Adobe-themed blogs that are being checked and aggregated on Techmeme:

• John Dowdell
• Scott Fegette
• Ted Patrick
• Mike Melanson
• Tinic Uro
• Richard Ziade
• Amit Agarwal

Did I miss anyone? Do any of you guys check Techmeme for news? If so, do you like it? If not, why not?

I love the Linux community, I really do, and this release of Flash Player just reinforces that. I already posted on the Player over on ZDNet, but I wanted to list some of the comments I saw on Mike’s blog and on Digg about the new release. There are some classic ones:

i dont believe it. it cant be! my children and my childrens children and their children too will thank you.

-tony

Praise Adobe! You people are my new prophets of worship!

Praise Them!

-Chris

Seriously though folks, did you ever think you would be so happy to download a flash player.

-Clarke Brunsdon

Oh, YES!!

Go have a beer, take a break, relax, celebrate!

Thanks!

-Mark

Holy cow it works on amd64 seemlessly. I can finally stop whining.

-Democritus52

Finally! Flash plugin doesn’t take over my soundcard now. I get super sexy alsa mixing.

-ChrisRX

Sweet! Now I can view the other half of the internet…

-Dcrumpton

Adobe, seriously, hats off. People are absolutely stoked over this, and it’s only the beta! The messages have been nothing but props to Adobe and greatfulness towards the team. I think this is a major breakthrough for the entire Flash Platform and I hope that we see some of this enthusiasm from the Linux community prompt them to look at Flex and dive in. I’m stoked.