In the past, I’ve been critical of how Adobe is handling Flex developers. Part of that is just because it’s a new product, but I always felt that part of it was because Adobe/Macromedia was used to dealing with designers. Sure there was always ColdFusion but those guys are just crazy .

But Ted Patrick released what is a pretty good Flex search engine today. It aggregates content from Flexcoders, the Developers Center, the Flex Documentation and Actionscript 3 Documentation. If you search for +Matt +Chotin you get about 43,323,231 entries (including some begging for help and ‘special thanks’). If you complain about the Flex interface, Ted impersonates Christopher Columbus in the comments.

In all seriousness, this is going to be a great tool. There are some great resources for Flex out there, but the problem is finding them. This is going to go a long way towards making that happen. And this is just the alpha version. I know there are a lot of plans in the pipeline and I feel very good about this being an anchor for the developer community. Giving people who are new to Flex the ability to find exactly what they are looking for very quickly will go a long way to increasing the population.

Then again, Flex developers are making bank because of the shortage, so this could be a bad thing. Just kidding.

Google Trends is always kind of fun to play around with, but for some reason I hadn’t ever thrown in the various Rich Internet Application technologies. After doing so tonight, I think it’s a pretty accurate gauge of where we are today. OpenLaszlo got a big head start and has a lot of sustained growth. Flex has been steadily making gains and WPF hasn’t quite taken off yet (it was released just days ago). Also, Adobe Apollo isn’t popular enough to show up on the big board yet, but as Duane notes, we’re getting there.

Other fun searches? Adobe Flash vs. Macromedia Flash, ColdFusion vs .NET vs Java, Flash Lite vs Java ME, FLV all by itself.

I’m sorry I’ve been neglecting the blog lately. I’ve been absolutely swamped and hopefully I’ll be able to talk soon about what I’m working on. Well, it looks like Matt Chotin is spamming the flexcoders list again which is my signal that it’s time to write up the Universal Desktop Daily. You can set a watch by Matt’s late night question answering.

Update: Brian Fitzgerald added Ajax to the mix and all of the pretty colors shrink waaaayy down to the bottom. Unsuprisingly, Ajax has a huge following.
[tags]Google Trends, Flex, Adobe, Windows Presentation Foundation, OpenLaszlo, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

I don’t think you’d see this anywhere but Seattle:

Now for the backstory. Saturday night we went out with some friends to a piano bar, 88 Keys. It’s a blast, I highly suggest it if you’re in Seattle. But they have the “Phrase of the Night” where you can have them write something on the mirrors behind the stage for a dollar amount. It starts at $1.00 and goes up another dollar each time someone writes something on the board. It’s genius because by the end of the night when everyone is drunk they’re paying $30.00 to write something on the mirror. But early in the night, when it was still $6.00, for a few hilarious minutes, “Microsoft Vista makes me horny” was up front and center.

I really like Vista, but there is at least one person here in the Emerald city who REALLY likes Vista.

I’m here chilling at Seattle Mind Camp, which has been a lot of fun so far.  It looks like there will be some interesting (and even non-technical) sessions, so I’m looking forward to checking them out. Also, Nintendo is going to stop by and they’re bringing Wii’s for us to play with. Madden Wii here I come baby. Right now I’m sitting next Michael Graca who is in the process of starting Old Town Fancy. That’s the best thing about MindCamp, a lot of people have fun ideas and most of them are still in the very early stages.

Also, I saw that TechCrunch has a review up of Yourminis.com. I think my review over on ZDNet is more in depth, but I really like what those guys are doing and it’s very cool to see them get press from the big guys. It’s not so rare anymore to see a Flash application on TechCrunch, but I still enjoy it.

[tags]mindcamp, seattle, yourminis,techcrunch[/tags]

 

 

Last night I got an email about Adobe’s new Creative Suite 2.3 advertising campaign, The Creative Mind. It’s a big jump for Adobe because I think this is way more “viral” than anything they have done before.

I love stuff like this. It kept me entertained for quite a while last night just exploring the worlds and having fun with it. I don’t think this type of advertising is for everybody, but it hits a spot, and it’s a fun way to advertise a product. Kris Abel and Heavy Backpack seem to agree.

[tags]Adobe, Creative Suite, The Creative Mind[/tags]

I was having a conversation about Apollo today, and this question came up. What surprised me is that I realized I didn’t really have an answer. I’ve been following Apollo for a long time, and I’ve tried to track almost every single piece of news about it, but I have yet to come across information about who Apollo is really for.

In my opinion, it’s for Web 2.0 developers. It’s for the smaller development shops who are currently building web applications that could benefit from some tight integration with the desktop. But who does Adobe see as Apollo’s target audience?

It’s an important question, because marketing to the enterprise, and marketing to “Web 2.0 companies” is very different. And while it may be tempting to say that Apollo is for everyone, that paints a pretty broad brush and any marketing message is likely to get lost in the mix. Do I think that Apollo will grow into the enterprise? Of course. Do I think Apollo is a compelling enough technology that it can succeed in nearly any vertical? Probably.

But you still need to have a target audience. Everything I’ve seen seems to imply that the target is smaller, web 2.0 companies, which I agree with. My worry is that the direct revenue that comes from catering to the enterprise will win out against the indirect revenue that comes with the smaller guys. Is that the sense that you guys get, who do you think Apollo is for?

[tags]Adobe, Apollo, Web 2.0[/tags]

I got wind last week that a Flex user group was starting up here in Seattle. I had always thought it was a travesty that we didn’t have one, and I even thought about figuring out how to start one a few times, but in the end, I just didn’t think I had the time. Luckily, Ali Daniali has stepped up and we now have a Flex User Group all our own here in Seattle.

So here the details according to the blog:

We are meeting at the Adobe Conference Center here in Seattle (which, if you didn’t know, is the nicest Adobe office in the world. Seriously.)

• First Meeting is November 16th, 2006 from 6:30 to 8:30 – This will be to cover general group info and get input from people as to what they want to see from a Flex user group.
• The second meeting is December 7, 200th from 6:30 – 8:30 – David Gassner is coming to speak, so it should be a good meeting. I’ve heard good things about David but haven’t been able to meet him.

Now, I’m going to be bugging people via email to come, but if for some reason you don’t get an email from me, mark your calendar down. And if you decide to, say, drive up from Oregon….well then beer is on me…..

[tags]Adobe, Seattle, Flex[/tags]

I’ve heard good things about the fourth iteration of Contribute, and specifically I’ve heard good things about the blogging functionality. I use OneNote for my ZDNet blog, and love it just because of how easy it is to keep track of everything. I recently started using Microsoft’s Live Writer for this blog, and have been very pleased with how easy it makes blogging offline.

Is Contribute set up with functionality similar to Live Writer? Is anyone using Contribute to blog on a WordPress blog? I’d like to hear your experiences. Is it worth picking up?

[tags]Contribute, Live Writer,Blogging[/tags]

Man, Adobe has been busy on the investment front. First it was Bunchball, now word is that they’ve put in some of the $30 million dollars that MobiTV announced receiving today. The $30 million puts MobiTV over the $100 million dollar funding mark (in the Series C round).

Very interesting move by both MobiTV and Adobe. MobiTV arguably has the most traction in the enticing-yet-unfulfilled mobile TV market, and they leverage a lot of Adobe technology to provide that. In addition, they have a bunch of content deals, which is quickly becoming the golden egg for media companies. It’s one of the reasons Brightcove made such a splash earlier this week.

Now I’m not sure if this is part of the aforementioned $100 million that we heard about at MAX, but Adobe does seem to be jumping to companies with more regularity this week, which I doubt is a coincidence. I still haven’t been able to talk with Adobe about the VC announcement, but I’m hoping to because I know a lot of developers out there want more info about the fund.

[tags]MobiTV, Adobe, venture capital[/tags]