Episode 10 of The Flex Show is up and Jeff has part one of a great interview with Juan Sanchez from Scale Nine, the guy who makes all of those awesome Flex themes.

 Also announced in this episode is our Flex Builder contest. Adobe gave us some free copies of Flex Builder and all you have to do is send us your Flex application to win one. If your Flex Builder trial has expired, you can use try.flex.org or the IIS and Apache Modules for building Flex Apps.

Head on over to the episode for all of the details!

[tags]Flex, The Flex Show, Flex Builder[/tags]

John Udell has a post about the implications behind the Silverlight DOM being accessible by JavaScript and implies that you could use Greasemonkey-like tools to actually rewrite Silverlight applications on the fly. One of the reasons he’s excited about this is that he saw a bunch of people able to learn and manipulate pages using Greasemonkey and they could go through that same learning process with Silverlight:

Greasemonkey unleashed a flood of creativity by enabling developers who are not the authors of web pages to enhance the behavior of those web pages in ways that can be profoundly useful. I hope we’ll see similar effects in the realm of Silverlight. And if we do, I hope they’ll enjoy the same cross-browser reach that Silverlight itself does.

It’s kind of interesting to think about. Though the non-binary file has its downsides, there are a lot of intriguing things about it and it may appeal more to the open community.

[tags]Silverlight, John Udell, Greasemonkey[/tags]

I missed the presentation by Ben Forta last night because at the last minute I was without a ride, and the buses were all going to take way too long, but an ex-coworker of mine, Ian Smith, was there and blogged his top 9 new features for Scorpio over on DownloadSquad. There’s a lot in this new release and ColdFusion is going to make a big splash in web development by making some things very, very easy to do.

[tags]ColdFusion, Ben Forta[/tags]

Adobe released the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 today which helps bring together Flash and Flex so designers and developers can work together. This is something we’ve been struggling with on our team, so it’s a VERY welcome release, and having seen some early versions of this, I’m glad to see it progress so quickly. (This is the demo presentation, WELL worth spending 30 minutes on)

It has some pretty significant implications for Flex. For the first time Flashers and Flexers can really work together as equals and Flex developers can incorporate Flash content from their designers. This is going to go a long way towards making it easy to customize Flex applications and really make them stand out from a UI standpoint. I think this is a big leap for the framework and it’s going to result in some high quality user interfaces.

Flex just got a whole lot more powerful with the ability to leverage the Flash talent out there. Upward and onward.

More thoughts by Eric Dolceki and Jesse Warden

[tags]Flex, Flash, CS3, devigner[/tags]

How’s this for a media quote?

Microsoft last week made what is likely to be a lame attempt to slam the barn door after the video horse has bolted, copying the Adobe Flash Video strategy with a product that is quite simply too late.

 That’s The Register on Silverlight, announced last week at NAB. They seem very unimpressed calling the move “purely defensive” and pretty much writing off the video war. I just don’t see how people can believe that. Video is white hot, yes, but is it over? No way. I think Silverlight’s video story is good. It has DRM, has a better, more open codec, and if they get penetration (a BIG if), they’ve got tools to make it happen. Windows Media Format is still used in a lot of places, and now those people have an easy way to do video. That’s going to be compelling.

The Register also gets some things wrong. One, it mentions that Microsoft will struggle to get video on the mobile platform. Flash Lite currently doesn’t support video, and I’ve heard the Flash Lite 3 support won’t be stellar, so I’m not sure that’s a notch in favor for Adobe.

Secondly, The Register mentioned Adobe Media Player: “Meanwhile Adobe turned the knife at NAB, announcing that it was not content to just have stolen the PC video market from Microsoft, but added that it is now preparing its own Media Player to go head to head with the Windows Media Player.“

Adobe Media Player *sounds* like a big dig at Microsoft, but the two media players aren’t really competitors in my mind. Adobe’s version is aimed much more at people that want to distribute content with support for things like DRM and Media RSS.

Adobe has a huge head start, but is this over? Not by a long shot. I think Adobe is doing all the right things to keep their lead, but things are still going to be interesting, and we should probably wait until Silverlight is actually *released* before we go digging it’s grave.

[tags]Silverlight, Adobe, Adobe Media Player, The Register[/tags]

I’m back at home after a fun, but crazy week. Web 2.0 Expo was awesome, but I stretched myself a *bit* too far. Keeping on top of my development job, planning 360|Flex, blogging a week in which Microsoft and Adobe both had significant RIA news, then moderating the panel and helping out with blogging on the O’Reilly Radar just kind of overwhelmed me. So I spent Thursday-Sunday down in Oregon at my grandfather’s WWII reunion, stayed away from email, blogging, and even Twitter in an attempt to recharge. I think it worked.

Web 2.0 Expo was great. Lots of interesting sessions, lots of excitement for RIAs and a chance to meet people for the first time and hang out with others. I finally got to meet Richard MacManus, Chris Messina and Matthias Zeller and I hung out quite a bit with Bryan Zug, Andre Charland and Daryn Nakuda. Even hung out with James Ward and Ted Leung for a night.

All in all, great conference. During the conference, I also realized that I should have some kind of logo for Digital Backcountry, so I came up with this (I didn’t go Web 2.0 reflection-style):

I’m going to add it as a watermark in the corner of the photos, but comments are welcome.

I’m still catching up on email, feeds and everything else. If you have anything you know is good that I missed, please drop me a line and send it to me. I’ll be more responsive this week . And I’ll stay responsive during MIX next week because I don’t have any sessions to present on.

[tags]Web2Expo, Richard MacManus, Chris Messina, Matthias Zeller, Bryan Zug, Andre Charland, Daryn Nakuda, James Ward, Ted Leung[/tags]

I just saw Richard MacManus posted about Bungee Labs, and I want everyone to go read it. I hate Ajax, but this thing is off the hook. Richard does it better justice (but Richard, I don’t really think it competes with Apollo at all) so here’s the quick version:

Bungee Labs developed a web-based IDE that makes it really easy to hook into web services and build an application. The IDE is really, really cool and you can throw together an application pretty quickly and leverage power features like data binding. In some ways, the IDE is very similar to Expression Blend.

What makes their model different is that they let you build this application, then they store it on their servers and charge you based on the traffic to it. In some ways it’s like Amazon’s S3 and EC2 but for building AND deploying applications. I asked them if they were going to do a Flex version, but no word on that.

I’m going to try to do a more in depth look later this month.

[tags]Bungee Labs, Web Development, Ajax[/tags]

The Web 2.0 Expo wifi has been spotty, so I haven’t been able to catch up on all of the opinions, but a bunch of people are talking about a bunch of things. We’ve got the Silverlight news, the talk about Adobe’s Media player, and lost in the shuffle is that Salesforce.com is starting to do things with Flex.

Today isn’t great because Microsoft unveiled Silverlight, we knew that was coming for a while, but it’s great becuase people are talking about RIAs. They’re talking about Apollo, they’re talking about great in-browser and out-of-browser experiences, and they’re talking about richness that the browser can’t achieve.

It’s also great to see interesting people come out and talk about RIAs.The always good basement.org has a post, Scoble mentioned the new Adobe Media Player, Richard MacManus took on the space, Stan Schroeder, who has a good blog also talked about it.

RIAs are hitting the big time, and getting more and more attention.There’s nothing bad about that.

That may be the most ridiculous title I’ve ever written, but CenterNetworks ran a story a few days ago about the 5 hottest startups submitted to KillerStartups for the week, and two of them are Flex; Eyejot.com and Fauxto.com (link goes to the KillerStartups profile).

KillerStartups is a digg-like directory of startups where users can vote on the merits of a particular company. It’s kind of a cool concept and it’s great to see people are buzzing about Flex apps, especially when two of the best are in th running.

There seems to be a lot of Flex news recently, which is a good sign. I’m behind on the linkblog, but trying to keep it updated this week.

[tags]KillerStartups, CenterNetwork, Fauxto, EyeJot[/tags]

I’m just stepping out the door to head to the Web 2.0 Expo. It’s looking like it will be a pretty fun event with lots of talk about Rich Internet Applications (and of course, Web 2.0). If you’re in San Francisco, we should meet up, so feel free to Twitter me, email me, or call me (267.50.9422).

If you’re actually at the Expo, I’m doing two sessions. One, is my panel on Rich Internet Application technologies. The other is a Birds of a Feather session about the Business Value of Rich Internet Apps. Both should be fun, so swing by.

Also, tonight I’ll be going to Ignite Expo, which is always fun here in Seattle, so they imported it to San Fran. It’s free to anyone, so even if you don’t have a conference pass, you’re welcome to show up.

[tags]Web2Expo, Rich Internet Applications, San Francisco, Ignite[/tags]