CNN was one of the big sites that hadn’t switched over to Flash video yet. For me, it was the only site that I checked on a regular basis that hadn’t, so whenever I was in Firefox, I couldn’t watch the video. I just noticed thanks to Twitter that they rolled out the new site and all the video is in Flash. They had a beta of the new site running for a long time, so this may not be news, but not having to worry about browser issues when I’m going through CNN was a great feeling.

Update: Webkitchen has a blog entry up now. Thanks dude!
I’m off to Granite Peak for a backpacking trip, so I’ll see you guys on Sunday night!

[tags]CNN, Flash Video[/tags]

Robert Cringely has a post about Adobe and our strategy in which he describes Flash and PDF as “invisible”, the next step after ubiquity. He then goes on to talk about Silverlight, JavaFX, AIR and Adobe’s overall strategy. It was a fun thing to read and I think for the most part Robert captures one of the major reasons why I wanted to come work for Adobe:

So where is Adobe headed with this? Traditionally we’d expect a fight with Microsoft for the desktop, but I think Adobe is headed in a different direction, toward mobile and embedded devices, with the desktop variants like AIR primarily intended to make sure there is something for all those mobile devices to link TO.

I don’t discount the desktop quite as much as Robert does, but he pegs the value of our platform pretty well. One of the big things that we’re looking to enable is a consistent development story across a variety of mediums and devices. We want you to be able to build applications with web technologies anywhere your users can interact with your data. One of the reasons we chose WebKit for Adobe AIR is that it had already been ported to devices and we want to create a version of Adobe AIR for the mobile world.

There are definitely thing we need to work on; we need to get more developer to the platform, we need to get our mobile platform up to par with the rest of Flash and we need to make sure we continue integrating our products so designers and developers can easily work together. But all in all, I think we’re doing a good job and working to get better in all of those areas. Ubiquity is a valuable thing, but as Robert says, invisibility is even more powerful. We’ve got a great platform on our hands and I’m excited to be a part of that.

[tags]Adobe, Platform, Adobe AIR[/tags]

I hate reading things like this. Alex, I’m sorry you had to go through all that just to get software which you were obviously excited about. It’s a shame that for whatever reason we couldn’t handle the order online. What makes it worse is that we have some very, very passionate users. One of the comments in that post says “I presently work with GIMP. I have started to pool funds so that one day, I will [own] the holy grail.”
That’s how people see Adobe products, as the holy grail of design software. It sucks when we can’t get that software quickly and painlessly into the hands of people that want it. I’m just a lowly evangelist Alex, but I feel for you. Hopefully this is something we’re working on.

[via James Governor]

[tags]Adobe, software, customer service[/tags]

This week has been nothing but iPhone news. People are lining up, studying every new tidbit of information, and even building applications for it. All this for a phone that by most accounts is technologically inferior to what we currently have on the market. So why all the buzz and hype? Because the iPhone is an experience. It creates an emotional reaction, it looks beautiful and it’s interface by most accounts is fun to use. That sounds a lot like important traits of a Rich Internet Application to me.

I can’t wait for a day when our software (web based and desktop) all conjure up the kind of raw excitement that the iPhone does. We’re getting close. The apps we’re building are getting easier to use and we have great design tools that let us expand what we can do with software. Software doesn’t have to be boring just like cell phones or MP3 players aren’t boring. You can have the kind of elegance that comes with great design in your software. You just need to look around and rethink what technology you are using to deliver your applications.

[tags]iPhone, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Scoble has a post about PR and blogging as a corporate citizen. One of the things I really like about Adobe is how open we are. A lot of our employees have blogs, but it’s also that we’re open with our products. Flex is open source, we’ve been talking about AIR for a LOONG time and we released bits for it very early on so that developers could dig in and play with it. We’ve gotten a lot of great press around AIR, so in this case it seems to have been good for us.

But Scoble brings up the fact that Apple is uber-secretive about their products and Steve Jobs manages to get an insane amount of good PR whenever he does something. Sure, part of that is the fact that the company is secretive, but it’s also because since Steve’s been back, he’s done a lot of good things. Apple is the kind of company that *can* be secretive because they’ve got a string of big wins behind them and you never know if their next product will be as game changing as the iPod.

I don’t think other companies have that luxury for the most part. And I’m glad. I like being able to be very open and get product feedback in the middle of the development cycles. I think it makes for a better product and generates a lot of excitement in the community. What do you think?

[tags]Corporate PR, Blogging[/tags]

As part of the Bus Tour Event here in Seattle we’re going to be doing something that the Seattle crowd should be very familiar with; an Ignite-style event focused on the web. Ignite Seattle! is a gathering that Brady Forrest puts on here in Seattle with presentations that last 5 minutes and consist of 20 slides on a 15 second delay. The speaker doesn’t control the slides so it makes for a fun, quick and sometimes challenging talk.

We’re taking the spirit of that event and doing Ignite the Web during the evening of July 10th when the On Air Tour is here in Seattle. We’re going to keep to the theme of the web for these talks, so we’d love to hear from you guys here in Seattle about the kind of web applications you’re building or cool things you’re doing with the web. If you are interested in speaking, send me an email with your presentation topic and make sure to register for the Seattle event. We’re going to offer prizes to the top presentations. Here are the details for the event:

Where: Elysian Fields
Date: Tuesday, July 10, 2007
Time: Full Day starts at 9:15, Evening starts at 5:15
What: Free food, beer, networking and presentations about the Adobe Integrated Runtime

[tags]OnAir2007, AIR, Seattle, Ignite[/tags]

I just saw an interesting slideshow over on the Canoo blog about getting Ajax, Swing and Flash to talk to each other. I had seen the Ajax-Flash stuff before, but I hadn’t ever thought of incorporating Swing. If you’re building a Swing application but looking to transition to Flash, you might want to take a look at this.

Also, I should remind those of you who are working with Ajax and Flash through External Interface that you can use LiveCycle ES to get access to the Flex-Ajax Bridge which makes the Flash/Ajax connection more powerful. I was sad to see it wasn’t a free download on labs anymore, so if you’re looking for it, we’ve rolled it into LiveCycle.

[tags]Flash, Ajax, Swing, LiveCycle[/tags]

Ajaxian has posted the full PDF of our AIR for JavaScript Developers over on their site. We’ve got the book available for purchase if you like to hold things in your hand but if not, the download should be more than sufficient for you.

This is the second book in the series and the second one we’ve released under a creative commons license. The first book, Apollo for Flex Developers, was a huge hit and this one looks just as good. It should cover almost everything you need to know about JavaScript in AIR:

• Chapter 1: Introduction to the Adobe Integrated Runtime
• Chapter 2: Getting started with AIR Development
• Chapter 3: Working with JavaScript and HTML Within AIR
• Chapter 4: AIR Mini-Cookbook
• Appendix A: AIR Command-Line Tools
• Appendix B: AIR JavaScript Aliases

There was an interesting post I caught over at Adblock Plus which talked about a session at the Mozilla Developer Day at pit XUL against HTML. There has been a lot of talk, mostly from the HTML crowd, that they are worried about some of the Rich Internet Application markups (XUL/XAML/MXML) taking over the web and relegating HTML to some dark, antiquated, technology graveyard. What made it interesting was that this conversation occurred at a Mozilla developers conference and Mozilla is a very strong supporter of HTML. As a result, the tone of the conversation was in getting people to switch from XUL to HTML.

Are you puzzled? I think many people were. Was that a serious question? The advantages of XUL are too obvious: the box model, powerful localization mechanism and user interface widgets with native look-and-feel. But it isn’t that simple. The box model can be used from HTML as well, just take a look at Mozilla’s CSS extensions (e.g. display: -moz-box and -moz-flex: 1).

Wladimir goes on to talk about reasons XUL isn’t going away and highlights the things that it cannot do as being important:

It cannot do table-based layouts or relative positioning (everybody who ever “inherited” a web application will probably appreciate this a lot). It doesn’t do all the numerous quirks to be compatible with all browsers including Mosaic 1.0. It doesn’t even have a quirks mode! It is a simple and straightforward language built for one and only one reason: to enable efficient development of user interfaces.

He’s talking about XUL, but the same could be said for any of the RIA markup languages. With these languages we get a chance to start from scratch and focus on a different set of problems. HTML isn’t going to go away, and I don’t think anyone wants it to. But as the web evolves, not all of the solutions can be implemented with HTML. The advanced user interfaces we’re starting to see are an important part of the web and the way we build them is very different from the way we build web pages. We should continue to strive and make them as “webby” as possible, but that doesn’t mean we have to build all of our apps with HTML and CSS.

[tags]HTML, XUL, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Yesterday I recorded an episode of RedMonk Radio with Michael Coté and covered everything from what I do as an evangelist to the search for UI frameworks. We also got to talk a bit about what RedMonk does and some of my thoughts no Foo Camp. I’m a huge fan of the RedMonk guys and this was a lot of fun to record. I also noticed that we’ve got episode 1 of the Flex Show interview with Matt Chotin so if you haven’t listened to it yet, head over and download it.

[tags]RedMonk, Michael Coté, Flex Show, Podcast[/tags]