One of the applications everyone wants to see is Buzzword by Virtual Ubiquity. It had a lot of attention at Engage when it was demoed there and the excitement has only gotten more pronounced as they’ve slowly taken the covers off and opened it up to beta testers. If you are interested in seeing a bit about how it works, David Coletta is giving an eSeminar entitled “How to Build a Better Word Processor in Flex 2” next Tuesday. Here are the details:

Who: David Coletta, Developer and Co-Founder, Virtual Ubiquity, Inc.
What: Building a Better Word Processor With Flex 2
When: Tuesday, June 19, 9:00 AM PST
Where to sign up: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?
event=detail&id=462539&loc=en_us

David is also giving away a free copy of Flex Builder so not only do you get to see Buzzword in the flesh, you might take something home for your troubles.

[tags]Buzzword, David Coletta, Virtual Ubiquity[/tags]

Edward Mansouri over at AirApps.net has created what I think is the first mashup for our On Air bus tour. He’s plotted out all the stops on Google maps and when you click on a venue, it will show you the current weather for that city. Another cool feature is that if you click anywhere on the map, it will tell you the closest tour venue to you. Now you don’t have any excuse for not showing up at one of the events.

[tags]onair2007, Air[/tags]

Looks like they posted my video interview with Tinic Uro of the Flash Player team about hardware accelerated, 1080p video in the Flash Player. Tinic is such a smart dude that it was cool to get to hang out and chat with him a bit (it was even more fun when we were off camera). You can’t really tell how good the quality is from the video, but you do get some idea.

Hopefully we get to do more of these now that I’m an employee. Next time I’m in San Francisco I’ll see if I can’t get Mike Chambers to help me get some interviews set up. Anything you want to see in particular?

[tags]Flash Video, 1080p, Flash, Tinic Uro[/tags]

The past couple of days I’ve been getting trained in Ajax with the guys over at Ext, one of the popular JavaScript frameworks. Because Air supports Ajax, we set up the training to learn more about it. Kevin Hoyt did some research and chose the Ext crew because Ext is excellent at building Ajax applications that look like desktop applications (instead of web applications). So after getting a deep dive into their framework I came away with a bit more respect for Ajax.

The first thing is that these guys are really, really smart. Developing an Ext-based app takes a bit of time to get used to, and coming from Flex it was hard to get the syntax down (to configure the components you use object literals which were tough for me to look at on the screen and read). But the components they’ve created are very powerful and full featured, they even have a few things that we don’t in Flex. And because they’ve done all the hard work behind the scenes of ensuring browser compatibility, all you nee to do is code away and lay your components out.

So while I was impressed, I’m not switching away from Flex for my primary development. We showed them a bit of Flex and they were surprised by how good it was. I think it’s common misconception within the Ajax community that Flex is slow/bad/incomplete. Part of the resistance is that Flex isn’t HTML/CSS, but I think there are a lot of people like the Ext guys who just want solid technology.

Watching Air evolve and bring together the worlds of Flex/Flash and Ajax is going to be exciting. I think Ajax developers are really going to like being able to do ECMA 4 with ActionScript and are going to learn that Ajax and Flash work together well. It was good training and Air is going to help enable some cool things.

[tags]Ajax, Ext, Training, Air[/tags]

I just caught this article over on Wired Blogs about Jesse James Garrett‘s reaction to AIR. Jesse James Garrett coined the term Ajax so it makes sense that he would be happy with AIR, but he has a couple of good quotes about what it means for developers and how it extends the reach of Ajax – all things we want it to do:

“I think that Ajax developers have kind of been running up against the constraint of the browser for a while now,” says Garrett. “There’s a lot of code from your browser application that you’d have to throw out for the offline portion of your app.”

That’s really the great thing about AIR. Not every application you build will need to be outside the browser. But as applications become more sophisticated and you do run up against the browser, you don’t need to reengineer your application. Most of the code will port directly to AIR and all you need to do is extend it using the JavaScript APIs available in AIR (or ActionScript if you’re using Flex). As the desktop and the browser blur, that’s going to be very helpful and it will make it easy for web developers to explore closer integration with the desktop.

[tags]Jesse James Garrett, Ajax, AIR[/tags]

Dan McWeeney is a developer employed by Colgate who is currently doing some work at SAP. As part of that work, he’s been digging into Flex and making it work with parts of SAP’s infrastructure. He hasn’t even touched Flex before, but he’s a smart programmer, which makes his feedback the kind that I really like getting. He blogged about his initial impressions with Flex and using Flex within SAP.

He’s generally pretty positive about how easy it is to get started. He’d like to see the documentation a bit more organized, which I agree with. He mentions that you can extend Flex with custom components and also tapped into Flexcoders to find information. Part of being able to get started is being able to find resources, and it sounds like we’re doing a good job of that. It’s cool to see new Flex developers talk about their experiences, if you have any other examples let me know.
[tags]Dan McWeeney, Flex, SAP[/tags]

We’ve set up a Skypecast with Matt Chotin, the Product Manager for Flex to answer your questions about Flex 3 and anything else you want to ask him. The Skypecast is a live event, so you can join the room and get the chance to ask him questions directly which should be pretty cool. The event is taking place this Wednesday, June 13th, at 7:00 PM Eastern (4:00 PM Pacific). You’ll need the Skype client to join and information on the Skypecast is here. I won’t be able to make it because I’ll be flying to New York, but I’m really looking forward to hearing the final product. Hopefully you guys can get some secret stuff out of Matt.

[tags]The Flex Show, flex, Skypecast, Matt Chotin[/tags]

By now you’ve heard all of the announcements and are probably excited about the developer contest (and prizes). It’s going to be a fun few months and the bus tour is going to be ridiculous. I’m planning on going on all three legs for every stop, so if you’re in one of those cities I’m going to be tracking you down and making you stop by. I’ll be blogging from the bus, Twittering like a madman and even posting reviews on Yelp of the places we go (all of those links are on my profile page). So if you want, you’ll be able to follow along. I’ll also be taking any good prank ideas (and with live streaming video, you can watch me try and pull them off).
I think the entire tour is going to be a hit. The website looks great, the people going on the tour are knowledgeable and a lot of fun to talk to, so I think we’ll get a ton of developer interest. We’ve also got some awesome venues. The venue in Seattle is the Elysian Brewery which means beer, code and AIR.

We’ve got a lot of fun events planned, so keep an eye on the website and if you have any ideas/feedback, let me know. I’ll pass it along to the team. Mike Chambers also has a video up where he discusses some of the tour.
[tags]AIR, bus tour, On Air Bus Tour, onair2007, Yelp, Twitter, Elysian Brewery[/tags]

There is an article in the New York Times today about the distribution of media and content across a number of devices and platforms. It delves into how companies are dealing with the plethora of ways to distribute content and trying to do so in a way that keeps costs down but still lets them be creative. The article centers around the Digital Content Lab, but I think some of the ideas in the piece speak to the strengths of the Flash Platform:

The Cartoon Network was aiming to expand its library of more than 150 games — which correspond to its TV cartoons — beyond computers and into game consoles, without spending a fortune rewriting all its software, said Suzanne Stefanac, a journalist, and longtime A.F.I. mentor who was recently named director of the Digital Content Lab. (Ms. Stefanac and I once worked together at ZDTV.)

I tend to refer to these different platforms as “touch points” and one of the great things about Flash is that you have access to multiple touch points that all utilize essentially the same runtime so you can quickly and easily port Flash content from platform to platform. This could be video, games, interactive content or any number of things; they all leverage the Flash Player and as a result transfer easily. In a lot of ways the Flash Platform has become a de facto standard. It’s running inside the browser, on the Wii, on the Play Station 3, mobile devices, set top boxes, cars and with Apollo now has a close integration with the desktop computer.

In order to be nimble in the digital world you’ve got to be able to quickly release content depending on where your consumers are. A big theme with the major Rich Internet Application technologies is similar development tools/assets that you can use to do just that. What I think makes Flash unique is that so many different vendors and companies have opted to put Flash inside their machines. That’s a lot of space to be able to take advantage of.

[tags]Flash, American Film Institute, New York Times, Platform, Digital Content Lab[/tags]

I’m going through feeds and I came across another good Web Worker Daily post by Anne Zelenka that asked do you crave offline web applications. She goes through the intro and then lists off some technologies that are looking to bring web applications offline including Apollo, Zimbra, Firefox 3, and Google Gears. You can throw Dekoh in to that group as well. People seem obsessed with the idea of bringing web applications offline, so I want to make it very clear what I think the biggest value of Apollo will is:

Desktop applications that can be built with web technologies.

I don’t think this is about offline web applications at all, it’s about desktop applications. People expect desktop applications to always be available, which some people misconstrue to be “offline”. But that’s not the only thing. I’m planning a post on this for ZDNet later this week, but I really want to start talking about why I think Apollo is significant. A huge part of that is being able to create desktop applications, and all of the features that implies, with web technologies we all know.

So think about all the desktop applications you use today. Think about what you like about them and what you dislike about them (on both Mac and Windows). Think about how much more innovative the web has been than the desktop. Then think of being able to take the good things you like about your desktop applications and the creativity/innovation of the web. Now combine them and think of your own web development skills. That’s why I’m excited about Apollo.

[tags]Apollo, Firefox 3, Dekoh, Google Gears, Offline, Zimbra[/tags]