I’ve been neglecting my duties over on the O’Reilly Digital Media Blog where I’m posting some notes from the road. I took time today to post some of the things we’ve been doing and some of the things other people have been saying about the tour. Keep an eye on the blog because I’ll be posting some of the informal fun stuff as well as some cool pictures that we take.
[tags]onair2007, Adobe[/tags]
TweetUpdate: I’m an idiot. The bus tour appears to have taken away my ability to read months correctly. Nothing to see here.
Heh, I just saw Mashable’s Adobe vs. Microsoft Smackdown today but it looks like it posted on Friday. I thought it was funny that the smakdown consisted of 4 products (Flash/Silverlight and Adobe Media Player/Windows Media Player) and the winner in each category was the technology that was actually released. This is the problem with talking about beta software; it’s tough to really compare it with what’s already out there.
But the number of comments and trackbacks are interesting. People are excited about this space. A smackdown article always gets people riled up but at the end of the day, it’s always good to see people discussing things. I also wan to give props to Pete for not doing a smackdown of Silverlight vs. AIR.
[tags]Adobe, Silverlight, Flash, Microsoft, Mashable[/tags]
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I’m slowly trying to catch up on feeds and email but today I came across the introductory blog post for the Yahoo! Flash Blog. Yahoo is doing a lot of cool things with Flash and Adobe technologies, so it’s great to see that developers will be able to tap into the knowledge they have there. I’m also really glad that the Yahoo Flash Platform Team has an avenue to talk about what they’re doing and show off some of their projects. There are a lot of good Flash/Flex minds (including Josh Tynjala) in that group, so this is a blog to keep an eye on. And from the sounds of it, there will be some interesting posts:
The Flash Platform team is developing the technical strategy and policy for Adobe technologies as it applies to Yahoo!. As such, we are focusing on developing libraries and platform solutions, methodologies and practices, as well as looking into emerging Adobe technologies.
[tags]Flash, Yahoo[/tags]
TweetReading my RIA feeds has gotten almost depressing this summer. I don’t know if it’s the summer lack of news or if people are discovering the various rich internet application technologies for the first time and not trying to understand what everyone brings to the table. Stuff like this just makes me shake my head and pray we get an influx of unbiased understanding in the RIA world.
It’s actually been a really good summer from an RIA standpoint. Silverlight is close to release, our on AIR Bus Tour has been a huge success and 360|Flex sounds like it was an excellent conference. But despite all that it just seems like the conversation has gotten less interesting. We’re arguing about time-based animation over frame-based animation. That stuff is lame. We should be talking about RIAs are important and trying to get more people to understand the value.
Maybe I just need to get out and go backpacking 
[tags]RIA, Summer[/tags]
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Aviary, a company I blogged about earlier this summer just posted about an online font editor that they’ve created called Horus (brilliant name). I haven’t been able to demo any of their products yet, but they have a screenshot up of the editor and it looks cool. I don’t know if they’ve done any design work on it yet, because it looks like a stock Flex app, but an online editor that allows you to manipulate the vectors in a true type font is great no matter how it looks.
I continue to be impressed by these guys. They’re building out an entire suite of online creative tools on top of the Flash Platform. And you can tell by the little things (the icons, the naming conventions, the screenshots) that these are all very creative people. That’s a great combination and I can’t wait to try some of these tools out.
[tags]Aviary, Flash, Fonts[/tags]
TweetJD pointed to a couple of articles by what I’ll call the “web standards circle” that both seem to portray Adobe AIR as a threat to the web. On one hand I understand where these people are coming from. I understand the distrust of anything proprietary even if I don’t agree with it. I think Flash has helped push the web forward, not held it back or constricted it in any way. I think AIR is going to do something similar for the desktop. Isn’t it good to have a more web-centric experience on the desktop? Isn’t it good to enable web developers with the ability to create full desktop applications? And with AIR you don’t even need to use Flash if you don’t want to. All of our APIs are both ActionScript and JavaScript so you have total control over how you’re building these applications.
I’ve never quite gotten the fear that proprietary runtimes seems to run so deeply in the web community. This fear that one company or another will “control” the web seems to undermine the web as a medium. The web is just too large and there are too many players for anyone to control it. The greatest part of the web in my mind is choice. There are so many ideas flying around and people are free to grab the ones they like and use them. That ability to choose drives competition and moves us all forward. I totally agree with Asa that no one should be locked out of the web. Luckily the web is a very big place; bigger than any one company, any one organization, or any one format.
Adobe has a huge stake in the web succeeding and the fact that our developer and designer communities continue to grow is proof (I think) that we’re doing something right. I’d encourage Asa and Molly and whomever else is worried about Adobe’s impact on the web to engage us. We’re not interested in locking people out or destroying the web with Flash. I think most of us inside the company want to see Flash become even closer to the web and integrate more closely with the browser and HTML/JS/CSS. Work with us to do that so that all of our interests can be represented and discussed. That’s a much better way to move the web forward than to paint a bulls-eye on a lot of great, heavily used technologies.
[tags]Adobe AIR, web standards, Adobe, Flash[/tags]
TweetWe’re starting the second leg of the bus tour in Atlanta today. I took a red eye from Seattle so I could participate in the first day of 360|flex which was really good. The sessions all seemed really valuable and the general vibe was fun and excited. The Flex community is really starting to take off. I noticed that a lot of the attendees were just getting started with Flex. I think that’s a good sign. Lots of cool apps, lots of outside interest and lots of brainpower.
Jeff and I managed to record a Flex Show episode live from the event last night, so keep an eye out for it. Hopefully I’ll be seeing you at one of our east coast bus stops!
TweetAt Gnomedex one of the talks was by Guy Kawasaki, a guy many people consider to be the father of evangelism. His speech today was titled the Art of Evangelism and as a newly indoctrinated evangelist I really, really enjoyed it. Throughout the speech I was thinking of how it applied to my role at Adobe and one thing he said really struck me. It was about making a mantra instead of a mission statement. He talked about how many ridiculous mission statements there are out there but that if you want to be successful you should just choose a phrase with 2 or 3 key words that describe what you’re doing or what you want to accomplish. With Adobe AIR, I would describe this as our mission statement:
“Adobe® AIRâ„¢, formerly code-named Apollo, is a cross-operating system runtime that allows developers to use their existing web development skills to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.”
It’s accurate, it’s good, it works. It isn’t really a mission statement, but it is “markety”. So here’s what I came up with: Web-Enabled Desktop Development. I think that works pretty well because to me, that’s what makes AIR so valuable. AIR brings all the baggage of the web development (both good and bad) to the desktop. There are some fantastic things about web development. I think people enjoy doing web development, it’s accessible to a large number of developers, it’s a very creative medium and there is a universal web development community full of information, resources and a desire to help people learn. But there is still a lot that developers just can’t do within the browser and the desktop is still a central part of our computing environment. Web-Enabled Desktop Development means both that we can leverage web skills to take advantage of desktop functionality but it also means we can bridge the gap between the web and the desktop.
I love Web 2.0 and the web as a platform. I think Adobe AIR has the potential to take that to the next level by making the desktop environment more accessible to web developers. So that’s my new mantra: Web-Enabled Desktop Development.
[tags]Adobe AIR, Guy Kawasaki, Gnomedex, Gnomedex07[/tags]
TweetI’m at Gnomedex for the first time and so far my mind isn’t made up yet. Last night was a great event and because of the number of interesting people here, the mixer was a lot of fun. I got to talk to Jeff Barr about crossdomain.xml files on Amazon’s Web Service servers, John Musser, Randy Stewart as well as Hans Omli and Daryn Nakhuda. I also got to meet Dave Winer for the first time thanks to Dan Farber at ZDNet. Dave was an interesting guy and he had some ideas about how big companies should be talking to bloggers. As a blogger at a big company I took some of what he said with a grain of salt, but the idea focused on catering to a blogger community.
I was unimpressed with the keynote speaker. Not because he wasn’t smart; he was and he articulated his ideas very well. He just seeemed to be angry at everything and didn’t really have any ideas on how to change it. Yes, the world is a messed up place and there are a lot of things we can do, big and small, but instead of railing against everything from central banks to the Iraq War, I wish he would have focused on something that we could actually help make a difference about.
[tags]Gnomedex, Gnomedex07[/tags]
TweetThe team at Matchmine is putting together a party on Sunday night for everyone coming to 360|Flex. So after you pick up your badge, be sure to wander up to the party room between 8:00 – 10:00 PM on Sunday the 12th. It’s going to be a great way to kick off the conference, see what Matchmine is doing, and as part of the event they’re hosting a Guitar Hero contest. There will be prizes awarded at the end of the night to the best guitar players in various categories.
I’m going to be there showing off my new GH skillz from the bus tour. I won’t be able to stay for the whole conference, so I’m hoping to see a lot of you Sunday night. It should be a lot of fun.
[tags]360flex, matchmine, guitar hero[/tags]
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