Unfortunately I missed Flex Camp but this video does a great job of pulling out some highlights and talking to a few of the people at the event. It looks like it was a lot of fun. What’s really cool is how quickly the Flex ecosystem has grown over the past 12 months. Demos of products like Mixbook and SlideRocket just weren’t around 12 months ago. Now we a ton of great Flex applications out there all doing very interesting things with the platform. It’s a great time to be in the world of rich internet applications because software is getting so much better. In addition, more and more developers are getting the opportunities to build applications that they couldn’t build before for technological or design issues. That’s all changing.

Lots of three letter caps there, but as Duane said, I’m going to be speaking at MAX on the topic of Leveraging PDF within Adobe AIR Applications. The PDF side of AIR is something that there hasn’t been a whole lot of information on and from what I’ve seen it’s a feature that a lot of people are curious about. As I start to hash out the session and create examples, I’ll be posting some of them here so feel free to drop me a line with questions or suggestions for PDF and AIR. If you haven’t registered for MAX yet, go now and tell them you signed up just to hear me talk – you’ve got a few more days for early bird pricing! Here’s the abstract of the session:

Adobe AIR is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML,PDF, JavaScript, Ajax, etc.) to build rich Internet applications that can be deployed to the desktop. This session will examine how Adobe AIR applications can utilize PDF content alongside HTML and Flash. We will explore how PDF content can be interacted with using Adobe AIR functionality, integration, and scripting.

[tags]MAX07, PDF, Adobe AIR[/tags]

Not sure who did this from Adobe, but whomever did, you rock. We’re sponsoring the Australian team in the FullCodePress “site in a day” competition which is known as the Geek Olympics down under. According to the website, the premise of the competition is this:

The concept is simple. Web teams take each other on, at the same location, to build a complete website in 24 hours. No excuse, no extensions, no budget overruns.

The competition has selected a charity that will receive the complete website after the 24 hour period. The Australian team has 7 people and from what I can tell, looks like it’s pretty good. Hopefully they’ll fare better than my AFL team, the West Coast Eagles, did against Fremantle.

Since I blogged about this last week, I wanted to post a followup from Gilbert Corrales. It looks like the guys at Schematic have created a Silverlight SEO test. They’ve created a basic page with a Silverlight control in it that has some text including the word SilverlightSEO. He’s also linked directly to the XAML page. Here’s what the control looks like:

At first I thought the test was a great idea, but after checking Google, I realized it isn’t going to work. According the Filetype FAQ, Google only indexes 13 filetypes beyond the standard web formatted documents:

• Adobe Portable Document Format (pdf)
• Adobe PostScript (ps)
• Lotus 1-2-3 (wk1, wk2, wk3, wk4, wk5, wki, wks, wku)
• Lotus WordPro (lwp)
• MacWrite (mw)
• Microsoft Excel (xls)
• Microsoft PowerPoint (ppt)
• Microsoft Word (doc)
• Microsoft Works (wks, wps, wdb)
• Microsoft Write (wri)
• Rich Text Format (rtf)
• Shockwave Flash (swf)
• Text (ans, txt)

So even though XAML files are text based, Google doesn’t look at them, so it won’t ever find SilverlightSEO inside that XAML control. I’m sure this will change down the road and that Google will add support for XAML, but it doesn’t have it right now. In my mind, this is one example of what you get by going with a technology that has been around for a long time. Google already indexes SWF files, so you don’t have to worry about the SEO implications (aside from the overall “RIA SEO” issue). There’s a huge ecosystem built around Flash and it took us 10 years to do it. That can’t be replicated overnight.

[tags]Silverlight, SEO, Flash[/tags]

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I am not a regular reader of Dr. Dobb’s Portal, but I know it’s a fairly well regarded tech news site. Unfortunately in the world of rich internet applications, well regarded tech sites tend to get the facts all wrong. Here’s a gem of an introductory paragraph from the Dr. Dobb’s post:

This year, some of the big boys gave every impression of having suddenly and simultaneously remembered that there is such a thing as a desktop. Google got Geared up, Adobe announced AIR, and Microsoft saw the light with Silverlight, all of which are tools to help web developers integrate operations on the Web and the desktop just a little better. That oft-repeated mantra that the web browser is the new operating system? In 2007, not so much.

Why do tech people continue to lump Silverlight in with Adobe AIR and Google Gears and then go on to describe it as a platform for bridging the web-desktop gap? If they were just talking about all the new technologies that are coming out, that would be one thing. But they continually misunderstand the features of Silverlight.

We’re in a new space and I can understand how the number of new technologies would be a bit confusing at times. Hopefully we can all just keep writing productive posts about the different RIA solutions and maybe we’ll get through to people. You can start with this article.
[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Tech Journalists[/tags]

We posted a video today of Lee Brimelow‘s talk from the On AIR event in Denver. Lee’s session, Transitioning to the Desktop with Adobe AIR, was one of the highlights everywhere we went. Lee is a great, down to earth speaker and he stole the show with his demos. In the video it’s kind of hard to see Lee, but the screen is easy enough to see. It’s about an hour, but if you’re at all interested in Adobe AIR, you should check it out. He’s got some great examples and some fun info. It’s also worthwhile for any Flash developer to check out because that’s what Lee usually does so he does a great job of speaking to that audience.
[tags]Lee Brimelow, Adobe AIR[/tags]