Monthly Archives: September 2007

It’s All About the Web Worker

Posted on by
3

Scoble has a really good take on the news. Microsoft owned “Work 1.0″ but Work 2.0 is going to be about collaboration. I think it’s also going to be about a great user experience. Really it’s all about collaborating with experiences. That’s why I think Adobe has an upper hand in this. Read Scoble’s post (update: read Josh Catone’s post as well) and then think about Adobe. We’ve now got Buzzword, Connect, PDF, Flash, and Share. We’re in a position to not only to empower web workers but also to promote rich Internet applications at the same time. That’s the power of a platform and I’ve always believed user experience can be a huge differentiator. Adobe has the ability to provide both a great user experience as well as some powerful technology with collaboration, PDF, and Flash.

Big Day for Adobe

Posted on by
Reply

Today is a really cool day for Adobe. I’d think that even if I didn’t work for them. We moved in a cool direction today. First, we acquired Buzzword, a Flex application we’ve all been seeing. That’s awesome. It means Adobe is actually acquiring Web 2.0 companies. I’m stoked and I hope that trend continues. But why did we do that?

Adobe is branching out. As an employee, I’m stoked about that. We’ve got a kick ass word processor (with some legitimate limitations) but we’ve also got a great document format (PDF) and a ubiquitous platform (Flash). Combine those two things and you’ve got a TON of potential. One of my huge complaints is that Adobe hasn’t been “Web 2.0″ enough. We’re changing that today. Share is all about the beginning of hosted services at Adobe.

This is going to be great.

Thinking About the Purpose of AIR

Posted on by
Reply

I had a really interesting discussion today with someone at the On AIR Bus tour event in Chicago. Towards the end of the night he came up to me and asked “So what is AIR?” Having given the keynote, this kind of question scares me and makes me wonder if I need to rethink how I explain what AIR does. But I answered his question with a question and asked him what he did and why he was here (he had a good reason). As I did that, I realized that the purpose of AIR changes for different people.

I think there are a lot of subtleties to AIR that are difficult to put into words. Having your app run outside of the browser doesn’t sound very exciting, but from a user experience standpoint it’s a very different world. Even without any AIR hooks at all, having native chrome and the ability to register file types or have an icon running int the dock/system tray may be a good reason to adopt AIR.

However I realize that’s not the goal. The argument seems to come in when we talk about AIR with regards to the “browser movement”. The browser is great but it obviously has limitations. In my mind, the major purpose of AIR is to enable web developers to get around those limitations without leaving their comfort zone. We don’t want you to forego your web applications altogether, but rather give you more tools to create the best experience for your needs. And because AIR lets you create “real” desktop applications your experiences can take advantage of that. Keep that in mind throughout MAX.

[tags]Adobe, AIR[/tags]

Here Early for MAX? Check Out the Bus!

Posted on by
7

The final stop of the North American on AIR Bus Tour is tonight in Chicago in the shadow of the MAX conference tomorrow. If you’ve flow in early for MAX, it’s worth checking out. We’re all pretty relaxed now that the tour is over and so tonight is going to be a fun nostalgic celebration of the entire trip. There will be a few good AIR sessions and I’m even giving the keynote. We’ll have beer, video games and the team will be up for talking about anything (especially college football). It’s a great way to kick off MAX, so swing by and feel free to give me a call after I finish the keynote (267.250.9422). Brutally honest feedback is appreciated :) .

[tags]On AIR Bus Tour, MAX, Chicago, max2007[/tags]

Blogging on the Bus is Hard

Posted on by
6

Blogging on the Bus is HardMan I am behind. The bus tour is always awesome but it’s really difficult to keep up on the news and sit down to write blog posts. There are a ton of cool companies I want to write about and a lot of news that I’ve missed out on writing about. With MAX around the corner and my presentation still not finished, it’s going to be a hectic weekend. Factor in all the news and the fact that Halo 3 is taking over our suite and it’s going to be a rock star couple days of coding, gaming and socializing.

What I wanted to mention was our new developer connection. I’ve been poking around and I think it’s a good step for Adobe. I was actually kind of skeptical that Adobe could pull it off and that we’d have some growing pains at doing something like this for our developer community. But I think we have a great first edition. It’s obviously good to have our developer tools/technologies laid out in a way that people can get information (and inspiration) but I’m also glad to see that we have a section for RIAs (I was supposed to be in the video for the RIA section but I don’t think my takes were good enough :) ) and Flex Interface Guidelines. Both of these sections will evolve, but I hope we’ve started a conversation. I also hope that we get more people talking about the whys as well as the hows of rich Internet applications. I think the dev connection starts to do that, so enjoy and let me know what you think.

[tags]Adobe, Adobe Developer Connection, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

Adobe and Ajax

Posted on by
Reply

This is an old post, but it just popped up on my feeds. Dave McAllister, one of Adobe’s open source gurus, has a post about all the various ways Adobe uses Ajax and encourages it. It’s well worth a read and I think it illustrates the direction we’re hoping to go. I’ve had my own love-hate relationship with Ajax but with the AIR launch and getting over my insecurities with Flash, I’m excited about what we’ll be able to do with Ajax.

Adobe is a web company and despite what some of the open standard crowd thinks, we genuinely want to help move the web forward and put more power/creativity/richness into the hands of web developers. That’s one thing AIR does very well. I also hope we see more Ajax-Flash interaction. Using the technologies together can be great and it doesn’t have to be one or the other. Making it easy for web developers to incorporate both will make for better experiences which is what Adobe is all about.

[tags]Adobe, AIR, Ajax[/tags]

Flash Player 9 Penetration up to 93.3%

Posted on by
3

Emmy just posted the September 2007 penetration numbers and we’re up to 93.3% in mature markets. The number is actually 94.1% in US and Canada and both Europe and Japan saw bigger than 3% jumps. I’ve been curious how our numbers match up with some of the other big sites. I know Slide hasn’t moved to 9 yet because of a penetration issue, so I wonder how far off their internal numbers are from ours. If you have any info on what you’re seeing on your site, shoot me an email or comment below.

[tags]Flash Player, Penetration[/tags]

Adobe Live at the Halo 3 Launch

Posted on by
Reply

Halo 3Last week I said we had a surprise but I didn’t want to steal anyones thunder by giving it away to early. But I checked, and it’s cool if I blog it now. It turns out that there are a couple of people that play Halo on the bus tour. And since the tour happens to be in New York City on the day of the Halo 3 launch (tomorrow) we’re going to be heading over to the Best Buy after the event and waiting in line for our copies of Halo 3.

I’m going to set up a Ustream channel so that we’ll be streaming video, chatting and hanging out while we’re in line. The Best Buy here is supposed to be one of the biggest launch events and Major Nelson is supposed to be making an appearance here. If you’re in the city, stop by the line. I’m not sure where we’ll actually end up in line because we’re waiting until later in the day, but either way it should be fun.

Halo 3 and Silverlight

Posted on by
Reply

Microsoft has been pushing a lot of Silverlight stuff out in the conjunction with Halo 3 launch, which I think is brilliant. The Halo 3 site shows off some of Silverlight’s video capability and they just remixed their Tafiti site with a Halo 3 theme. It makes Tafiti a lot cooler, but I’m still not really sure how many people are using it. I think all of this is a carefully laid plan by Dr. Sneath to steal Mike Chambers away. The Barely out of Beta guys should do a comic about that.
Also, I think we’re going to have some news about the Halo 3 launch, but I’m keeping quiet because I don’t want to steal anyone’s thunder. Stay tuned though.

[tags]Silverlight, Halo 3[/tags]

For Those of You Affected by the Alpha of AIR Expiring

Posted on by
Reply

I just caught this on the Adobe forums, but wanted to post it here as well in case anyone was searching the blogosphere and got bit by the Alpha version of AIR expiring. This is a letter from the product managers:

It has come to the Adobe AIR team’s attention that a few AIR developers were affected by today’s expiration of the Alpha version of Adobe AIR released on March 19, 2007. We regret any inconvenience that the timeout may have was caused anyone especially our earliest adopters. For that we apologize.

In the future, we will strive to do a better job at communicating these dates to the community. The best place to find this information about expiration dates is on our FAQ:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIR:Developer_FAQ#Does_the_Adobe_AIR_runtime_have_an_expiration_date_or_timeout.3F

Our intent was to encourage developers to move to the latest version of the runtime to take advantage of new features and capabilities. We intentionally removed the Alpha version download from our website after Beta1 was released so that AIR developers would begin transitioning their applications over to the Beta which included dozens of new features and bug fixes. However, it appears that some developers that kept building on top of the Alpha were surprised to discover that it would not launch today.

Moving forward, we highly recommend that AIR developers move their applications to the latest version of the runtime as soon as it’s made available. Until we officially launch 1.0, you should expect that new versions of the runtime will have new capabilities and bug fixes.

If you encounter any difficulties with migrating from one version to another we want to support you, so please send us any issues.

IMPORTANT: If you review the FAQ, you’ll see that Adobe AIR Beta 1 will timeout after December 11th, 2007. When the next version of Adobe AIR is released, we will provide detailed steps on how to migrate over your applications. As previously stated, you should plan on updating your applications as soon as the next version is released.

Please feel free to respond to this thread if you have questions or thoughts you’d like to share.

Thank you,
- Rob and Luis

Product Managers, Adobe AIR
http://www.adobe.com/go/wish/

[tags]Adobe AIR[/tags]