I just noticed that Deepa Subramaniam, one of the rock star engineers on the Flex team is blogging. She’s always at events and she’s a huge speaking draw, so now that she’s blogging you all should be getting even more Flex goodness. Now we just need to get her on Twitter.
[tags]Deepa Subramaniam, Flex[/tags]
TweetThis is so freaking awesome (more video goodness here). It’s the end result of an Interaction Design project by Tim Roth who built a multitouch computer by himself and then built applications for it using Flash. According to Mike Potter, it’s been rolled into a platform being built by Natural User Interface. According to Mike the software, built on ActionScript 3, is going to be open source so anyone building their own multitouch hardware can use it.
In doing some digging I think it’s the same group that does Touchlib (and I think Touchlib is what’s running the machine in the video. Touchlib is a multi-touch development kit which supports Flash via the TUIO protocol. I’ve heard rumors that Microsoft Surface‘s original demo were all based on Flash and so they may have been using Touchlib.
Mike points out that this has serious implications for mobile devices. Multi-touch stuff is really cool and having an open source development environment that lets you build multi-touch applications is going to be a great thing for the community. The hardware is just going to get cheaper, so the barrier to entry should be lower and lower as time goes by. These guys are coming to MAX (and brining the table) so make sure to swing by!
[tags]Flash, multi-touch, Microsoft Surface[/tags]
TweetTed has lined up some pretty cool Birds of a Feather (BOF) and Meet the Team (MTT) sessions at MAX. These are always great and the only downside is that we have a ton of sessions in each timeslot. I’ll probably try to bump between a few of them to meet people and see what’s going on. When I wasn’t working for Adobe, these were the best way to get in front of people and network. The added bonus this year is that there is an open bar and food for the whole thing so from 7:30 to 10:30 you can network, learn and drink. Rock on!
[tags]MAX2007[/tags]
TweetJohn Spooner is reporting from the Intel Developer Forum about their plans for a new chip, Menlow, that will bring new power to devices. Here’s what John had to say:
To be clear, Menlow is not a device. It’s a collection of chips that make it possible for a manufacturer to build a device. This new platform contains Silverthorne processor, a sub-1-watt chip that is smaller than the size of a penny, yet still powerful enough to run Windows Vista. Not that it will in every case. Silverthorne will power next year’s UMPCs, based on Windows Vista. But Intel thinks that Menlow will also spawn a range of handheld, network-connected MIDs or mobile Internet devices.
JD picked up on this and actually got a quote from PCMag which talked about Al Ramadan coming on stage and talking about AIR on mobile devices. Mobile AIR is something we’re really excited about, but device requirements obviously play a huge part in both Flash Lite capability and eventually AIR on devices. I’m glad to see we’re working with partners like Intel to both drive increased capability as well as better experiences.
[tags]AIR, Mobile, Intel, Flash Lite[/tags]
TweetA couple of cool Flex items. First, Total Training is giving away 30 free days of Flex training. Considering how in demand Flex is, this would be a great way to jump in and get your feet wet. I love the Total Training stuff so this is an awesome opportunity.
Secondly we launched a brand-spanking new, Web 2.0 enabled Flex Showcase. You can vote on applications you like and browse by tags or popularity or any other feature. Mike Potter worked with Teknision to put this together and I think it looks great. So go vote for some sweet Seattle startups like Picnik.
[tags]Flex, TotalTraining, Picnik, Flex Showcase, Teknision[/tags]
TweetReally interesting post by Joel Spolksy about the history of software development and how that translates into the current very web-centric environment. Now in the era of computing he’s talking about I was more worried about playing ThinkQuick or writing crappy QBasic programs than writing real software, but I think he makes some really good points about the usefullness of software optimization and where it will get you in the end. PCs got faster so that it made sense to push the envelope instead of spend countless hours tweaking and tuning. As Joel notes, this is a lot like today with bandwidth being the restriction that people are concerned about.
But Joel spends a lot of time talking about JavaScript in the browser and the problems with it right now that will someday be solved by more bandwidth and some hardcore engineering. I read that and all I see are places that Flash shines. Flash is pushing the boundaries right now. Of both rich media and application development. Complex Flash applications are sometimes slow to load, but I tend to agree with Joel; that’s not going to matter. He takes some time to say that Sandboxes aren’t going to work but I agree with Tim Anderson here. Here’s Joel’s prediction:
What’s going to happen? The winners are going to do what worked at Bell Labs in 1978: build a programming language, like C, that’s portable and efficient. It should compile down to “native” code (native code being JavaScript and DOMs) with different backends for different target platforms, where the compiler writers obsess about performance so you don’t have to. It’ll have all the same performance as native JavaScript with full access to the DOM in a consistent fashion, and it’ll compile down to IE native and Firefox native portably and automatically. And, yes, it’ll go into your CSS and muck around with it in some frightening but provably-correct way so you never have to think about CSS incompatibilities ever again. Ever. Oh joyous day that will be.
We’ve got a lot of that right now with Flash/Flex. It gets even scarier the more of the article you read. He touches on user interface standards and application interoperability that comes when everyone is building on the same platform. He takes on a lot of the critques with Ajax and they are mostly critiques that I think Flash solves. Especially when you throw AIR into the mix. It’s a great read, I highly suggest you check it out and I’d love to hear your thoughts.
[tags]Flash, Ajax, Programming[/tags]
TweetHats off to Sam Robbins for digging around and finding out about “Thermo”. Digging around looking for clues in job postings is exactly the thing I liked to do, but it doesn’t work as well now that I’m on the inside. We’re going to talk a lot more about Thermo at MAX, but Mark Anders has some good information. He’s leading the project which should give you an idea of 1) how strategic it is and 2) how awesome it’s going to be.
So what is it? I’ve seen some guesses around but luckily no one has gotten it quite yet. But as someone who has been following the RIA space for a long time, I’m really excited about Thermo. The job description says it’s going to “enable designers and creatively inclined developers to easily build rich internet applications and interactive content” and that’s a pretty good description. Think of Adobe’s strengths and it’s weaknesses up to this point. “Thermo” is going to finally bring those together and enable the creation of RIAs in a way that only Adobe can pull off. You’re going to see some great looking apps thanks to Thermo.
Also, I just looked at the list of the Thermo team. These guys are awesome.
[tags]MAX, Thermo, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]
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TechCrunch40 pretty much took over the news today and there were a couple of applications that used Flex. The first was Bluestring by AOL (TC post). It allows you to mash up a bunch of rich media to create a tapestry of content that you can share with friends and family. It’s a pretty cool interface and they’ve taken away all of the stock Flex look so you can’t even really tell it’s Flex. I threw a bunch of random stuff together but it’s really meant to be a way to capture all of the rich media from something like a trip or event all in one place for easy shareability.
The second application I noticed was StoryBlender, which I believe is a Flash application but I can’t get in (and can’t understand why because it’s in Korean). There was also a really slick application called MusicShake which would have been a great Flash application but was instead built on something else and required Internet Explorer and a pretty significant download. CenterNetworks had some thoughts on both.
Adobe also had a pretty strong showing in the Crowd Sourcing section. DocStoc, the “YouTube of documents” (yes, I hate myself for repeating that) is using Flash to embed the documents on pages. The coolest use of Adobe technology however goes to Ponoko, the personal manufacturing service. You can actually have them make a toy from an Adobe Illustrator file. Cool stuff. More of the recap action over at CenterNetworks.
[tags]TechCrunch40, Bluestring, StoryBlender, MusicShake, Ponoko, DocStoc, Flex, Flash, Adobe[/tags]
TweetThe Register has a couple of quote from Scott Guthrie during an interview at MIX UK in which he discusses AIR and Flex:
I asked Guthrie, who runs the development teams that build the .NET Framework, if there are any plans to take Silverlight in that direction. “If you want to have the richest desktop experience it requires significantly more than what’s going to be in AIR,” he told me, claiming that there is “a lot of frustration with AIR”, and making the point that an AIR application will not look truly native to its host platform.
and
Guthrie says that the number of existing Microsoft developers gives Visual Studio and Silverlight an advantage over Adobe’s FlexBuilder and Flash. “Flex is probably a 20th the size of the ASP.NET developer base. So it’s still pretty small. I don’t mean to minimise it, but we’re going to have a really compelling offering with Silverlight that’s richer and we’ll have better tools and language support.”
Hmmmmm. I’m not sure where there is a lot of frustration with AIR. I’ll agree that if you want the “richest desktop experience” AIR isn’t what you’re looking for. AIR is about giving web developers the power to build desktop applications. Maybe the frustration with AIR is from current desktop developers, and it’s not for them. We’ve seen a lot of movement towards web technologies in the browser and I think AIR is an extension of that movement.
On the Flex side he’s right about the community size (I’m not sure of the exact numbers) and more language support, but I’m not sure that’s really a big differentiator. The better tools is debatable, but I hear a lot of great things about Visual Studio and it does seem to be the gold standard for IDEs, though Eclipse is popular and open source (even if Flex Builder isn’t). The richer thing I don’t buy at all. Flash is 10 years in and Flex is built on top of that. Silverlight doesn’t even have controls and the 1.1 release will only include some minor controls. When you think of the networking support in Flash and the new H.264 support, I’m not sure Flash can be beat on the richness.
Luckily Andrew Shorten got to chime in with his thoughts in the end.
“We’re very much talking to people who are building applications with HTML, AJAX, and Javascript, who are then linking those into PHP, Ruby, JSP and Java back ends, of which there’s a huge number, millions of developers across the world. Adobe’s view is not to tie you into a particular server language or particular stack of technology.”
[tags]Scott Guthrie, Flex, AIR, Silverlight[/tags]
TweetScott Barnes pinged me about a really cool rich internet application that is being used on Oakland Crimespotting. The app lets you look at crime data in the city of Oakland and filter out by date and type of crime. There are a few nice features which I think make it stand out.
The first is the way it displays (and lets you manipulate the date). It doesn’t use a calendar, but lays ot the days in chronological order and then graphs it according to the number of incidents. It’s an easy to then click on the most (or least) crime filled day and see the data. You can also move the slider to select multiple days. The other cool thing is that when you hover over a specific type of crime (either on the map or in the key) it will grey out the map except for those types of crime. It makes it easy to focus on a specific crime without removing other data.
Kind of a fun thing to play with on a Friday.
[tags]Oakland, Flash, RIA[/tags]
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