I just heard that a video interview I did at MAX with Builder.au. I think this is my first press interview as an Adobe employee and it was a lot of fun. We talk about AIR, AMP, Thermo, Ajax and a bunch of other things. I think I was able to get across a lot of why I’m excited about Adobe in this interview.

[tags]Adobe, Builder.AU, AIR, AMP, Thermo[/tags]

I saw this post this morning and thought it was worth sharing. I’m not familiar with the InfoSys blogs and it doesn’t seem like they get a lot of comments but I liked that this article talked a bit about RIAs in the enterprise (and the blocks there) as well as the reasons why it’s been successful in the consumer space.

Just got settled into my hotel in Tokyo and I’m about to go grab some food to eat before sitting down to some hard core email and feeds. I’m here for MAX Tokyo which should be a ton of fun and it’s also my first trip to Tokyo so I’m looking forward to that part of it as well. Unfortunately I’d been on the ground all of about 30 minutes before I made two dumb mistakes. First I screwed up the Yen->Dollar conversion and tried to withdraw $4,000 from my checking account. Luckily my bank thought that was a little funny and didn’t let the transaction go through. Secondly, I’m pretty sure I got ripped off getting to my hotel. I went with a driver who asked me if I was looking for a Taxi to Tokyo (always a bad idea to go with people asking you) and the fare was WAY more than I think it should have been. All in all it’s been good though. If you’re going to MAX, ping me and let me know!

[tags]Max, Tokyo[/tags]

Check this out. Google has something called SearchMash which as far as I can tell is just a way for them to mess around with different interfaces/options for their search technology. So this isn’t going to the home page or anything, but today they rolled out a Flash-based version.

Google using Flash isn’t groundbreaking because they use it in places like Google Finance and a web based version of Google Talk. But SearchMash is done in Flex! If you would have told me yesterday that Google would roll out Flex anything I would have laughed at your face. Are they playing with Flex? I wonder if the open source announcement had anything to do with them starting to dabble. We’re not going to see Flex on the home page any time soon but maybe they’re looking at rolling out some Flex-based Google apps or maybe they’re looking at buying a company currently using Flex.

Also, as Mike Potter notes, they’re doing some cool stuff with Google Maps and Flash/Flex. They’re also using some deep linking features and have some accessibility stuff built in. Very, very interesting.

Speculation on!

[tags]Google, Flex, Flash, SearchMash[/tags]

As I’m going through my feeds I always see pretty interesting posts from Channel 9, Microsoft’s Forum-based community for a lot of their developer stuff. I’m always impressed by the number of active users and the breadth of what they talk about. Sometimes it’s us (Adobe), sometimes it’s technical support for Silverlight and sometimes it’s talk about the latest developer stuff from Microsoft.

We have forums but the Adobe/Macromedia community has always been centered around blogs and mailing lists more than forums.  I don’t spend much time on Adobe’s forums though I try to check every once and a while to provide tech support. So I wanted to throw a question out to all of you. Do you use the forums we have? Do you like forums or do the various blogs and mailing lists fit your needs?

I feel like forums foster a better community but it doesn’t seem to have taken root in our current forums, so I’d like to hear your thoughts.

[tags]Channel 9, Forums, Adobe[/tags]

There’s a post over on Duane’s blog that talks about how rich Internet applications fit into the world of Web 2.0. Put aside your Web 2.0 hype-o-meter for a second. I’d never actually stopped to think about it but I really like the idea of RIAs as a specific design pattern of Web 2.0. Some people claim that RIAs are the next generation of Web 2.0 (what comes after 2.0? ) but I’ve always believed in what’s going on with the web right now. I’m not looking to get way, just help speed it along. RIAs do exactly that.

RIAs raise the bar of software but at the end of the day they are simply a means to an end and not the end themselves. RIAs are (and I think have always been) about enabling the web and creating better, more usable, more interactive software. That idea spans the browser, the desktop and mobile devices. As Duane notes, when you think about it that way, it’s easy to fit RIAs with other Web 2.0 Design Patters like Service Oriented Architecture and Software as a Service.

I’m excited about Duane and the Governor’s book. They talked about the book here (but don’t tell them, I haven’t watched yet). Right now I’m listening to .NET Rocks but it’s next on my list this afternoon.

[tags]Rich Internet Applications, Web 2.0, Design Patterns[/tags]

There’s a bit of a dust up over on Techmeme about Google reducing the PageRank of some popular sites (like Engadget and TUWA). I don’t even pretend to understand the black voodo magic that is search engine optimization, but I do know that I show up high on quite a few (often random) Google searches and I think that’s due in large part to my PageRank, which is an 8. (You can check yours here)

Supposedly this new downgrade is due to paid links, something most people in the Adobe community won’t have to worry about. But since this is coming up, I wanted to see what some of you guys’ PageRanks are. I’ve always thought that having MXNA (which is a PageRank of 10) constantly linking to us made a difference. But MXNA actually hides the link behind identifiers so I’m not sure that makes any difference at all. In that case maybe it’s just weblogs.macromedia.com or blogs.adobe.com (both PageRank 10) that make a difference. So those of you blogging about Adobe stuff, what’s your page rank?

[tags]Blogging, PageRank[/tags]