Monthly Archives: February 2008

Engage 2008 – Enhancing the Conversation Around Rich Internet Applications

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Engage 2008Tomorrow we’re holding Engage 2008 here in San Francisco and after helping do some setup today and being involved in the planning I’m really excited about it. We started doing Engage last year and I attended as a community member (even blogged the initial Apollo thoughts on TechCrunch). We had a great group of attendees and the conversation around what Adobe was doing and where technology was going helped shaped many of the decisions in AIR and Flex. One of the things I liked most about the event was that we had a fantastic list of speakers and I got to see some of the more impressive rich Internet applications out there. We got to hear from big companies as well as startups and there was a lot of commentary about what Adobe is/was doing.

It’s very fitting that a year later we’ll all be sitting down again with those ideas and discussions incorporated into an “Apollo” that has become Adobe AIR. The landscape has been enhanced and the tools behind the technologies have gotten a lot better. Adobe’s RIA platform is still very much about helping designers and developers create great experiences. We’ve expanded our footprint beyond the web into the desktop world but have tried to keep what makes the web so elegantly complex front and center. Engage is about bringing together a lot of disparate voices in technology and letting them mix and mingle around Adobe’s customers, Rich Internet Applications, and the web. I’ll be blogging from the event tomorrow and I assume a lot of other people will as well.

[tags]Engage2008, Adobe, Flex, Flash, AIR[/tags]

Google Docs == Fail but Google Docs + Adobe AIR == Win

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Google Docs on AIRThere’s a very good comment over on ReadWriteWeb by Karim on why Google Docs is nowhere close to Microsoft Office and how Google Docs is “Chock full of Fail.” He’s absolutely right and he goes on to list a number of things you can’t do in Google Docs. And you know what? No amount of Ajax is going to help some of those things (like pasting an image) because the the browser, you don’t have access to that kind of stuff.

But Adobe AIR? Yup, you do. The Buzzword version of AIR that we’ve been playing with internally can do it. The browser is really great for a lot of things, but it’s also limiting for a lot of things, and not just offline access. Of course people like Scoble are moving more and more online. It’s just easier on so many levels. But what if you do want that advanced functionality that Karim mentions? Why not use the best of both worlds? Use Google Docs online inside of your browser and when you have to sit down and do complicated tasks, open up the Adobe AIR version of Google Docs which saves to both your hard drive and the cloud. You can still open that same document up in the browser, but by going outside of it you can get around what the browser doesn’t support.

From Google’s standpoint? This should be a no brainer. Same codebase runs on Mac, Windows and soon Linux. It’s using nothing but HTML/JavaScript and so all of the code that they use to power the browser version of Google Docs translates perfectly. You just have to add extra code for the AIR version.

If you want to “beat” Microsoft and desktop applications with online apps, you need a platform that provides more functionality but stays true to the web. That’s AIR and the sooner people realize that, the sooner we’ll have some kick ass applications out there.

[tags]Google, Docs, Adobe, AIR, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

How Flash Works on Facebook

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Facebook PlatformThere’s a bit of “news” today that Facebook is allowing Flash content on pages and profiles. As a lot of the comments have noted, Facebook has been allowing Flash for a long time but there seems to be some confusion about 1) how this works and 2) who will be affected by it.

If you take a look at the FBML spec and specifically the SWF tag you’ll see that Facebook doesn’t allow you to insert Flash content right on the page. Instead you do it using FBML and then Facebook creates an image of the content then requires the user to click on the image before it displays/plays the SWF content. As a result, it’s not like MySpace and the “autoplay” feature isn’t supported. I’ve had emails back and forth with Facebook folks about how we could make that user experience better, so if you have any ideas, let me know. The idea (in my mind) is to remove the click activation but to make sure that we don’t have an onslaught of noise/video when we load a page.

[tags]Flash, Facebook[/tags]

Online Tools – Collaboration is the Key

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There is a very good post over at Read/WriteWeb on Why Google Apps is a Serious Threat to Microsoft Office and one of the big answers is collaboration. I actually think this extends to a majority of the online software on the web. If the browser world is really going to replace the desktop world, the main driver has to be collaboration. And I think that’s part of the value of Rich Internet Applications as well as something Adobe can do better than anyone else.

Adobe has a very long, good history of enabling collaboration from both the Macromedia side of the house and the Adobe side. Adobe did good things with PDF and collaborating around documents and Macromedia has been pushing the envelope with things like Connect (formerly Breeze) and Brio. This year we’ve gotten even better. Buzzword is a spectacular example of how collaboration should work when working on a document. We’ve also got Share, which lets you share files and CoCoMo which will actually let you use our collaboration components (chat, whiteboard, etc) inside of any RIA that you create. As we get Flash and Ajax working together more closely, you could even use these components in an Ajax application down the road (in theory).

Collaboration and rich media go together like Gin and Tonic. Because Adobe’s RIA platform has such a big foundation in rich media, it’s easy to add very powerful, interactive collaboration to applications built on top of it. Adobe has its own applications leveraging that collaborative platform but we want to enable our developers to do the same. With a great set of collaboration services I think we can take advantage of what makes the web great and in the process help teams work together much more easily. It’s a fun story and it’s actually starting to play out.

[tags]Adobe, CoCoMo, Brio, Connect, Buzzword, Collaboration, PDF, Google Docs[/tags]

Does Experience Really Matter?

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I spend a ton of time talking about how important experience is and why it will make you smarter, stronger, and better in bed. Then I spend time on sites like MySpace and I wonder “Damn! Does it even matter?!?!” MySpace is a train wreck from a user experience usability standpoint. My latest annoyance is when you type in your password incorrectly you get this very helpful error message: “You Must Be Logged-In to do That!” Awesome. The pages are a disaster, the site is constantly erroring out and it uses almost no Ajax to speak of so the MySpace experience is: click…wait..white screen…terrible music/background/fonts…click..wait…white screen…even worse music/background/fonts…rinse…lather…repeat.

And despite all of this MySpace is still gigantic. According to compete MySpace’s traffic still dwarfs Facebook’s, which most people would agree has a better user experience. So what the hell is going on? Does UX not matter?

Part of the problem is that MySpace was first so it could be a crappy experience and no one cared. But they also made a very interesting use of rich media. Friendster (the real “first”) blew it and MySpace stepped in by giving people full control over what their pages looked like. That included customizing everything and adding all kinds of video and music no matter how annoying. People controlled their own experience and even if it was bad, it was still theirs, which is something to keep in mind.

Of course the experience matters. If it didn’t people wouldn’t buy fancy cars or overpay for Apple stuff. By nailing the experience you can set yourself apart from competitors and instantly build a brand. But there’s something to be said for letting your users control their own experience. As you build your own RIAs I think that’s something to consider. If you can give your users the tools to customize their experience in a way that keeps it usable, you’ll have hit on something very valuable.

[tags]Experience, MySpace[/tags]

$100k+ Flex Jobs

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While watching the Lakers/Suns game I saw the add for The Ladder, the job site that deals in only “100k+ jobs” and thought I’d see what the results for Flex look like. The average salary for Flex jobs according to Indeed was about $77k but I get the feeling that a lot of people (especially those who follow the blogosphere) are making more and the The Ladder sites seem to bear that out. In my search of Flex jobs I got 47 jobs with everything from an Advanced Flex 2 ActionScript 3 developer in San Mateo, CA at $100k to a Sr. Front End Engineer in San Mateo for between $120k – $130k.

I’m not a huge fan of The Ladder (good thing I’m not looking for a job) because the interface was kind of unintuitive and it’s very geared towards the pay membership (you don’t get much at all for the basic membership). But if you’re looking for a Flex job, this might be one place to try.

[tags]Flex, Jobs, The Ladder[/tags]

Finally The On AIR Tour has come BACK…….To Europe

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AIR Tour EuropeAnyone get the WWE reference? No? Well we finally announced the dates and cities for the On AIR Tour in Europe. I’m really, really exited about the tour both becuase I’ve never been to a lot of those places in Europe and I think the European RIA community is going to help us really rock these stops. We’re going to try to make this a really engaging set of events even if you’re not in Europe, so if you want to jump in, you’re more than welcome. We’ve got a Facebook Page all set up and we’ll be blogging, posting random video snippits, taking a ton of pictures and posting all of the inside jokes.

So check out the Facebook page, and then head over to one (or more) of the cities closest to you and register. We’ll see you in April!

[tags]onair2008, adobe, air, europe[/tags]

Help Us Test AIR On Linux

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AIR on LinuxWe’re looking for a few good developers who have a lot of Linux experience to help us beta test AIR. James Ward has most of the details but if you’re currently doing Flex/Flash development on Linux and you want to help us test the AIR Linux (so we can get it out faster!) there are a series of questions you’ll need to answer and send the responses to helptesterairlinux@adobe.com. Here are the questions:

  1. Are you comfortable working with prerelease software that is not yet feature complete?
  2. Will you be able to submit bug reports on issues that you find back to our development team?
  3. How many hours a week can you spend testing on Linux?
  4. What is the primary distribution of Linux that you’re using? If you are using more than one distribution, please list.
  5. Will you be developing applications on your Linux machine (as opposed to writing on Windows and testing the applications on Linux)?
  6. What other operating system are you using, if any (Mac, Windows)? Can you compare the behavior of AIR for Linux with AIR for Windows and AIR for Mac OS?
  7. Are you working on an AIR application today? If so, please describe.
  8. Are you primarily a Flash, Flex or JavaScript developer?
  9. What is your name, company name and email address?

We’re going to be keeping the group fairly small to start with, so don’t get discouraged if for some reason you don’t get picked this round. We really appreciate the feedback and as we open it up, you’ll have a chance to help us nail the Linux version of AIR

[tags]AIR, Linux, Adobe, Test[/tags]

Adobe AIR on MIT’s Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008

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Very cool recognition in MIT’s Technology Review. Adobe AIR is listed as one of the Top 10 Emerging Technologies for 2008. It’s pretty cool to see Adobe AIR next to ideas like Wireless Power (yes please!), Connectomics and Reality Mining.

The more I think about AIR the more excited I get. I think there’s a huge place in the world for occasionally connected web applications that have more functionality than regular web applications. I also think AIR is a huge step in the right direction for all kinds of software. I look at things like the development environments, the update/install experience and the fact that it runs cross platform and I really think people will latch onto it as a way to create and deploy applications. We’re working with the best of what the web has to offer and bringing that to the desktop.

[tags]Adobe AIR, MIT, Technology Review[/tags]