Nitobi is running a Web Design and Development Survey and they’re giving away an iPod Nano to one lucky email address. The survey is pretty general stuff about technologies and tools that you’re using. I think they’re trying to get a pretty wide array of responses and I wanted to help them out. Plus, they told me they’d share the results with me so I’m hoping to get a good snapshot of what people are doing.
[tags]Survey, Web Development[/tags]
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A lot of people saw this application last year but it’s always worth a mention and the 2008 version has been updated some. If you’re looking for a great showcase of a lot of Adobe’s technologies including Flex, LiveCycle Data Services, Flash Media Server, and Flash Video, this is it. The Tour Tracker combines all of those elements to give you a very in-depth view of the Amgen Tour so you can track the race and see live video from the racers.
Why couldn’t we do this for an Everest expedition? How great would that be? Live video might be tough but I’m sure we could wire up some GPS technology so you could track the climbers on the move to the top. We could incorporate the expedition updates and do a live feed from different parts of the trip. Maybe a live feed from a couple of the base camps? I wonder who I need to talk to to try and make that happen. I’ll even take the fall and go on the trip as Adobe’s representative.
[tags]Adobe Tour Tracker, Flex, Flash Media Server, Amgen Tour[/tags]
TweetI’ve been a fan of CrunchBase for a long time because it has such valuable information on startups but I noticed recently that they have started including both people and larger companies in CrunchBase and the entry on Adobe has a partial list of our investments as well as some other information.
It looks like it’s Wiki-based, so take some of the un-sourced information with a grain of salt, but if you’re looking for past info on companies Adobe has invested in or other startup-related info on Adobe, this looks like it could turn into a very good resource.
TweetWith AIR dropping soon and for those of you who want to get up to speed on AIR you’re going to have a chance in March and April. Greg Hamer is going to be teaming up with Shawn Pucknell of FiTC fame to put on a couple of two day courses in AIR. The first is March 11th and 12th in Toronto and the second will be April 26th and 27th in Las Vegas. If you’ve been tracking AIR but waiting until release to really dig in, these could be great opportunities to hit the ground running.
Apologies for the random ads in the feeds. Don’t click them, I’m working on getting them removed but my WordPress seems to have been hax0red and I haven’t found the code yet.
[tags]Adobe AIR, Training[/tags]
No, I’m not starting advertising in my feed, and thanks to those of you who gave me the heads up. I was having issues with deleting posts and people were getting errors whenever they posted comments so I had HostMySite, my provider take a look at it. I think they fixed the issue. But for some reason I’m getting ads at the bottom of my feed. It’s not even for anything good, just some mortgage stuff.
So I’m going through my blog to see if I can figure out what the hell is going on. They embedded it right in my blog posts (you can see by viewing source) so I’
m not sure what happened. If you have any ideas, let me know.
This is one of the reasons I like Tech Crunch; Mike’s personality gets to show through. In this case he’s defending Silicon Valley in a discussion about whether or not Seattle is as good as Silicon Valley. Mike’s arguments can be summed up in the old Ebb song: “If I can make it there, I’ll make it anywhere” And sure, Silicon Valley has the most potent collection of ideas among anyone in the world. In the Valley you can live, eat, breath and sleep the web world. So if you want to change the world, Silicon Valley is a great place to do it. But you can still do it in Seattle and in some ways I think you have to work harder because you won’t be as surrounded by the startup world as you would be in Silicon Valley.
We’ve got some great things here in Seattle to help startups succeed. There are distractions, sure. Skiing, hiking, sailing, etc, but the tech community in Seattle is supportive and active. We’ve got events like Ignite that help bring together the tech community and the competitive spirit is more likely to get people to help you than try to sabotage you. The kind of people you’ll work with here in Seattle will help make sure that your company is well rounded and has some perspective. All of the good things about Seattle including the outdoor culture and the Pacific Northwest culture will be embedded into your company. I think those things are great for a company in the long run. Look what Amazon has done with S3. We also benefit from a larger tech community that includes Boeing, a ship building industry and companies like Cascade Designs who push technology in the outdoors. Being able to pull ideas from all of those sources is a huge benefit for startups or any company.
The Valley is great and Mike’s right, if you’re a couple of kids in the Valley you can do great things. But Seattle isn’t all that different and I think the end result will be more fulfilling and more interesting in the end. And Scoble, it’s the other way around. We’re 2 hours from the Valley. 
[tags]Seattle, Startups, Silicon Valley[/tags]
TweetHuge congrats to Loic Le Meur and the Seesmic team because they’ve raised $6 million dollars to help keep the momentum going. I’m a big fan of Seesmic and while I haven’t been on the service a ton because of the fact that my Mac Laptop sucks, I really like what’s going on. Sometimes video isn’t the best way to consume information, but it’s great to put a face to people and a lot more personality can show through with video, so I like the model and I like where they’re going.
They’re also big users of our technology which is great. They’ve built the entire application in Flex and I believe they’re using FMS as well. In addition to that I think they’ve done a really great job of engaging our community. Critter has been talking to them a lot and doing some work with AIR. He’s even been strutting his stuff around their offices.
[tags]Seesmic, Flex[/tags]
TweetI was looking at Aviary’s recent creation and found myself amazed yet again at how much functionality is in Phoenix, their image editor. You can do some really fantastic production level stuff in there. And it’s all made possible with Flash (and some really amazing engineering) so it’s cross platform. Runs exactly the same on Mac, Windows, and most importantly, Linux. Is there any reason not to use Aviary over GIMP? Especially when Aviary turns some of their tools into AIR applications? Does this tool blow away every design tool made for Linux?
Think of the broader ramifications for that. Aviary is focused on the community. So this set of tools will bring together the design community on Windows, Mac, and Linux in one set of tools which could be browser-based or desktop-based. In a lot of ways I see this as the perfect RIA. It’s cross platform, it can be deployed a number of different ways, and it provides a superior user experience. I think it’s a bummer that we don’t have our CS tools on Linux but it comes down to demand. With Flex/AIR/Flash you don’t have to worry about demand trade-offs. You’re creating something that everyone can use and when it’s an application suite like Aviary, that’s a big deal.
I’ve gotten the Linux people annoyed with me, so that’s not what this is. But I think that there is a great opportunity for Adobe and the Linux community to work together through our RIA platform. No, it’s not open source, but it does open up a lot of possibilities and the technology is powerful enough to enable tools like Aviary. This is a really great first step and if anyone thinking about application development on Linux and how it can work with AIR/Flex, I’d love to talk to you. Drop me an email. I think AIR is about making development better everywhere but I really hope we can work with the Linux community while we’re doing it because it’s a great market.
[tags]Linux, AIR, Flex, Flash, Aviary, Gimp[/tags]
TweetThere are a ton of blog posts about the “news” that Flash on the iPhone is coming soon. I’ve been getting a lot of Twitters and emails about whether or not I can confirm or deny and I wasn’t going to post anything but I do want to give my thoughts as an Evangelist and since JD provided some insight, I want to as well.
I have no idea if the rumor is true or not. I’ve met Andru through some of his work with MindCamp here in Seattle and I know they broke the 1.1.3 Jailbreak story so he has some cred in the tech community. But the fact that this news has 1880 digs at the time of this writing shows that there is a TON of interest in Flash on the iPhone. I’m not sure anything with Flash has had that many diggs on Digg before, so it’s really cool.
But this isn’t Adobe’s device. I assume someone at the high levels of Adobe knows what the status is but I don’t and everyone I talk to doesn’t. That’s because only Apple really knows anything about it. If you want Flash on the iPhone I’d keep bugging Apple. I’m really stoked about what’s going to come with the iPhone SDK and believe me, I want Flash on it just as much if not more than most of you. But no one aside from Steve Jobs has any idea if/when it’s coming.
[tags]Flash, iPhone, Rumors[/tags]
TweetSorry for the off topic. My Mac is getting ready to die so I have an appointment at the Genius Bar tomorrow. I’m pretty sure the “Geniuses” are just going to tell me that they need to take my laptop away and send it to the mothership for the proverbial anal probe. So I’ll be without my primary development machine for the first time. I was thinking I wanted to have a bit more flexibility in my development and figure that a SVN server is the way to go. Does anyone have suggestions for SVN Hosting? Research seems to indicate CVSDude and Wush are the best options. Anyone tried either of those?
[tags]SVN Hosting[/tags]
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