Monthly Archives: April 2008

Loading Files in External Applications with Adobe AIR

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I had a conversation with a customer the other day about ways to launch certain files with their “native” application. Like .doc files with Word, .wmv files with Windows Media, etc. Because there isn’t any Shell.exec() in AIR, you can’t just point a file at an external application and say go. I hadn’t tested the solution I brainstormed with the customer, but Jeffry Houser just blogged about it so I wanted to share.

Basically, you can use the browser and navigateToURL() to channel those calls through the browser. As Doug mentions, you’re pretty much at the mercy of the users browser configuration, so this isn’t a sure fire method, but in my experience, browsers generally behave when dealing with the most common filetypes, so this should work for very general cases. But it’s definitely a bit of a hack and should be treated accordingly.

Places to get your Thermo Fix Over the Next Few Weeks

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We’re starting to ramp up conversation about Thermo and that includes a lot more speaking slots and a lot more opportunities for you to give feedback. In the next few weeks we’ve got some conferences coming up where you’ll be able to hear more about Thermo:

I also made a video with NJ about the designer/developer workflow in Thermo. I’m hoping to get it on Adobe TV but for now it’s over at blip.tv. In the talk NJ discusses a bit about how we hope to make sure developers and designers will actually be able to collaborate instead of creating code that the developers just throw out.

The GAE SWF Project – Helping you Deploy Flash/Flex Apps on Google App Engine

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GAE SWF ProjectAral Balkan just released the GAE SWF project which is an open source project that helps Flash and Flex developers both deploy their applications to Google App Engine as well as provides a series of hooks so you can make the most of the GAE and do things like leverage Google Accounts and make Flash behave more like regular web apps so you can change the URL easy with SWFAddress and make Flash obey the font-size changes.

GAE SWF is a Python/ActionScrpt 3 hybrid framework that incorporates “some of the best open source components available today on the Flash Platform and Python ecosystem”. GAE is a very, very cool way to deploy applications and it’s awesome that Aral has taken an open source approach to helping Flash and Flex developers take advantage of it.

Thanks to Mike for the heads up.

One of the Big Values of AMP – Analytics, Analytics, Analytics

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A couple of weeks ago we launched the Adobe Media Player and to be totally honest, I’m still not how to describe it to a layperson. It’s a media player, it lets you subscribe to video content and then it will download new episodes for you so you can watch them offline if you want. I usually get a response like “so, it’s kind of like iTunes” at which point I realize getting into the guts of the media player is kind of a non-issue and I usually say “yeah, only you don’t buy anything, you just subscribe and watch.”

But Andy Plesser over at Beet.TV has a really good interview with Ashley Still about some of those guts that make AMP really interesting for me. First and foremost, it’s about being able to track video content at a very granular level. I think that’s one area where Adobe, with Flash, can really make some inroads. The way the Flash Player is set up, if you program things correctly, you can get a lot of data about what was watched, how long it was watched, and whether they clicked on any of the ads (if you show them). AMP lets you do some of that offline so you get constant tracking throughout the online/offline process.

Analytics around video is still very new, but it’s something that 1) studios are going to require as they put more content online, and 2) will help the entire ecosystem deliver more targeted, interesting ads so you not only get free content, but the ads are compelling and everyone wins. I think finding the “Google paid click” model for video is close and when we get there, I think the impact will be just as big for the web as Google’s model was.

Flash Player Timing in the Browser and Standalone (and in AIR)

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Chet Haase has a really, really good blog post up about framerates in the Flash Player. He was playing with the BubbleMark test that has become a de facto test for benchmarking RIAs and tried to figure out why he and James were getting some wacky results.

The gist is that the browser limits the framerates of the Flash Player. In standalone you get the expected framerates. And because AIR is essentially a standalone version of the Flash Player, you get more accurate framerates in AIR as well. As a result AIR applications might run a little differently, possibly better, than the same code in the browser.

via Dion’s tweets

Leg One of the on AIR Tour

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Update: Wow, this ended up being long. If you don’t want to read it all, you can click the name of the city below or even better, check out the photos and videos from the tour. Keep track of the tour on Facebook and check out my personal videos as well for an “after events” view of the tour.

Cities: Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Dublin.

Before I forget it all I wanted to do a recap of the tour. It was definitely one of the coolest developer-related things I’ve done and it will be tough to capture it all so I’ll focus on the highlights. We all had our own personal way of capturing the trip. Kevin actually did a highly in-depth technical blog post for every stop on the tour. Lee wrote up a great report. Mike did the best job of keeping track of the blog posts from the event. I had two favorite parts. On the personal side it was great to hang out with the European evangelists; Enrique, Serge, and Andrew. I still have no idea when Serge is joking, but I think that makes him even more hilarious. Professionally, I was really impressed with the amount and quality of AIR applications that I saw on the tour. People are doing very cool stuff with AIR.

Stop 1: Madrid
Madrid was a great event and I think it *might* have drawn the people from furthest away because we had a big contingent from Portugal there. In fact Joao Fernandes recorded all of the sessions at the event. Madrid was also special because Enrique gave the keynote in Spanish and it was our only foreign language keynote of the trip. I got to chat with a company that’s still in stealth mode from Portugal doing some very cool stuff that I’m excited to talk about. I didn’t have any speaking slots in Madrid so I didn’t get quite as many questions but I got to meet a fellow mountaineer and saw some great pictures of his from Morocco. Thanks Ricardo.

Stop 2: Paris
The best applications of the trip were in Paris. After a long, powerless train ride from Madrid we had one of the more fun events I thought. We were all worried about the language and making a bunch of French-speakers sit through an entire day in English but we had a great turnout and a great response. I got to meet the creator of mooFlair, a neat video-viewing application and also a multi-touch table that used AIR as the UI from Inituilab. We also got to see a presentation on the iLog Elixer components which was really good. There’s a ton of stuff you can do with those things. He showed a demo page that I can’t find the link to now, but there is some good stuff on the developer center. We also ended Paris with a blogger dinner in which we got to meet a lot of the French RIA bloggers. Very quality evening.

Stop 3: Amsterdam
In Amsterdam I got to take a look at an application codenamed Elvis by DutchSoftware. It’s targeted at the publishing field and allows them to keep track and manage all of their assets including text, photos, and multimedia assets. I think it’s an interesting application that might help bridge Adobe’s “old” customers to the new technology. The team is also great and they asked a lot of good questions which Ted was able to help out with.

Stop 4: Brussels
I think we were all kind of run down after the first week but the response we got in Brussels was great. Dion joined up with us, Serge, our native Belgian, gave the keynote, Nicolas from the Analytics application also joined up, I got to give Kevin’s second Ajax session about Flash and JavaScript integration. That’s one of my favorite parts of AIR so it was a fun session to give. I got a lot of questions about it afterwards so I think it’s a topic that resonates with people. I didn’t have anyone come show me an AIR application in Brussels but I did connect some people with the user group in town. It sounds like they lost their database and a few members weren’t getting emails.

Stop 5: London
In terms of applications, London was very cool because we got to chat with the guys from howard/baines about AlertThingy, their FriendFeed application built on top of AIR. They released it shortly after the tour and it was really interesting to talk to them about their experiences because they started from scratch and went in only knowing Ajax. We had a great keynote from Andrew and the largest turnout of any event. I also got a lot of more advanced questions in London. I didn’t see as many applications as I wanted to, but I think there are a number of things cooking. It’s an interesting community.

Stop 5.5: Dublin
Ted and I made one extra stop at the Scotch on AIR event in Dublin. We had to postpone the on AIR event in Dublin but about 30 people came from all over Ireland to hear about Flex, ColdFusion, and AIR. It was really cool to see the turnout and we had the event in the basement of a bar so it still had that on AIR feeling. If you’re in the UK and looking for a conference to cover those technologies, Scotch on the Rocks is shaping up to be great.

What Service is The Best for Uploading 30 second – 5 minute Clips of Video?

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I should know this considering I work for Adobe and talk/think about Flash all day, but as I get ready to upload a bunch of clips from my trip to Dublin this week, I realize I have no clue what the best service is from a high quality/shareable/information standpoint. I’ve been using Facebook because it instantly hooks into my social network and I can tag people I know, but I also want something I can share. I’m currently uploading a bunch of clips to Flickr video but I’m pretty sure that in some cases this week I’ll be going over their 90 second limit. We’re going hiking around MacGillycuddy’s Reeks this week and I’m stoked to get some action shots so I hope I’ll be able to capture more than 90 seconds.

I’m looking for high quality, and ideally I’d like to be able to geotag the videos as well as embed them on my blog. I assume the last one is pretty much must-have but Facebook doesn’t let you do it. Any tips?

Easy Photo Uploading with AIR and ImageDropR

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Easy Photo Uploading with AIR and ImageDropRRich Tretola has been working on ImageDropR, an AIR application that makes it easier to upload images to some of the photo services out there. I wrote about AIR as an easer way to upload bits to social media sites and as I’ve been uploading a ton of video lately, a tool like this would be great. He currently only supports Flickr but it should be pretty straight forward to add other sites.

For me, something like this is a godsend because I hate uploading to multiple spots. I use Flickr and Facebook for photos and YouTube and Facebook for videos. If I can have a tool (built on AIR) that lets me do those sites simultaneously then it would make my social media creation MUCH smoother. ImageDropR is a good start.

[tags]ImageDropR, Adobe AIR, File Uploading[/tags]

Wikipedia for data would be awesome for GPS/Mapping

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Bret Taylor has a post up that I found thanks to Techmeme about the need for a Wikipedia for data. I love this idea and Bret’s reasoning behind it:

If you want to experiment with a new driving directions algorithm, it is infinitely more difficult than coming up with an algorithm; you have to hire a lawyer and a sign a contract with a company that collects that data in the country you are developing for. If you want to write an open source TiVo competitor, you need television listings data for every cable provider in the country, but your options are tenuous at best.

So the commercial implications are big. I’d love to see Topographical data be as prevalent on the web as regular mapping data and a Wikipedia for data would be a huge help in that direction. But even non-commercial data would be great to have en masse. Trailguru kind of does this as they allow anyone to upload tracks and waypoints and then plot it on a map.

Any kind of data would be great but GPS data is what’s most interesting to me because it combines geolocation and time, the building blocks for everything. Once you attach your actions (taking a photo, twittering, etc) to that, you can create some really fantastic visualizations.

[tags]GPX, Mapping, Wiki Data[/tags]

Desktop Applications as the Power Behind Web Applications

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Josh Catone gives a bunch of reasons why we need web applications on the desktop. He absolutely gets it and I think he makes all of the right points. This isn’t a battle between the web and the desktop. The desktop is going to be a HUGE help for the web. It’s important to first to think about what the web *is*. Is the web a browser? Absolutely not. The web is a set of languages, protocols, and a community. That’s the core of the web, not just a single tool, and that’s why web applications on the desktop are a good thing – they push the evolution of the web forward.

Josh make all of the major points; the benefits of storing your data in the cloud and on your hard drive, the ability to multitask and providing more functionality. It’s also very subtle. The desktop was meant, from the very beginning, to run applications. Every usability feature on the desktop is geared at that. The browser just wasn’t made to run or deploy a lot of applications. There are some great features like zero install, instant update and cross-platform, but why do we have to limit those to the browser? Why not take the creativity, the easy development, and the vision of the web and web standards and put some of that back on the desktop in an environment more suited to applications? That’s what web apps and RIAs on the desktop do.

In the end, I have no doubt the two worlds are going to blur, but I think if you step back and think objectively it will be much easier for the core ideas of the web to transfer to the desktop than it will be to shoehorn all of our computing into the browser. Embrace RIAs on the desktop, expand the web.