Monthly Archives: July 2008

1,000,000 downloads for eBay Desktop and Interview with Alan Lewis

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Big congratulations to the eBay Desktop team on hitting the 1,000,000 download mark. The eBay application was one of the very first applications we showed off and even though I admit to getting a little tired of seeing it demoed, it quickly gave people the gist of what we were talking about with this newfangled AIR runtime business.

Last month I was at the eBay developer conference and sat down with Alan Lewis, one of the drivers of eBay desktop to get his thoughts on RIAs, user experience, and everything else he’s up to.

Upcoming Presentations in Portland and San Jose

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After a couple of months at home coding, emailing, and getting my blog back on, I’m going out on the road again. I’ll be in Portland for OSCON next week and I’m also going to be presenting Online/Offline Synchronization with Adobe AIR and LiveCycle Data Services to PDXRIA on Thursday. I thought I was also going to be giving this talk tonight to the Austin Flex User Group but it turns out I was off by a day and I missed it. Sorry guys!

In August I’ll be heading down to 360Flex, the premiere Flex conference, to give the same talk (but probably more polished). The talk is primarily targeted at developers who want to take a look at how to start taking AIR applications offline and having a server do all the work. I’ve been coding demos and examples the past couple of weeks and it is really, really impressive how easy it is. I hope to see you at one of those conferences!

My “Thermo” Talk at MAX

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I’m giving a few talks in the next couple of months, but with all due respect to the 360Flex guys, the one I’m most excited about is my MAX talk – Next-Generation Flex Authoring: In Depth. I’m not a huge fan of the title (and it may change) but I’m going to be providing walkthroughs and demos of Thermo and Flex Builder Next. If you’re interested in how to use Flex Builder and Thermo to collaborate between designers and developers, you’ll want to catch the session.

And what’s even better is that it’s a Monday session. That leaves you the rest of the week to attend Serge and NJ’s session on Creative Design for Flex Applications. They’re doing a 90 minute lab/workshop deep dive so you’ll be able to jump in and start messing with Thermo. Between my session and that lab, you should be all set to Thermoize your life. MAX is going to be kick ass this year and I can guarantee you that between Flex and Thermo, MAX is going to be ground zero for really revolutionizing the designer-developer workflow. And we’ve got a few surprises with regards to the platform and workflow that I think are going to make people very happy.

Here’s to better looking, more engaging applications.

Flex Next! – FXG, New States, and More: the Gumbo Has Landed

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A few minutes ago we posted a new build of the Flex SDK which includes a lot of the stuff we’re doing for Flex Next. This is your first chance to jump in and start playing with Flex Next features. A couple of my favorites are FXG and the new states model.

Ely Greenfield has a good video on Adobe TV about the new designer/developer workflow in Flex 4. We’re making a ton of improvements around the designer/developer workflow. That includes FXG, it includes Thermo, and it includes making it easier to work with our current design tools.

Now that it’s live, I’m going to be trying to do a ton of content/tutorials/info about how to use these. Right now I’m working on an online/offline sync demo for my talk at 360|Flex, but if this stuff interests you and you haven’t registered for MAX yet, you should – *hint*.

Garmin Using Adobe AIR for the Tour de France

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I’ve been waiting and hoping for Garmin to do an Adobe AIR application (I’ve even tried lobbying our lighthouse program to reach out to them) and while this wasn’t exactly what I was expecting – it’s a start. Garmin has created a little custom-chrome, GPS-shaped widget that provides updates on the Tour de France. I’m not exactly sure what it does, but right now it just has some text on the main screen and a “wait until Wednesday” message. The icon shows a map, so my hope is that they’re integrating some mapping into the news feed. I’ll be checking back on Wednesday but it’s really cool to see Adobe AIR applications pop up from companies that I spend a lot of money with.

Anyone Going to the Enterprise UI Summit?

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While perusing around the internets I found out about the Enterprise UI Summit which is taking place August 7-8 in Aspen, Colorado. It sounds both pretty swanky and pretty valuable:

The Enterprise UI Summit is an exclusive, invitation-only event for the most innovative UI designers and big companies in the world. The event is a think tank meant to address “the UI for the Enterprise.” It will host top UI Designers as well as big companies like Apple, Nike, SAP, John Deere, EMC, and more. This small group will share trends, standards, problems and ideas on how to drive a wholly new level of employee engagement through positive UI experience.

I have no idea who Jive software is (but they’re located in Portland -cool-), but anyone talking about user experience in the enterprise gets props from me. Even more so since they’re flying people out to Aspen to talk about it. Anyone know of someone going to this? I’d love to hear how the conversations go.

Updated Flash Penetration Numbers: Flash 9 at 97% and update 3 at 82%

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According to Justin Everett-Church we have new penetration numbers as of yesterday. It’s great to see Flash Player 9 do so well, but most significant is the fact that Flash Player 9 update 3, which was released 6 months ago, is up to 82% penetration. Do you remember all the cool stuff that came in Flash Player 9 update 3?:

  • H.264 support
  • AAC support
  • Improved drawing performance
  • Full-screen hardware acceleration
  • Flex Framework caching

It’s a big list, and now 82% of people on the internet have access to all those features so you should feel relatively comfortable taking advantage of them.

The Two Most Interesting Geeky Blogs at Adobe

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I think I’ve talked about this before, but if you’re new to Adobe and you’re a geeks geek then there are two employee blogs that are must subscribes. Tinic Uro is a Sr. Computer Scientist on the Flash Player and has his hands in a ton of cool features. He’s also a great geek writer and provides some of the best information out there with regards to the Flash Player. Second, if you’re Linux-inclined, you should subscribe to Mike Melanson’s blog, Penguin.SWF. Not only does he provide status updates on Linux at Adobe, he monitors his comments very closely and will help track bugs for any Linux users having issues with the player.

Two great blogs from two really good engineers.

BitMaker – Desktop Interface for bit.ly using AIR

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Update 2: Just uploaded a new version that includes the ability to drag and drop a bit.ly URL and get a Pie chart with the source information. Done with the experiment. Took me ~3 hours to do the whole thing. It isn’t pretty, but I think it’s semi-useful for me and I learned a limitation of AIR (no drag and drop to the dock). This version also includes some bad AS3 parsing code and classes for handling bit.ly urls that any of the various AIR twitter clients are more than happy to take, use, and/or modify so we can replace TinyUrl.

Update: Of course, if you’re smart, you’ll just use the bookmarklet that they added to the front page. If I ever get around to incorporating the analytic data then the AIR app might be more useful than it is right now.

Marshall blogged about bit.ly, a new URL-shortening service (ala tinyurl.com) that not only provides smaller URLs but also has a tracking feature so you can see how many people have clicked on one of bit.ly URLs that you’ve put out there. Being able to track it is a nice feature and I wanted to see how quickly I could whip up an AIR app based on their APIs, so I’ve created BitMaker (you may have to do a right-click and save as). BitMaker lets you drag and drop URLs onto the app and it turns them into bit.lys for you.

A couple of notes. I found out that AIR can’t really do drag and drop to the system tray or dock icon, so the application isn’t as useful as I was hoping. I wanted to be able to let people leave it running and drag their urls down to it. Instead, it’s always on top but you can minimize it. Also, I know the close/minimize buttons suck. I need to learn how to make icons because I get tired of the Silk Icons but I’m not good enough to make my own.

This is version alpha-lame. bit.ly’s APIs actually include the ability to get the tracking information in XML or JSON so for the next version (if I get around to it) I’ll incorporate a way to see the tracking information for a URL. For instance if you drag a bit.ly URL instead of a regular URL it will show you the tracking screen. Maybe I’ll get around to it.

The project is up on my SVN repository and you can check out the source on Trac or the zip file here.

Help Contribute to Flex, Win Fabulous Prizes

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The Flex Team is looking to get the community involved in the Flex Framework. When we open sourced Flex we did so in part because we thought that the community would do the best job of helping to steward it. I think we’re still trying to find a balance of how to get the community involved in future features, but one of the ways you can help right now is by fixing some of the bugs that are out there. It’s a great way to pitch in, and if you’ve ever run into any of these bugs, you know how great it would be to have them fixed.

So we’ve tried to make the process really easy by creating a list of bugs that are ideal community fixes. And, as an added bonus we’ve thrown in some prizes for people that fix bugs. For every 3 bugs that we accept and commit, we’ll purchase an Adobe-related book from your Amazon wishlist. And the first two people who have 10 bugs committed, we’re going to pay for your MAX registration at any of the three locations.

So if you’re interested in digging into Flex and you want to get some free stuff in the process, this is a good way to start.