Monthly Archives: July 2008

Adobe Flash Player 10 on Linux: “One Heck of a Beta”

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One of the things I like about Adobe is that we’ve gotten better about our Linux releases as we’ve gotten more open. For those that don’t know, we’ve got a beta 2 release of Flash Player 10 which includes Linux. Practical Tech has a post up about the latest version of Flash Player 10 for Linux and is generally really happy with it. There are still some issues to work through of course, but as a company, we’re very committed to Linux for our runtimes and even our developer tools. It’s great to see people notice.

Announcing the Flex SEO Contest

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Peter Elst has a really good post up (with some concerns) about SWF Indexing in some of his Flash files. And it’s clear that a lot is changing and we’re not sure what’s going to be exposed or how it’s going to be exposed.

Flex SEO Contest
But what I’m most worried about is how we can expose valuable data from Flex (and Flash) to search engines in a way that makes the user experience better. So I’m starting a contest in the hopes that the community can learn the best way to expose data from a Flex application to search engines.

Rules
I’ve come up with a phrase: “Fleximagically Searchable” which currently has absolutely no results on Google. In two months, whichever Flex application is number one in the search results wins. Here are the rules:

  • It has to be a Flex application
  • “Fleximagically Searchable” must be dynamically loaded. It can’t be static text inside of your application. – But I don’t care how you load it, in fact that might make a difference in how Google ranks you.
  • The first link must be deep linked directly into where you load “Fleximagically Searchable” into your application. Feel free to use any deep linking methods out there.
  • Nothing in your code can dynamically load the phrase automatically. It has to be the result of a user interaction.
  • You must provide source code and be willing to talk about exactly what you did.
  • Multiple entries are allowed if you want to try different things.

Prizes
The winner will get a copy of CS3 Master Collection (or CS4 if they want to wait) and a copy of Flex Builder 3. Second place gets a copy of Flex Builder 3.

I’m working on getting more prizes. Maybe a MAX pass or other Adobe goodies. If any companies want to contribute prizes or cash or anything to give away, send me an email.

Disclaimer
The rules may change as the contest goes on. The goal is to let the community know the best way to expose content to Google for SEO purposes and to actually have that content deep linked. I think the rules I’ve got cover that but I don’t want someone winning through a loophole. I’ll be checking, posting updates, and letting people know how it’s going over the two months. If you have any questions, feel free to email me. I encourage you to try a bunch of different methods for embedding, for deep linking, and loading data. That’s part of the fun of the contest is seeing what works best.

Also, if anyone wants to do a logo for the contest, that would be awesome.

Great Opportunity to Get Flex/AIR Training from the Best

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Two of the best guys out there when it comes to teaching are going to be providing a cheap Flex and AIR Training Session July 19th and 20th. Mike Kollen and Chuck Freedman are the instructors and the training will be in Silicon Valley so if you’re a startup doing Flex work or a consultant who is looking at getting into the RIA business, this is a great way to do it.

You can head on over to their website, For Those About to Code, and register for the session. The cost is $675 which is a very, very good price for a couple of days of this kind of training. They’ve also got a few other courses tentatively scheduled including advanced Flex, Flash and AIR, and Flex UI/Skinning.

CS3 and Web 2.0 Icon Generator on Adobe AIR

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I came across this cool little application built on AIR that lets you generate a CS3 or Web 2.0 style icon. They seem to have gotten the fonts correct so you can pick your color, type in a couple of characters, and have your very own icon. And of course when you save it the application uses the file APIs to write 4 different sizes of the icon for you. Perfect for an application.xml file.

PassPack Desktop Client Built on AIR

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PassPack is a service that lets you store a bunch of passwords for safe keeping so that you don’t have to remember them – something that can be pretty handy in this web 2.0 world. There’s a good writeup on WebWare that explains how they keep everything encrypted on the server so that you’ll be safe even if someone breaks into PassPack’s servers. For a while they were using Gears as a way to store those passwords on the client but they’ve just recently switched over to using Adobe AIR.

It’s a great example of the encrypted local store and there’s a good review on Profy. I’m sorry we don’t have the encrypted local store working on Linux yet. Hopefully soon.

FlashLite Ported to the iPhone? Sort of.

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David from AgencyNet sent me this link this morning which describes FlashLite being ported to the iPhone. It actually sits on top of something called EyeGT technology. It seems too good to be true (and it sort of is). Our community picked it up yesterday including Scott Janousek who notes “These products merely take the original Flash application and coverts it to run on the iPhone platform using the b.Tween framework.”

It looks like Peter Elst had the first info and Thomas Joos did the porting.

Video demo is below.

Adobe Reader 9 Now Shipping With AIR Bundled

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Adobe Reader 9 is now available for download. There’s a lot of new stuff in Reader 9 including native Flash support and faster load up time. But the biggest deal for AIR developers is that we’ve bundled the AIR runtime with Reader so anyone who downloads reader will also have a copy of AIR on their machines. That’s because Reader now comes with the Acrobat.com application that lets users hook into a bunch of Adobe’s services.

I believe it’s shipping with version 1.0 and not 1.1 but we’ll be doing the auto-update for the 1.1 installs in a few weeks (for Reader users). I’ve been playing with the beta of Reader 9 and I’m fairly impressed with the improvements. The Flash stuff is great and the load times are genuinely faster.