Monthly Archives: November 2008

Getting Stoked for MAX Milan and Liveblogging

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I’ve been on vacation the past week but I’m sitting in the Cancun airport waiting for my flight to Milan (through 2 other cities) and getting excited about MAX Milan. I’m going to be doing the Flash Catalyst keynote with one of the Catalyst engineers, Ty Voliter, and I’ve got a surprise for Flash Catalyst fans (you’ll have to come find me). We’ll also be giving out brand spanking new DVDs with Flash Catalyst and “Gumbo” for anyone that wants them, so it should be a good event. After the success of the MAX North America liveblog, a few of our other European evangelists are going to be covering the keynotes in Europe. Serge and Andrew will, of course, be occupied because they’re the keynote rockstars in Milan.

I’m getting in Saturday afternoon, so if you’re there and want to meet up for some jet-lagged drinks or dinner, drop me an email or give me a ring (+12672509422).

The Flex Builder “Identity Crisis” and the Flash Platform

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Lee Brimelow left a comment over on Keith Peter’s blog about Flex Builder. That spawned a pretty well read post over on calm in the chaos (great name). As someone that has been doing Flex development since the 1.5 days, here’s what I’ll tell you.

One, Flex is a great brand. I love the Flex brand. It’s not going away and in fact we want the community to embrace that brand. Things like the Flex Show and 360 Flex should show that we really support the community using the Flex brand. But anyone that has done Flex development over the past 5 years knows that there’s been some confusion over the kinds of apps that you’re building. Flex apps? Flash apps? They use the Flex Framework but they still run on the Flash Player. Even though you may not have used Flash Professional to build them.

So here’s the deal. The Flash Platform is going to be all encompassing. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Flex exclusively or Flash Professional exclusively – we’re all building Flash applications. Everything we create ultimately compiles down to the SWF format. That’s the Flash Platform. And Adobe has a ton of tools that target the Flash platform. We’ve got Flash Professional, we’ve got Flash Catalyst, we’ve got Flex Builder, we’ve got ancillary projects like Alchemy. Imagine all of those tools working seamlessly together. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had one single brand of tools to use to target the platform? Wouldn’t that help clear up some of the confusion in the community? And the think about the strength of that brand for developers as we move into the mobile space. Ultimately I think this helps bring together everyone that’s building anything on the Flash Platform.

Roundup of the Flash Catalyst News

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I was lucky enough to be a part of the MAX Day 2 keynote where we showed off Flash Catalyst so I’ve been surfing around collecting the feedback. Here’s the good stuff I’ve found so far.

Thanks to everyone who’s posting info about Flash Catalyst. I’m hoping to do some screencast and tutorials in the next couple of weeks so that those of you who are playing with the MAX build can get started quickly.

Serge and Andrew are Live Blogging the Day 2 Keynote at MAX

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Serge and Andrew are going to be doing Day 2 Keynote Liveblog that should be a lot of fun. You can comment on everything they write so it’s a great way to share in the keynote festivities whether you’re sitting in the audience or couldn’t make it. This is probably going to be my favorite MAX keynote ever. You’ll see why.

CoCoMo – Collaboration for Every Developer

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Along with the Flash Platform news, we’ve released CoCoMo, one of the coolest products at Adobe. CoCoMo is basically a framework that lets you add collaboration to any Flex application out there. It comes with a few basic components like video chat, text chat, and whiteboards, but it also includes hooks so that you can build your own real-time collaborative application.

Real-time collaboration on the web is something that I think has just barely hit it’s stride. CoCoMo uses the Flash Platform, AMF, and our various server products to enable any developer with the power to create a collaborative application. You can host it all on Adobe’s servers and we’ll take care of the hardware infrastructure for you. So basically you can now take any Flex application and add video chat, whiteboards, or your own personal collaboration requirements to it and start differentiating yourselves from customers.

This is a big, big deal. I can’t wait to see what people do with it. You can check out my interview with the CoCoMo folks on AdobeTV for more info.

The Flash Platform (again) and Hello Flash Catalyst

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Gotta love the press cycle. Even though the keynote isn’t for another couple of hours, we’re going to be announcing the Flash Platform. Those of you who have been with us since the beginning may have a feeling of deja vu. You aren’t alone. Yes we’ve talked about the Flash Platform before. This time I think it’s more meaningful. One, we’re bringing all of the tools together under a single brand – which is going to help the confusion that comes with Flex versus Flash. Flex remains a great brand and it’s the face of our open source framework, but aligning the tools under one brand is going to help bring everyone that creates SWF content together.

And that’s why I’m excited and glad that “Thermo” is becoming a part of the Flash brand under the name Flash Catalyst. It bridges both worlds – the Flex world and the Flash world – into one tool. It connects our Creative Suite 4 tools with our developer tools. And that’s significant. As someone who’s been doing Flex for a long time, I can tell you that Flash Catalyst will completely change the way you think about building Flex applications. Part of it is great design-develop workflow but it’s also the fact that Flash Catalyst works very closely with the CS4 design tools. You get the development power of the Flex Framework, the design power of the CS4 tools, and the deployment/interactive power of the Flash platform. That’s a big deal.

Also, 64-bit Flash Player for Linux. Boo-yeah. Go Adobe. Go MAX.

Behind the Scenes of the MAX Keynote

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I’ve been stuck in rehearsals all day but Serge stopped by and captured the magic of what’s going on behind the scenes at MAX.

It’s already shaping up to be an awesome event. I’m giving some folks a tour of the San Francisco offices tonight and then off to some socializing and talking about Adobe technology. We’re going to have a ton of surprises at this conference so I can’t wait to hang out and get the reaction from folks. If you want to hang out and tell me what you think you can drop me an email (ryan@adobe.com) or give me a call (+1.267.250.9422).

See you this week!

Dojo Extensions for Adobe AIR

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The Dojo team just released a set of extensions for Adobe AIR. The extension basically fits a lot of the AIR APIs in to the Dojo development model so that developers used to dealing with the Dojo APIs can now very easily take advantage of AIR’s functionality. It looks like it’s going to be very helpful for Dojo developers who want to build desktop applications. The Dojo folks will also be doing a talk about this at MAX next week.

For info and screencasts you can check out the main project page.