Our buddies over at SlideRocket have been nominated for a Crunchie award in the best design category. Head on over and vote now. They were the only Flex/Flash startup that I saw, but if there are others that I missed, let me know. Congrats to the SlideRocket guys!
TweetManish Jethani noticed a PDF of one of Chet Haase’s talks about animation and the Flex framework. It was cool to see it, especially after seeing Lee blog about choosing a Flash tweening library. As you can see from Lee’s post, there are a ton of great tweening libraries for ActionScript 3. And traditionally, Flex has been a bit behind in the animation department. One conversation with Chet will make you realize that’s not going to be true in Flex 4. We have some awesome stuff in store, so if you’re interested in creating filthy rich Flex apps, make sure to find Chet and talk to him.
I think Ely’s talk from MAX covers some of this, but Chet spoke on the topic so when that gets posted, I’ll add it here.
TweetI just noticed that we have a Japanese language version of AdobeTV. All of the tutorials are done in Japanese and it’s just in time for MAX Japan. I’d love to see some of the community stuff, like the Spark Project, get some AdobeTV time.
ReadWriteWeb and the AIR Team Blog both have some info on Cyn.in‘s new desktop client. Cyn.in is an enterprise 2.0 collaboration suite that comes in a variety of installation and hosting modes. It’s kind of a combination of wikis, Twitter, and SharePoint – all geared at an organization. I got a demo last night and I’d love to see this used at Adobe.
But the coolest thing is their desktop client. As far as functionality there isn’t anything groundbreaking about it, but it integrates very nicely with the full Cyn.in stack. What’s great is the polish and UI design they put into it. The application is very elegantly skinned and they’ve made sure the preferences for things like alerts and “always on top” are easily accessible. It’s one of the best examples I’ve seen of AIR because it brings the full functionality of the backend system into a desktop client for ease of use and tracking. It’s unobtrusive and simple to use, and they made it look really good. I encourage you to check out the screenshots on their blog.
This is classic, and it’s indicative of a wider trend as more and more attention gets paid to RIAs. People who don’t really have any sense of the history of our business or the technologies start writing about buzzwords. In this case the Motley Fool wrote a blog post about how Adobe is running scared because of Silverlight. The premise was that Netflix had switched from Flash to Silverlight and that Flash was in trouble. The problem is that Netflix never used Flash. In fact I doubt it ever will seeing as the Founder of Netflix is on Microsoft’s board.
So how do we fix this? How can we better educate journalists on the competitive landscape. I think everyone at Adobe has a pretty healthy respect for Silverlight, and that’s been great for our customers. We’ve added a lot of features to the Flash Player and have done a ton around innovation because everyone is gunning for us. I don’t think we’re “running scared”, we just know that we have to keep up the pace, and I think we have so far. The fact of the matter is that we’ve seen a ton of wins. Hulu, YouTube, CBS, and people switching back to Flash from Silverlight like MLB.com. Flash provides a great video experience. Our server software has made giant strides both in price and features like dynamic streaming and DRM. Competition is healthy but I’d be hard-pressed to name an area where we’re behind when it comes to rich media or RIAs on the web. But if you, as the customer, think there are, let us know. We’re listening.
TweetUpdate: Just got a note from Fab (I couldn’t rememeber his name or the name of the application). You can check out his blog – http://www.lafabrick.com/blog/ – and learn more about the application called Twiidee (love that name). Thanks, Fab!
In MAX Milan I got to see some of the coolest stuff being done on the Flash Platform. I think MAX Milan actually had cooler stuff than MAX San Francisco. I’ve got a couple of videos but the first round is a demo of someone who created a collaborative 3D modeling application which uses a Wiimote as the input device.
They’re using WiiFlash by Adobe’s own Thibault Imbert to create the connection between the Wii and Adobe AIR. Once in the AIR application they created a drag and drop application that uses either Acrobat 3D or Papervision to render the 3D models. As Doug shows below, you can use the Wiimote to manipulate and rotate the 3D model. But the best part is the collaboration aspect. After seeing the Cocomo keynote on day 1, they went back to the hotel room and implemented collaboration with the Cocomo SDK. They set it up so that any number of clients can connect to the server and get the real time view of the 3D model as the Wiimote moves it around. It’s a really cool use of some of the most exciting stuff in the Flash Platform. Enjoy the videos.
TweetJulie just posted a video of NJ and I doing the Flash Catalyst demo from the MAX Keynote. If you didn’t see the keynote or want to get a better idea of what Flash Catalyst will do for you, it provides a great demo of the features and a closeup of how everything works. I think it turned out really well, and yes, I know I need to shave.
I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff from MAX Milan to post this week, so stay tuned.
TweetScoble is at Nokia World talking about some new fangled device that we’ll hear about on Wednesday. These were the paragraphs that got me:
But engineering does NOT equal a great experience. Yeah, my Nokia does not drop phone calls in places in Silicon Valley that my iPhone does, but generally I reach for the iPhone when I want to make a call or surf the web. Why?
Nokia is behind in experience. The executives here from Nokia that I’ve talked to know that. They know this is Nokia’s touchiest week and one where they either deliver a much better device or they are going to face a very tough 2009 globally.
I’m clearly biased, but this is an industry that needs Flash. The user experience of the traditional players is so far behind the iPhone that it isn’t funny. And the iPhone is a perfect example of how important nailing the experience is – people buy based on that. Nokia has great hardware but the software experience needs to be better. That’s where Flash can bring them back to par with the iPhone and enable the same kind of developer ecosystem – if not larger – than the one Apple has created with the app store. The millions and millions of Flash developers could start building apps.
We’re working on this from a runtime perspective, and it’s starting to come together. And Nokia is a member of the Open Screen Project, so they’re clearly interested. Things are happening, but the huge potential continues to get me excited. And I want customers to start demanding Flash on more phones as a counterweight to the huge UX lead that Apple has.
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