Monthly Archives: January 2009

What Can You Do With 10k Worth of Silverlight Code? Win Stuff!

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10k_logoAre you planning on going to MIX? Then why not get Microsoft to pay for it? They’re running a fun contest that is looking for the coolest Silverlight or WPF application that you can create in 10k – and that includes image assets, so you can’t be crazy with the bitmaps.

The winner gets an all expensed paid trip to Vegas for MIX09, AND they get a $1500 Visa gift card so they can take all of their friends out to dinner. Do they let you cash in those gift cards in the casino? There’s also a community winner which will receive a $1500 gift card and three runners-up get $500 clams each.

But the best part, and the reason I’m blogging about it, is that I get to be a judge. So if you’re doing Silverlight work, and are planning on going to MIX, this is a great way to get there. And I’ll help!

Fun with Flash and SAP’s NetWeaver Platform

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Mrinal twittered today about a project he’s been working on and it took me on a pretty cool tour of what’s going on with SAP, NetWeaver, and Flash. NetWeaver 7.0 supports something called “Flash Islands“, which are basically SWF files inside of Web Dynpro interfaces, which is the user interface for SAP’s NetWeaver platform. Using ExternalInterface interface, you can pass data from Web Dynpro and a Flex/Flash application.

What’s cool is to see the most cutting edge parts of the Flash Platform being used in an enterprise setting like SAP NetWeaver. Mrinal has an example of Ribbit working, letting you make phone calls from NetWeaver, and there is an example of Cocomo collaboration by Mogens Enevoldsen, which shows off building a social network in SAP.

2009 is going to be a gigantic year for real-time data and collaboration. This is something that, arguably, the Flash Platform does better than anyone else, so I think it’s going to be an exciting year for Flex developers as they get to show real world examples of things that most people are just starting to think about.

How Do You Use Fireworks and Where Does it Fit in your Workflow?

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Doug Winnie is looking for feedback on how teams and individuals use Fireworks. I know a bunch of designers in the web and Flex space use Fireworks exclusively for their work and it’s one of my favorite design tools out there. There are some very cool ideas afoot for Fireworks, so if you use it, I’d really encourage you to head over to Doug’s blog and give your feedback.

The Day Has Come – Adobe Opens up RTMP

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I’m really happy to be able to blog that Adobe is opening up the Real-Time Messaging Protocol (RTMP) spec. As a lot of you probably know, RTMP forms a core part of the Flash Platform ecosystem. It is the backbone protocol for delivering real time data and rich media to the Flash Player. Now it will be available for any developer to implement in their own tools, server technologies, or projects.

As the Flash Platform has grown, Adobe as a company has pushed harder and harder to be both more innovative and more open. You see this in everything from open source Flex to open specifications like AMF and XMP and PDF. Part of the reason we can continue to open up is the fact that we are able to build value added services to our customers on top of our open technology. RTMP is no different.

The Digital Media group at Adobe has done some great things with RTMP. Over the past couple of years they introduced a variety of secure RTMP measures including an encrypted version of RTMP called RTMPE which enabled content providers to protect their content while allowing it to be consumed by the 98% of computers that have the Flash Player. These types of secure RTMP measures are what makes sites like Hulu possible – because the people that create content feel confident they can protect it while making it freely available.

These security measures are examples of technologies that Adobe built on top of RTMP, and they aren’t part of the core spec that we’re opening up. In general, this is even better news for developers. Adobe spent a lot of work creating those and we think we have a great solution to protect people’s content. But there are no rules in how developers should implement things like security or peer-to-peer functionality in the open RTMP spec – we’re leaving it up to developers to decide how they want to implement it. That helps Adobe’s offerings by expanding the entire RTMP ecosystem and fostering healthy competition for the best solution. Any user of the Flash Platform, from developers to the end users, is going to benefit.

So today Adobe is expanding the community around RTMP by continuing to be as open as possible and foster both innovation and healthy competition. When you think about everything RTMP provides – the data, the video, the audio – and think about all of the possibilities that now exist for 3rd parties and developers, it’s hard not to get excited. This is going to provide an explosion of innovation for the community around the Flash Platform.

Create a Pixel Bender Filter – Win Awesome Stuff from Nvidia

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pixel_bender

This is really cool. The folks at Nvidia are running a contest to see who can come up with the best Pixel Bender filter. NVIDIA wants to see what you can do to make use of their GPU, so they figured a great thing to do would be to give Pixel Bender a spin.

They seem to be focusing on Pixel Bender in Photoshop CS4, but what’s great about it is you’ll be able to use that same filter in After Effects CS4 or the Flash Player. If you’re looking to get started, Lee has a couple of great Pixel Bender tutorials.

Congrats to the Eco Zoo – Winner of the FWA Site of the Year Award

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I was lucky enough to be a judge for The FWA Site of the Year awards. If you haven’t seen it, ou should spend some time on the FWA site. It’s far and away the best collection of Flash content out there and you’ll come away feeling inspired.

This year’s winner was The Eco Zoo by a few agencies: McCann Erickson Japan, ENJIN Inc, and ROXIK. The site uses some great PaperVision effects and is a really, really fun use of Flash. I’m hoping those guys are going to be at MAX Japan next week.

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Obama’s Inauguration: Brought to you With ColdFusion and Flash

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Nice. There is a very good roundup by Andrew Nusca on where to watch the Obama Inauguration next week online. I blogged about this earlier, but what I thought was interesting is that Andrew mentions the site for the folks that are “in charge of all the inaugural activities at the capitol” – the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies – and they have a .gov address, so they mean business. They’re offering closed captioning of the entire thing. How are they delivering it? Flash. And what’s that extension on their site? That’s right, it’s ColdFusion!

Flash Catalyst Slides from my San Flashcisco Presentation

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I just uploaded the Flash Catalyst slides from my presentation last night to the San Flashcisco user group. You should be able to download them from that link. It was a very, very fun event, and I got a lot of questions – some easy, some a lot harder. I hope I answered all of them to some level of satisfaction and everyone had fun. I’m still embarrassed I can’t always remember how to make a motion tween in Flash. I need to spend more time with Lee.

I didn’t actually get to many of these slides because I dove into the demo and answered questions, so if you were there, they probably won’t look very familiar. Hopefully they provide some extra info/context to the demo.

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Thanks to everyone who came out!

Making Money with AIR – TweetDeck Gets Funding

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Congrats to Iain of TweetDeck! According to TechCrunch they have secured about $500,000 of angel funding in a very, very tough economy from Betaworks. According to TechCrunch:

TweetDeck is the work of one man, British programmer Iain Dodsworth, who says the TweetDeck Adobe AIR-powered and hence cross-platform desktop application has been downloaded 250,000 times since he launched it over last Summer, and that users are pushing 120,000 messages a day to their Twitter followers using the software.

Iain and TweetDeck are a great example of how you can quickly and easily create a desktop application with a great user interface and make a big impact. Iain did a superb job with the UI, and chose a great platform. I continue to be really, really excited about what AIR means for developers and end users. Great programming model, powerful runtime, and all of it is cross-platform on Mac, Windows, and Linux. It’s cool stuff.

Flash Video Powering The Presidential Inauguration

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On the podcast today Coté and I were talking about the inauguration as an online event. There’s a ton going on. Almost every major site is going to be streaming the inaugural ceremonies. But there are many different ways people are doing it. For the most part, as you’d expect, it’s being done in Flash. Basically all of the major media sites – CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News, etc. – are all going to be using Flash. CNN is even going to be inserting ads into the live stream which is pretty cool. Oddly, just like the Olympics, the “official” site is going with Silverlight. But like we saw with the Olympics, I’m pretty sure most of the viewing is going to be done in Flash because ultimately the barrier to entry is so small, everyone has it, and Flash just works.

As I told Coté, I think this is going to be fascinating from a number crunching standpoint. With so many options to watch the video, where are people going to go? And how will penetration of the technology used to stream the content affect that? With the Olympics, there was just one way Americans could watch the event – with Silverlight – but for the inauguration, people will be able to select any news media outlet and any format they want. I think it’s going to be a great mini experiment in how much penetration really matters as well as how much the brand of various media outlets matter.

Anyone who has watched Hulu in HD knows Flash has fantastic quality, and the install numbers for Flash Player 10 have been amazing, so our ubiquity isn’t slowing down. The combination of innovation and ubiquity add up to a pretty ideal experience and I think the numbers coming out of the inauguration are going to show exactly that. Go Flash!!

Update: Hah, I don’t actually think this is the reason they went with Silverlight, but I thought it was funny:

To note: The list of donors to the inaugural committee does not include any contributors who list Silverlight-rival Adobe Systems as an employer. As we have reported here before, it does include several high-profile Microsoft executives, including CEO Steve Ballmer. A Microsoft spokeswoman has said, “These donations are personal contributions from the named Microsoft executives, and not representative of Microsoft the corporation.”

I am really curious to hear the real reason, so if anyone sees it, please let me know.