Monthly Archives: August 2010

Helping Out with the Drupal Services Module

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I’ve been on vacation since mid-last week and still have a couple of days left, but I was really excited about this so I wanted to make sure I posted about it. I’ve gotten some budget from Adobe to help contribute to the Drupal Services module to help get it ready and compatible for Drupal 7.

If you’ve done any work with Drupal and Flash you know that the Services module is a pretty key part of the integration. After talking to Greg Dunlap, the mastermind behind Services, it was pretty apparent to me that helping contribute to his effort would go the longest way towards making sure Drupal 7 works really well with Flash in addition to helping the wider Drupal community.

I think there are a lot of places where Drupal can benefit from Flash. My colleague Mihai has done a couple of blog posts around creating Flex apps for Drupal and I think that LiveCycle Collaboration Service integration is something that a lot of Drupal users would benefit from.

So I’m stoked about Drupal 7. I want to give a big thanks to Josh Kopel and Jared Stoneberg for making the initial introductions and being so helpful with my Drupal questions. The Seattle Drupal community is fantastic. And this wouldn’t be possible without the great folks at Palantir, especially Tiffany Ferriss who dealt with my delays and back and forths.

Me on the Android Central Podcast

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I did a quick semi-informal podcast today with the guys from Android Central on Flash Player and Android. It was a lot of fun to do and special thanks to Phil and Jerry for having me on.

The feedback after the Android Summit we had has been great and I have to say, I think the Android community is as great as the Flash community when it comes to smart, passionate and fun people.

Slides and Demos from FITC San Francisco

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FITC was an absolutely awesome event. Props to Shawn, Rick and team for another great event. I’m looking forward to them coming back to San Francisco next year. Thanks to everyone who attended my talk. I got some great questions and as I said in the sessions, if you have anything cool you’re doing with mapping and Flash, drop me an email.

Below are the slides I used and I’ve also posted all of the code for the demos I did. I haven’t really cleaned them up at all, but if you have any questions, let me know.

Mapping and Geolocation on the Flash Platform
View more presentations from Ryan Stewart.

New Flash Player with H.264 GPU Decoding for Mac

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Thibault Imbert just blogged about the release of Flash Player 10.1.82.76, which includes support for H.264 GPU decoding on the Mac.

You should notice now a nice difference when playing H.264 content on your Mac in terms of CPU usage. We rarely enable new features in security releases but we really wanted to enable such a cool feature. For more details about it, Tinic already posted about this.

Some of you may remember talk of a Flash Player “Gala” that was put out as a beta right before Flash Player 10.1 was released. The GPU decoding didn’t make it into the 10.1 release so we had to wait for a security release to add it. That security release is here and it should make quite a bit of difference for Mac users who are playing H.264 video through Flash Player.

FITC San Francisco – Come one, Come All

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Next week is FITC San Francisco. FITC is one of my favorite Flash conferences of all time and having it in San Francisco means that a bunch of Adobeans are going to be out in force. It also means you get the big guns. Like Kevin Lynch giving the keynote.

It is an incredibly interesting period for Adobe and Flash developers. The word I keep hearing is that we’re in a period of “hyperchange” with the drive for multi-screen and an increasingly app-centric world. But all of this is good for Flash developers. While HTML5 is fantastic for a lot of reasons, it’s also not fully baked yet. It will be, I’m not worried about that, but the hype surrounding it hasn’t caught up with the reality of how hard it is to make the jump to mobile web content. Or create complex applications/content.

So this is a pretty pivotal FITC. And I think a lot of us at Adobe are looking forward to talking with you guys and providing some context to the stories you hear. Adobe is going to be a busy place over the next year and there’s a lot that should excite Flash developers. FITC is a chance to get a taste of that.

So go register!

The Problem with Google Wave: User Experience

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Google Wave is no more. For those who remember the sound of the jaws of the tech mainstream dropping when Google showed the demo at Google I/O, that may come as a shock. For those who tried to use it, it’s probably less of a shock. I kind of liked ReadWriteWeb’s take:

Why did Wave fail? Maybe because if you don’t call it an “email-killer” (and you shouldn’t) then you’d have to call it a “product, platform and protocol for distributed, real time, app-augmented collaboration.” That’s daunting and proved accessible to too few people.

To say that people don’t get collaboration or that Wave was ahead of its time is a cop out. Wave IS an awesome product. Real-time collaboration IS changing how the world works together. On the Flash side that is one of the reasons I’m so excited about Collaboration Services; real-time collaboration is fantastic.

But this was a case of Google’s user experience coming to bite them. Some people love the minimalistic experience of Gmail. And it worked a few years ago when it was first introduced, but the iPhone has shown how critical a great user experience is to user adoption. And frankly, Google’s user experience hasn’t changed much since the Gmail days and the applications are starting to feel dated. That’s not a big issue when you’re doing something as straightforward as email, but when you’re trying to completely change how people communicate, you need to provide a user experience that abstracts the technology and just makes it easy. Have we seen that done before?

iPhone

Exactly. Wave was a great technology showcase but it was not a great product. Google had the chance to fundamentally change communication on the web but they didn’t have the design chops to put it in a package that was useful to people and instantly easy for them to dive into. You can’t do an 80 minute demo for something that’s this big of a shift in thinking.

Hopefully Google takes this to heart and realizes that technology isn’t good enough. When you’re being revolutionary you have to design a user experience that makes the technology feel second nature.

Charting with Flex and PHP

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One of the things that I’ve found to be a bit of a pain is structuring data correctly so it’s easy to chart. Luckily there are some things you can do within the charting framework in Flex to make that a bit easier as well as some things you can do with the Zend Framework to send data in a way that’s easier to chart. I cover the basics in a new post on the Adobe Developer Center.