New Flash Player Team Blog

The Flash Player team has a new blog:

The team wanted to start this blog to share with you information about how things work in Flash Player, why they work the way they do, tips, tricks, and other interesting behind-the-scenes details.

I think the AIR team blog has been pretty good at showcasing customers and providing updates to the product. Glad the Flash Player team has a blog as well. And hoping to see some geeky stuff from Thibault, the newest Flash Player product manager, on the new blog as well.

Flash Player 10 Penetration at 86.7%

flash_platform_blog

In case you missed it, the brand new Flash Platform Blog announced some new penetration numbers for Flash Player 10.

For our inaugural Flash Platform blog posting I want to begin with some important news. The Flash Player penetration statistics have just recently been updated and Flash Player 10 is now installed on 86.7% of Internet-connected desktop computers in mature markets, which is the fastest the Web has ever adopted new innovation.

It’s great to see the adoption speed and know that so many people can take advantage of Flash Player 10′s features. For those who want other datapoints you can see that MochiAds Zeitgeist is showing a similar percentage and RIAStats has penetration trending upwards but lagging about 10% behind our (and MochiAds’) studies.

It’s also a great inaugural post for the Flash Platform blog! The marketing team at Adobe has put a ton of work into this and I’m really happy with the content. I highly suggest you subscribe as this will be the place where you’ll see a lot of breaking news and general Flash Player momentum content. They’ve got a number of different authors so the entire range of the Flash Platform is covered. Plus the feed includes content from many of the evangelists.

Strange Problem I’d Love Help Figuring Out

I moved servers recently over to Media Temple. Everything seemed to go smoothly, I still get email, my blog seems to work, and I think mostly everyone is seeing the new version. Except for the internet. My Feedburner feed is getting updated content but that updated feed doesn’t appear to be updating any of the various aggregator services out there. Feeds.Adobe doesn’t show any updated posts for me, after October 23rd,FriendFeed isn’t getting new posts, and Technorati isn’t seeing anything new either.

All of those services should be updating but they aren’t. If anyone has any ideas on why, I’d love to hear them.

ProgrammableWeb Hits 1,000 Web APIs and Some ActionScript Cloud APIs

ProgrammableWeb is one of my favorite sites. If you haven’t been there, it’s an aggregation of all the various APIs that exist. Everything from Twitter’s API to an API from the USGS that gives you elevation of a point based on latitude and longitude (they even had APIs for the On AIR Bus). So I was happy to see that they recently hit 1,000 Web APIs. That’s good for the web and good for developers.

For those of you on the ActionScript side of things, Ted has been putting together a list of ActionScript Cloud APIs. It’s not close to the 1,000 that ProgrammableWeb has, but that list of ActionScript libraries will get you started using some of the many APIs that ProgrammableWeb has. If you know of some that aren’t on that list, make sure to leave a comment at the bottom of the page.

The AIR Team Gets a Blog

I knew this was coming but it looks like the official Adobe AIR Team blog has gone live. Robert Christensen, the product manager, is going to be doing most of the blogging it looks like but I’m hoping he includes guest posts from some of the team.

This is going to be a great resource for anyone interested in AIR and will also be a good way to get your feedback heard. Now we just need to get someone to design a blog for the Flex Team so we can get them off the ugly default Adobe template.

Getting Ready for My 360 Flex Presentation in Style

I’m giving my Online/Offline Synchronization with Adobe AIR and LCDS presentation at 360Flex next week and I had a couple of things I wanted to finish on the presentation. But I’ve been staying with my parents and wanted to get in some Colorado backpacking. Luckily, the life of an Adobe evangelist is awesome. I’ve got my local CF server, Flex Builder, and a laptop, so I packed it with the rest of my stuff and when we got to camp I did a little backcountry coding.

Also, I’m pretty sure I’m going to look like a leprous raccoon for my presentation on Wednesday. I got really, really sunburned while I was wearing my sunglasses so I look ridiculous and it’s probably going to be peeling when I present. Apologies in advance.

I’m hoping to grab a bunch of videos of various Flex developers who are doing cool stuff at 360Flex so if you want to show of what you’re up to, send me an email at my shiny new Adobe email address – ryan@adobe.com.

The Two Most Interesting Geeky Blogs at Adobe

I think I’ve talked about this before, but if you’re new to Adobe and you’re a geeks geek then there are two employee blogs that are must subscribes. Tinic Uro is a Sr. Computer Scientist on the Flash Player and has his hands in a ton of cool features. He’s also a great geek writer and provides some of the best information out there with regards to the Flash Player. Second, if you’re Linux-inclined, you should subscribe to Mike Melanson’s blog, Penguin.SWF. Not only does he provide status updates on Linux at Adobe, he monitors his comments very closely and will help track bugs for any Linux users having issues with the player.

Two great blogs from two really good engineers.

MXNA is Back Up, Just a Different Address

In case you haven’t seen the news, MXNA is back up as feeds.adobe.com. Christian has all of the info and background and he has been the one putting in the work, upgrading it to CF8, and making sure it’s super speedy (which it is). I think the feeds automatically redirected and I assume we’ll be redirecting the old weblogs address soon.

Thanks a lot to Christian. It’s been tough having MXNA gone.

Blogging on the Bus is Hard

Blogging on the Bus is HardMan I am behind. The bus tour is always awesome but it’s really difficult to keep up on the news and sit down to write blog posts. There are a ton of cool companies I want to write about and a lot of news that I’ve missed out on writing about. With MAX around the corner and my presentation still not finished, it’s going to be a hectic weekend. Factor in all the news and the fact that Halo 3 is taking over our suite and it’s going to be a rock star couple days of coding, gaming and socializing.

What I wanted to mention was our new developer connection. I’ve been poking around and I think it’s a good step for Adobe. I was actually kind of skeptical that Adobe could pull it off and that we’d have some growing pains at doing something like this for our developer community. But I think we have a great first edition. It’s obviously good to have our developer tools/technologies laid out in a way that people can get information (and inspiration) but I’m also glad to see that we have a section for RIAs (I was supposed to be in the video for the RIA section but I don’t think my takes were good enough :) ) and Flex Interface Guidelines. Both of these sections will evolve, but I hope we’ve started a conversation. I also hope that we get more people talking about the whys as well as the hows of rich Internet applications. I think the dev connection starts to do that, so enjoy and let me know what you think.

[tags]Adobe, Adobe Developer Connection, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]