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.
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.
There have been a couple of posts recently about Google’s ability to search Flash files. And it looks like we’re getting some good news. The latest is over on InsideRIA. Dominic Gelineau has been doing some experiments and noticed as recently as October 14th that things have started to change for the better. The other post was by Brian Ussery. He’s been also running a long series of experiments and while the results aren’t quite what I was hoping, things may have changed recently. Possibly most interesting from Brian’s research is that Flash files can now have their own page rank independent of the root URL (see case study #2).
So it doesn’t seem like we’re perfect yet, but we’re making progress after the announcement earlier this year. It seems like Google is starting tweak the algorithm and figure out how to get it working as people expect. That’s good news.
It’s a little tough when you live inside the Adobe bubble to step back on release day and talk about all the “new” stuff (and some bug fixes) that you’ve been talking about for months. But Flash Player 10 is a big release, so I’ll do my best. As I’ve said a bunch over the past couple of months, I felt Flash Player 9 was a developer-centric release. We rewrote the virtual machine, introduced ActionScript 3, released Flex 2, and essentially laid the groundwork for rich Internet applications. We created the train tracks for more complex, interesting, and sophisticated applications in the browser. We’ve since extended those train tracks to the desktop with AIR and into the world of real time collaboration/communication with things like BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services.
Flash Player 10 on the other hand, is in some ways about getting back to the core of what made Flash great in the first place – really creative people. We’ve got Pixel Bender which companies like Picnik are already using to enhance the graphical capabilities of their photo editor. We’ve got new 3D APIs that will help make it easy for anyone to add a 3D-like effect to their applications. We’ve got new drawing APIs and primitives that enable some very interesting visualizations and will go hand in hand with a lot of open source projects out there that were previously pushing the Flash Player further than most. We’ve also got new low-level text APIs that for the first time make text as rich as other aspects of the Flash player. I was showing off some of those text APIs a couple of weeks ago in Asia and they went over very well. It’s going to help the Flash Player become truly global.
With the importance of video we also added a lot of video enhancements. “Movestar” was our big video release with support for H.264, but in Flash Player 10 we’re enabling dynamic streaming which means your users can get the best possible picture that their bandwidth will support. That means smoother video playback and a better video experience.
So now that Flash Player 10 is out we’re providing the platform on which to build some very cool stuff. A way to blow people away with your creativity and vision. That’s going to be a major theme next year, I think. Adobe is a design company at its core. We make great design tools and we answer to designers. That provides us a big advantage in the increasingly design-heavy world of the web. Creative Suite 4 and Flash Player 10 are a great example of what’s possible. Flex 4 and “Thermo” are going to build on that so that when it all comes together it’s going to be the best platform around for great looking, fast, and cutting-edge applications. And if our penetration story sticks, in 6 months we’ll have upgraded the web again so you can just take it for granted and deploy those apps without a second thought.
Ted just posted a video of the day 1 keynote at 360|Flex in which Mark Anders shows off Thermo as well as FXG and Flash Player 10. It’s a great overview of the future of Flex and Flash and also a nice sneak peak of Thermo. I’m really excited to watch all of you guys play with Thermo. It’s been a fun and hard problem to solve. We’re also trying to be very open and transparent. We want to get your hands on it as early as possible, so we’re planning to make the bits available as soon as possible. The build probably won’t have the full bells and whistles, and the actual product release is still a ways off, but I think you’ll enjoy jumping in and kicking the tires while helping us drive features for the product as we march on to a 1.0 release.
The Release Candidate build for Flash Player 10 on Linux (And every other platform) is now available for you to go grab and check out. A bunch of new things in this version:
Camera input works a whole lot better (V4L1 and V4L2 cameras both work; V4L2 cameras don’t peg the CPU anymore)
Software fullscreen performance is vastly improved
Faster, more stable windowless mode (but be sure to use very recent browser builds)
SSL now handled through NSS instead of flashsupport-OpenSSL alliance
White speckles are gone from video playback
Important stability fixes (fewer crashes)
Still not 64-bit native, just to get that out of the way
I continue to be happy about Adobe’s support for Linux. As more applications move into the browser with HTML or the Flash Player and to the desktop with AIR it makes it easier to switch. Mike Chambers just posted a really good screencast on how to get started with AIR on Linux.
Holy hell. I’ve been tearing my hair out all night trying to figure out how to make a fully transparent and chrome-less native window using the mx:Window class. Luckily, thanks to Bradical from this post, I found the solution. You just need to set showFlexChrome equal to False in your mx:Window component. So quick mini-tutorial for anyone doing custom chrome/transparent native windows:
If you’re looking at a lot of AIR documentation you’ll probably see references to a NativeWindow class and think that’s what you want to use to create a new native window. If you’re doing Flex work however, you won’t be able to add any components from the Flex Framework to that NativeWindow because NativeWindow is a Flash class and doesn’t include the Flex (mx) libraries. So what you’ll want to do instead is create a custom component that extends mx:Window:
Notice I set up a style called chromeless, knocked out the background image/color and set the padding to zero like any other custom chrome application, but I’ve also set the showFlexChrome property to false. Now you’re good to go and you can start using all of the Flex Framework in your native window. In this case I’m setting the other native window chrome properties when I actually create the window (in my main Application file):
NotificationWindow is just the name of my MXML component (NotifyWindow.mxml) and I can set the system chrome options in that file directly, or on creation like I did above. If you’re going to be using the same chrome settings for your custom native window class, it’s probably easiest just to set the system chrome options inside your component.
Hope that helps other folks, and a huge thanks to Bradical, wherever you are!
According to Justin Everett-Church we have new penetration numbers as of yesterday. It’s great to see Flash Player 9 do so well, but most significant is the fact that Flash Player 9 update 3, which was released 6 months ago, is up to 82% penetration. Do you remember all the cool stuff that came in Flash Player 9 update 3?:
H.264 support
AAC support
Improved drawing performance
Full-screen hardware acceleration
Flex Framework caching
It’s a big list, and now 82% of people on the internet have access to all those features so you should feel relatively comfortable taking advantage of them.
One of the things I like about Adobe is that we’ve gotten better about our Linux releases as we’ve gotten more open. For those that don’t know, we’ve got a beta 2 release of Flash Player 10 which includes Linux. Practical Tech has a post up about the latest version of Flash Player 10 for Linux and is generally really happy with it. There are still some issues to work through of course, but as a company, we’re very committed to Linux for our runtimes and even our developer tools. It’s great to see people notice.
Update 2: Google posts about the new stuff and sheds some light on what will and won’t be indexed. (Props to Brian for the link)
Update: I did a Seesmic post below. It’s lame but I figured it was worth a shot.
It’s easy to get caught up in every new announcement when you’re an evangelist and I’ve definitely been overly excited a few times when I probably shouldn’t have but tonight is a really, really important milestone for anyone who is building Flash/Flex applications. One of the biggest pains/pressure points/disadvantages to using Flash is going to be minimized. We’re announcing today that we are working with Yahoo and Google to more accurately index SWF content.
So what does that mean? We are giving a special, search-engine optimized Flash Player to Yahoo and Google which is going to help them crawl through every bit of your SWF file. This Flash Player will act just like a person would in some cases. It will click on your buttons, it will move through the states of your application, get data from the server when your application normally would, and it will capture all of the text and data that you’ve got inside of your Flash-based application. We’ve basically provided a very powerful looking glass into SWF files so Google and Yahoo can pull out meaningful information.
The best part? You don’t have to do anything. Any SWF you already have out there will be indexed by this new player. Of course it won’t automatically be as good as HTML. Google won’t automatically deep-link your content or pull out unique URLs. So overnight I’m not sure a lot will change. But the most important part of this announcement to me is the fact that HTML and Flash can be on the same general footing when it comes to search engine optimization.
Google is going to have their own rules for how this new Flash Player indexes and uses the content. So will Yahoo. But we’ve given the search engines the technology to see SWF files in the same way they see HTML files. So now the art (or black voodoo magic) of SEO optimization can come to SWF files as well. That means it’s a big new world for Flash developers. You can poke the system, see what works and what doesn’t work. See how Google will handle deep linking and URL changes in Flash. It’s all up for grabs and it’s really exciting to think about what the Flash community can discover about SEOing SWF files.
SEO is big, big business. There are entire firms dedicated to it and a TON of money changes hands. Now Flash developers can get in on it and start figuring out how to optimize their SWFs to meet Google’s requirements. That’s pretty damn cool and it could result in a lot of money for the folks that figure it out first.
The Release Candidate build for Flash Player 10 on Linux (And 
It’s easy to get caught up in every new announcement when you’re an evangelist and I’ve definitely been overly excited a few times when I probably shouldn’t have but tonight is a really, really important milestone for anyone who is building Flash/Flex applications. One of the biggest pains/pressure points/disadvantages to using Flash is going to be minimized. We’re 