RIA and enterprise

Rich Internet Applications aka RIA are a hot topic these days. However many people think that RIA is mostly about distributing video files, or editing photos, or some other consumer glamorous web apps. And I found myself talking with enterprise people, and some of them don’t seam to be fully convinced that RIA is also very enterprise friendly.

My fellow evangelist Andrew Shorten and my favorite Brit, I might add, started this week a series about this topic: RIA and enterprise. He will dig a lot into it, so I encourage you to watch his articles. Here is the first one.

LATER UPDATE: And here is the second part.

December 25, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Kind of a traitor…

I’ve been using MS-DOS, Win 3.1, Win 95 & 98, Win 2000 and XP for the past 15 years. So it seems a little bit strange to switch after all these years to a Mac. But, I did it. My new MacBook came two days ago. I am still in the process of installing/configuring, and moving my data from my PC (I am also in vacation, so my wife doesn’t allow me to stay with my computers as much as I would love :D ). I must say some of the user interface metaphors are so sweet, and very … usable. After only a few hours, I got used with many shortcuts and particularities.

If you wonder why I did this switch after all this time, here is the answer: the current combination of the PC hardware and software seems to me that is somehow behind of the MacBook and Mac OS proposition. And because being productive with your tools means a lot in any business, I feel that it was time to do this switch.

PS. Because of this extra activity, I put on hold an article on the Text capabilities in Flash 10/AIR 1.5. Stay tuned, maybe I will manage to publish the article this year.

December 24, 2008 | Filed Under Others | 3 Comments 

CA signed certificates available for individual developers

We received many requests from individual developers who wanted to buy a commercial certificate for signing AIR applications. Unfortunately until recently these certificates were issued only for companies, and not for individuals. So if you were a freelancer you couldn’t have your own certificate.

Fortunately this has been changed, and you can buy certificates from Chosen Security. You can read more here. The price for one year certificate is US 199$.

December 19, 2008 | Filed Under AIR | Leave a Comment 

AIR 1.5 for Linux is out

One month ago we rolled out AIR 1.5 for Win and Mac. Today the Linux version is out! Without further talk, here are the links: Adobe AIR 1.5 for Linux and Adobe AIR 1.5 SDK for Linux.

December 18, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | Leave a Comment 

Tour de Flex – one month census

About 3o days ago Tour de Flex was launched. And during this time more than 1,000,000 code samples were served. As today, there are 217 code samples (Flex SDK, AIR, Data Access, Cloud APIs, etc). Greg Wilson wants to have about 1,000 samples by 2009 mid-year. And here we can use some help from you: if you have code that you think would add value, then you can submit your code (could be new components, skins, effects…).

A new version is under development, that will bring some improvements (performance and usability improvements). You can read more here.

screenshots-large-500_0

December 17, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Adobe Wave and you, developers

I had an interesting discussion at MAX Milan regarding some of Adobe’s services/platforms, and how one developer was feeling about them. He said that while he understands why Adobe builds things like Cocomo, or Adobe Wave, he is a little bit worried because he feels that these platforms are somehow competition from a big company for his projects or somebody else’s projects.

While I am fully sympathetic with his feelings, I must say that this is not how I see things, and it is not because I work for Adobe. As a matter of fact, if I were a developer, I would see these as opportunities and not threats. More on this idea a little bit later. First, let’s see what Adobe Wave is.

So, we made Adobe Wave public, and developers can sign up for a pre-release. But what exactly is this project? The goal of this project is “Displaying a desktop notification is as easy as sending an email”. I bet at that point you still don’t have a clear idea about what this system do.

Basically we created an easy way for end-user to receive notifications, and at the same time we created a back-end for sending a new notification, thus it will be a breeze for any publisher to send a notification using this.

Now, why would someone explicitly sign up for something that potentially looks like more spam? Well, here is the idea. Suppose you are interested in air tickets from London to Boston, you also love to see live music, and maybe you are a computer geek like me, and you don’t want to miss offers from your favorite computer store. You sign up for notifications from each company, and you receive offers probably, in your inbox. The problem is that you already have a lot of spam in your inbox, and it is possible to miss the timeframe for some of these offers. Another option for those companies willing to send you offers would be to build some kind of a client, that you download and install on your computer. And when you have Internet connection, you can get notifications. This could lead to another problem: as you opt-in for more and more clients, you will end up with a System Tray full of desktop notification clients.

Here comes the power of Adobe Wave: instead of installing so many clients, you install only one client. Then from within this client you can subscribe to publishers that you want to receive notifications from. You can think of this system, as a syndication for your notifications. No more emails in your inbox. And because the system is run by a third company (in this case by Adobe), all the players have to behave :)   For example, if you don’t subscribe for air tickets, you will not receive this kind of offers. If you say you are interested in concerts in the Bay area only, you will not receive notifications about concerts in Romania.

Selecting the publishers

As I said, Adobe created an easy to use back-end for publishers as well. There is a REST API and a portal available. About the portal:

“The Publisher Portal is a website where you can create and manage notification feeds, including customizing notification appearance and setting up lists of topics for users to follow. After you have your feed perfected, you then invoke the ‘Send Notification’ API to send both global and user-specific notifications.”

Notifications can have: a logo, a text message, and a thumbnail. Background and foreground colors can be customized. When a user clicks on your notification, the URL you attached to it’s open in the browser.

Here are some of partners that are interested in this platform (you will notice that you can opt-in to receive notifications when someone leaves a message to your MySpace page):

Partners for Adobe Wave

If you are curious about the technology behind this, the client is an AIR application, and back on the server is Flash Media Server.

Coming back to my discussion about Adobe platforms/services, and you, the developers: I think this might be an opportunity for you. As Adobe make companies aware about a new channel for distributing their services/products, you can use this hype for your own projects. While Adobe Wave is interesting enough for many businesses, it might be not interesting, for example, for some of the small catering suppliers from your area that have offers only for some city. You can build a feed only for the people who order in food in your city (at the office, or at home), and you can add new features that will be valuable for the end-user (things like remembering past orders, and high-lighting offers that are compatible – if someone always orders Chinese food, then don’t push offers for Bavarian cuisine :D ).

December 16, 2008 | Filed Under AIR, Others | 2 Comments 

"First Steps in Flex", MAX Sessions, and iTunes

Last week I was asked about good resources for learning Flex/AIR. So I have some more resources for you: First Steps in Flex is available for purchase. This book is written by Bruce Eckel and James Ward. I read this book this summer, because I was a member of the review team. And I can tell you this book can really help you get up to speed with Flex/ActionScript/AIR very quickly. So, if you are new to Flex world, and you want to learn, then maybe this is the book for you.

First Steps in Flex First Steps in Flex

As I said in another post, all the MAX sessions will be available. As a matter of fact, we’ve started to publish them in batches. You can find them on Adobe TV:

If you prefer to use iTunes, then you can find them in the iTunes as well. Enjoy!

iTunes and MAX Sessions

Later Update: You can enjoy these recordings in Adobe Media Player too. Click on My Favorites, and click on the ADD RSS FEED button and add these feeds:

amp

December 15, 2008 | Filed Under Books, Video | Leave a Comment 

Peer to Peer and Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5

We added P2P capabilities in Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Now you can create applications such as video chat apps, multi-player games, voice over IP. At the core of this new capability is a new protocol called RTMFP (Real-Time Media Flow Protocol). In order to use this protocol, Flash Player endpoints must connect to an RTMFP capable server. This means that before starting to download or upload directly to other clients, the client first needs to establish a connection to a rendezvous service server and this service helps establish the connection with other clients.

Until recently this was the missing piece for all of you who wanted to try the new feature. Now you can use the Adobe Stratus service. Stratus is in beta, so you can find it on labs.adobe.com. You can visit its page here, and FAQ page here. If you want to start playing with it, just go to the Stratus home page. Using your Adobe ID account you can sign up for a developer key. While it is in beta, this service is free.

LATER UPDATE: here you can read an article on Stratus and P2P http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/rtmfp_stratus_app.html

December 12, 2008 | Filed Under Others | 2 Comments 

Learning Flex in a week using video tutorials

I know that different people have different ways of learning things. Some prefer to learn by reading, others by listening, and others by watching videos. If you are new to Flex and you prefer learning Flex by watching movies, then just go here.

You can use AMP (Adobe Media Player) to manage the videos, thus you can watch the movies offline, whenever you want.

December 12, 2008 | Filed Under Video | 1 Comment 

Your chance to get an Adobe Platform Evangelist laptop bag

Andrew and Serge organized a charity schwag auction. They have about five bags to sell. Out of these bags, probably the most interesting is the one that only the Adobe Platform Evangelists have.

So take a look here, and maybe you will find your next laptop bag.

December 10, 2008 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

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