AIR sessions at Adobe MAX LA

If you want to learn more about Adobe AIR and you plan to attend Adobe MAX 2009, then you should book these sessions:

What’s Coming in Adobe AIR 2 by Christian Cantrell. Adobe AIR allows developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that run outside the browser on multiple operating systems. In this session, you will learn about the planned capabilities of the upcoming release of Adobe AIR 2.
Designing Applications for Desktops and Mobile Devices with Adobe AIR by Arno Gourdol. See how Adobe AIR has made it possible for web developers to build cross-platform desktop applications. Learn how the platform is expanding to enable the delivery of applications not just for desktop operating systems, but also for mobile devices.
Building Mobile Applications with Adobe AIR by Aditya Bansod (2 sessions). Learn how Adobe is working to bring Adobe AIR development out of the desktop and onto a mobile phone near you. We will cover how the AIR SDK and platform will evolve to add capabilities to help developers mobile enable, test, and publish their content. Mobile computing and mobile applications provide publishers and developers with exciting opportunities to get their products into the pockets of millions of people.
Explore Deployment and Distribution Options for Adobe AIR Applications by Oliver Goldman. Learn how to get your AIR applications to your users and how to keep them up to date. We will discuss important considerations for distribution on the Internet or an intranet, including impacts on your auto-update mechanism. We will cover existing deployment options such as badge installation and IBM Tivoli support. Finally, we will explore the new deployment options that will be available in Adobe AIR 2, including the native installer support required to use some of the advanced new AIR 2 APIs.
The Future of Digital Publishing: Delivering News through Adobe AIR by Jeremy Clark. Learn from Jeremy Clark of Adobe’s Experience Design team how his group has leveraged Adobe AIR, Flex, and the Text Layout Framework (now in beta on Adobe Labs) to help the New York Times and others reach new and existing customers with a revolutionary desktop news application.
LATER UPDATE: AIR Boot Camp BYOL by Duane Nickull and James Ward. Everything you need to know in order to get up to speed with AIR, Flex, and Flex Builder 3/Flash Builder 4.

You can register for the sessions here.

September 28, 2009 | Filed Under AIR, Conferences | 3 Comments

Adobe Cookbook new version

My friends from the Cookbooks team went live with the second iteration of the Adobe Cookbook site.

Cookbook

You can use this service to quickly find recipes for specific problems you want to solve using technologies such as Flex, ActionScript, AIR, Mobile and Devices, JavaScript, PHP, BlazeDS, ColdFusion, Flash Professional, Video, and more. The search is very fast and accurate. Below you can see a screenshot with the results for “remoteobject”:

cookbook_2

Of course you can become famous by contributing recipes. Enjoy!

September 25, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

Flash Platform events calendar

If you want to stay informed about what events we are doing, here is an easy way: the Flash Platform events calendar. It uses Google Calendar, so you can subscribe to the calendar and follow it via XML or iCal.

You can read more on the Adobe Flash Platform Blog.

September 25, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

Registration open up for Flex Camp Iasi

If you plan to attend the Flex Camp Iasi (October 31st 2009) then you can go here and register yourself. As with all the Flex Camps it is a free event. See you there soon!

Event location: Alexandru Ioan Cuza University. Stay tuned for the agenda and the conference room.

From the Adobe evangelist team Miti and I will be there. Some people from the local community will have a session too.

September 25, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences | Leave a Comment

Flex Camp Iasi

October 31, 2009

I will be in Iasi to speak at Flex Camp Iasi on October 31st.

September 24, 2009 | Filed Under Events | Leave a Comment

Web 3.0 or just “Augmented Reality + Always Connected / Always in Sync” ?

Every now and then we are drawn to the idea of predicting the future. And of course, most of the time we are wrong. But this does not stopping us from trying. So here I go with some thoughts on what I think will be a game changer in the near future.

Before going into the juicy parts (I hope) let’s have a look at what has been happening in the Internet and devices world for the past five years or more.

First of all, there is what became known as “Web 2.0”. A scholastic definition would be: “Web 2.0 is commonly associated with web development and web design that facilitates interactive information sharing, interoperability, user-centered design and collaboration on the World Wide Web. Examples of Web 2.0 include web-based communities, hosted services, web applications, social-networking sites, video-sharing sites, wikis, blogs, mashups and folksonomies. A Web 2.0 site allows its users to interact with other users or to change website content, in contrast to non-interactive websites where users are limited to the passive viewing of information that is provided to them.” .

Examples of Web 2.0 sites include: YouTube, LinkedIn, Twitter, Facebook, Wikipedia, and Flickr. If you look at what you do as part of your daily routine, chances are that you spend time on such sites, because they bring value to you. At the end of the day you are not using these sites because you are paid to, you do because it helps you to stay informed, share information with others, find very specific info, or stay connected with acquaintances. If you don’t believe me, I dare you to take on the following exercise: try not to use sites like these for a week or more.

But what about devices or the “things” we use to consume/produce digital content? I think these devices have changed a lot lately, and that we are only at the beginning of this change. There used to be a time when the following formula was true: device = software that you can use with that device. You’ve bought a particular brand of computer and OS because your primary interest was in creating documents, or houses, or magazines, and so on. As the software and hardware commoditized it became less and less important what computer you bought. Now, with Cloud / Software as a Service trends, the hardware platform and OS is even less important. Instead, I think, it is more and more important to be connected to the Web. It doesn’t matter whether it’s a laptop or Smartphone, you hardly can do your work or stay in touch with friends and family while disconnected.

The past is well known, but what about the future? I do think that there is immense value in what the Web 2.0 sites bring to our life, and these apps are here to stay. Of course they will improve over time and new features will “revolutionize” the world yet again. However, no matter how good they might be, we as people experience a big rift between the digital world (all these sites and services) and the analog world (what our naked senses feel from what lays in front of us). I mean, there are two completely separated worlds. But from the point of view of me as a human being who uses information from both worlds to do my daily activities, they are not at all separated and I don’t see why they should stay like this. In fact, if we combine these two worlds (from the point of view of how the information is presented and consumed) we will get to the next level, and the sum will be far greater than the value of them separated. And this level I would call Web 3.0, although this term might be too restrictive.

What do I mean? I’m talking about Augmented Reality. The most natural way to combine these two worlds is with the help of a hardware device that can layer on top of the reality the information retrieved from the Cloud, from your accounts on various sites. This could be some glasses or whatever; the idea is to have a way to visualize the information that come from the Cloud in relation to the context of what you, as a human living in the world, see and do at a particular point in time and space.

Imagine you are on a train and you meet two persons you know. The device, using face recognition can pull out the names from your address book, the notes you might have on them, can check their LinkedIn profiles and Twitter/Facebook/Flickr accounts and you might see something like in the next picture:

Or maybe you are walking down a street in Rome. Using the information from Google Maps, the system can give you recommendations for lunch or breakfast, depending on the time of the day and your personal preferences for food and beverages. You could have marks imposed on the street image to guide you to the Coliseum and then to a Chinese restaurant, and the phone number of the restaurant in case you want to make a reservation for two persons. And while visiting the Coliseum, information about the site is pulled out from Wikipedia.

And my favorite one would be to remind me all the ~~important~~ anniversaries and make suggestions based on what my wife is talking about on Facebook with her friends. This would be awesome :).

And if I were a big Advertising Network, I might give the magic glasses away for free, because I could use them to place targeted advertising when the consumer wore them. Similar to Google Ads for Internet searches, the glasses would display the relevant sponsors for the area you are in.

Of course this idea is nothing new. There are some scientific research projects dealing with these concepts. At the same time, I think with each year that passes the urge to have something like this grows stronger. I experience deep frustration when I have to research or find more about a person, site, or book and I am not able to connect to the Cloud because I don’t have the computer with me. You might say that a Smartphone will work, but I have the feeling that this is a dead end in the long term.

The rich information and excellent usability you get on a laptop is almost impossible to get on a Smartphone. And it will always be, because it uses a reduced display to present the information. And even if someone comes up with a display that can be folded in order to be portable but at the same time provides decent real estate, it still presents the same rift between the two worlds. There is simply too much value in the ability to augment what you see with all the information available in the Cloud and the personal preferences you express whenever you comment on something or someone. Until the PDA/Smartphone is able to impose the digital on top of the analog in a simple and effective way, I am afraid my vision about the next big thing after Web 2.0 will not be possible. Thus I think Smartphones must reinvent themselves and in the new form, probably, the phone features will be the least important feature for its user. And if the phone feature becomes just a tiny bit of the overall value, it means that the carriers as they exist today have to reinvent as well or die.

Thinking of the current devices, the closest to what I imagine is the GPS device and, especially, the ones that warn you about traffic jams ahead of you. Pretty far from the magical eyes, isn’t it?

What do you think? What does your Web 3.0 look like?

September 24, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 15 Comments

Flex Camp Iasi on October 31

If you live in the Iasi area and you want to learn more about Flash, Flex, and AIR then you should mark down October 31st. That is when we’ll have a Flex Camp in Iasi, Romania.

Magda has already posted a call for papers. If you want to be a speaker just go ahead and send us your topic; in case we receive more than the number of available sessions we’ll have to turn down some :(. For more details see Magda’s post (it is in Romanian).

September 15, 2009 | Filed Under Conferences | 1 Comment

News in the online video space

As I enter the last 100 meters of preparations for my China trip, I have hat to postpone some of the geekier articles I wanted to write. But I still have time to write about some interesting news from the online video space.

Last week, on Adobe Labs, Adobe Story was launched. This is a preview for a product that you can use together with future versions of Adobe Creative Suite Production Premium for the pre-production phase of a planning-to-playback workflow. You can use the product to create the scripts anywhere and anytime using an online and offline environment; you can import existing scripts into Adobe Story; and you can work on multiple projects. Furthermore, Adobe Story will integrate the script information into the metadata of your end product. For example, it will be possible to search in a video for the scene in which the phrase “the beginning of a beautiful friendship” is used.

Another interesting project is the next version of the Adobe Flash Media Rights Management Server. If you don’t like the name, then you’ll be happy to hear that the name was changed to Adobe Flash Access, and the product will be available in the first half of 2010 under the name Adobe Flash Access 2.0.

The main features revolve around “robust protection for premium content” and “ease of deployment and integration”. The content will be protected against tampering or capture, and it will be possible to bind the content to an individual device, or to a domain (such as a household).

It will be available both as a box and as Software as a Service through a number of partners. Thus, you’ll be able buy a hosted solution for delivering protected video. The protected content will be played using future versions of Flash Player and Adobe AIR. Flash Access 2.0 supports MPEG 4 (H.264) and FLV content.

You can read more about Flash Access 2.0 here.

Finally, another company switched from Microsoft Silverlight to Adobe Flash Player for delivering its content on the web: ITV. ITV owns the largest commercial television service in the UK (in terms of audience share and revenue). Andrew Shorten has a post about this.

September 14, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

New Flex 4 samples in Tour de Flex

Holly Schinsky (from Adobe) created 22 Flex 4 samples that were added to Tour de Flex. More are planned. Check her blog for more about these samples, and check Tour de Flex to see the examples.

tour-de-flex

September 8, 2009 | Filed Under Flex | Leave a Comment

Book on Flex 4

I have to say that I love books, actually I love reading books. Although, lately, I find less and less time for reading literature, I still have fun reading a good technical or business book. For those of you who have the same passion, here comes a title: Hello!Flex 4 by Peter Armstrong (and as Flex 4 is closing in fast you have an additional incentive). I think this is one of the first books on Flex 4, and although it isn’t published yet, you can have early access to the book. This enables you to read the chapters as they are written and provide feedback to the author.

Here you can find info about the book.

September 3, 2009 | Filed Under Books | 1 Comment