FlashSURF: image recognition and tracking on video

FlashSURF is a porting to the Flash world of SURF (Speeded Up Robust Features) and other libs for image recognition and tracking of live videos. One of the tools used by Eugene to do this is Alchemy.

Here you can see two videos of FlashSURF in action:

The library home page is here. You can help Eugene by testing the library and submitting feature requests and feedback.

February 23, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment 

Open Screen Project, iPad, and buzzwords

A buzzword (also fashion word and vogue word) is a term of art or technical jargon that has begun to see use in the wider society outside of its originally narrow technical context by nonspecialists who use the term vaguely or imprecisely.

We are deluged with buzzwords on a daily basis, especially because we are working in the IT industry. Though, I think it has become more of an issue lately. I’m too young to know what ‘70 or ‘80 looked like, but I’d bet they were not even close to what we experience today.

I remember the late ’90s and early 2000 years. Everybody was talking about XML. And shortly after that, about his best friends XPath and SAX. It looked like the closest thing to the Holy Grail that humanity ever created. The lesson I learned? It seems we are far better at marketing or PR than applied sciences. We can convince a lot of people about a particular subject, although there is no “scientific” proof to backup our statements.

We are assaulted by new “things”. Some of these things are just buzzwords, while others are the real deal. And they have the potential to change your life for the better. The question is how do you pick up the right ones? When you are a developer or entrepreneur, you can look at these novelties as opportunities. An opportunity to do new kinds of projects (maybe you’ve gotten bored by doing the same thing over and over), an opportunity to create new products, or an opportunity to get rich :D . Unfortunately you are limited by time. You cannot pursue all of them; you have to pick a few.

How can you increase your chances of making a sound decision? I will tell you one method I use: when something new appears I try to look behind the marketing talk. One way to do this is to see if that “thing” is starting to deliver on its promises.

Let’s have a look at the Open Screen Project. When it was first announced, back in 2008, it looked like something extremely cool. At the same time, I bet many people thought it couldn’t possibly be a success. I mean its mission is to “enable consumers to engage with rich Internet experiences seamlessly across any device, anywhere”, but in order to do this, Adobe needed to work with companies from different industries (chipset manufacturers, telco companies, publishers, networks, and so on) and most likely with companies that otherwise compete against each other.

osp_partners

A little more than a year after the launch, the partners list looks amazing and the project is delivering on the promises: we have demoed a prerelease version of Flash Player 10.1 running on Net PCs and on a number of smartphones (Nokia, Motorola, Google, Toshiba, HTC, Palm). By working close with our partners we were able to tweak the Flash Player to make the most out of the hardware platform and at the same time increase battery life and decrease memory usage (early tests showed an improvement by 87% of rendering performance and a 55% reduction in memory consumption). This means you can watch video for 3.4 hours and play games for 6.5 hours on mobiles.

I think the key element to take away is this: all these partners realized that the Flash Platform can help their platforms to bring more value to consumers. And they realized that by working with Adobe they can be sure they will provide great experience to their users. Needless to say that Apple is not a partner of Open Screen Project and it doesn’t look like it wants to be anytime soon.

And this brings me to Apple’s latest device, iPad. Apple claims that iPad is “the best way to experience the web”. I think this is, to say the least, a big overstatement. Like it or not, plug-ins are part of the today’s web. Java, Flash Player, Silverlight, Unity 3D are examples of plug-ins that move the web forward and are used by millions of people out there. And what it happens when you surf to any of the web sites that depend on these plug-ins on an iPad? Nothing. Literally. Because iPad doesn’t support plug-ins. In fact you can’t even install another web browser. Apple is acting like a guardian or a “benevolent” dictator and decides for you what is good or bad for you. I said it before but I will say it again. Maybe because I was born and raised in a communist country I’m extremely sensitive to products or companies who “think” for me by limiting my liberty. And because I’m free, I can choose to buy or not. Thus, I am the proud user of a MacBook, but I don’t own an iPhone nor do I want to buy an iPad in its current incarnation.

PS. You can see here an illustration of how a big part of the web is seen on iPad.

Later Edit: Mike Chambers has a great take on another fear I have, fueled by the moves Apple has made lately.

January 29, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player, Others | 2 Comments 

Thoughts on RIA and user experience

Last December I presented the Flash Platform to a group of students. And much to my surprise they didn’t know what RIA is or what the common challenges are when developing web applications.

After the event, I spent some time thinking of a better way to explain RIA to people. I came up with this: imagine you are in a restaurant in a foreign country and you want to order something to eat. You get the menu and you see the first dish like this:

Dish #1
Water 150 ml, salt 2 gr, sugar 2 gr, 1 onion, 6 tomatoes, 1 red pepper, 1 spoon of olive oil, 1 spoon of vinegar

I bet you’d have a very hard time “understanding” this dish. But what’s the problem? You have all the ingredients, it’s plain English, so it should be easy. Or not?

Now imagine the same restaurant, with the same food, but this time the menu looks like this:

Gazpacho Soup
Ingredients: Tomatoes, Onion, Red Pepper, Olive Oil, Vinegar, Salt

Now we are getting somewhere! You know it is a soup. But still, you may have problems making up your mind, especially if it is your first time eating gazpacho. Maybe you could find additional info by asking the waiter.

Let’s see a third menu. The soup is listed like this:

Gazpacho (traditional Spanish tomato soup) – served cold
Ingredients: Tomatoes, Onion, Red Pepper, Olive Oil, Vinegar, Salt
Note: You can see this dish below or have a taste at the bar.

I think this time the menu is pretty much perfect. You know what it looks like, you know it is served cold, you can see the ingredients and you can even taste the dish before ordering.

Now, if I go back to my initial challenge, explaining what RIA is to newbie, I’d say that from all the web apps out there, RIA apps are the closest to the last menu.

I think this is happening a lot. It doesn’t matter how experienced you are, it helps to design the UI and workflows from the point of a view of a chef. Of course a chef would know pretty well what a dish looks like even just by looking at the ingredients. But most people  are not chefs. More likely we are like a tourist in a foreign country trying to figure out what the meal looks like. And making people ask a “waiter” to find their way around is simply a bad practice. They will run to another restaurant/country and stop buying your poorly presented food even if you have top quality ingredients.

We have come a long way from the beginning of the IT era. The hardware is amazing, the software is more powerful than ever. But still, when I look at applications around me I am surprised when I find myself thinking “Is this the best we can do?” I suspect that the constraints of the smartphone platforms coupled with the increasing demand for applications for them will lead us to better user experiences, especially for simple applications. And this experience will be “ported” back to desktop/web applications.

What does your perfect menu look like?

January 25, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 3 Comments 

WorkflowLab Beta is out

Last week we launched WorkflowLab Beta. This AIR application can help you to learn about workflows used by designers, developers, and program managers to create applications. You can build your own workflows and you can share them with others.

These are the new features:

The application was built using Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4, and Flex.

January 18, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 3 Comments 

Proof of life

worldmap_2009

Another year of evangelism has almost passed. I spent some time looking back these past days and I have to say it was a hell of a year! Of course, it was a lot of work. One day out of four or five I was on the road, sixteen times during weekends. I spoke to almost 3,000 people. With some of these people, I think I became more than acquaintances. If I have to pick only two favorite events,  they would be China and Israel. I had such great events and met amazing people over there!

But leaving out the events from Norway, Denmark, The Netherlands, UK, Portugal, Germany, Croatia, Poland, Italy, Romania or US wouldn’t be fair. Some of these events were driven by the PHP community (The Hague, Stuttgart, Hamburg, Munich, Frankfurt, London, Cluj, Copenhagen) others by Adobe User Groups (Amsterdam, Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Milan, Zagreb, Bucharest, Gdansk, Craiova, Timisoara, Lisbon, Iasi). Being among passionate people about technology who are so open minded is very refreshing.

As I said, being again amongst the PHP community is great. I truly value opportunities to talk with our community. And not because it is easier because they know the Flash Platform, but because of the quality of feedback they provide us. Some times it is harsh, but not any bit less helpful. Let me tell you a true story from the advertising industry to better illustrate my point. In the ‘90s, a sweets factory invented a process that enabled them to apply a thicker chocolate coating on the biscuits. The factory representative met his account manager from the advertising agency. And he starts talking about this new technology and how great it is, being unique in the whole world. After 20-30 minutes of peroration, the advertising guy interrupts his client quite bluntly saying: “All this is very interesting, but in the end it’s just a ***** biscuit!”.

Sometimes we think that this or that is a mind-blowing feature. And you, the community, help us to recalibrate our view and better understand what is important and what you really want. Nevertheless, I think our job of telling the Flash Platform story to the world has become increasingly easier. All the work done around the Flex Framework, the new tools, Flash Catalyst and workflows (designer-developer, Flash apps for iPhone) are some of the changes to account for this. Probably the biggest selling point is that the Flash Platform bridges the gap between different screen sizes/devices/OSes (Flash Player 10.1).

I want to thank you for attending my events or helping me with them, and for reading my blog. And I wish you happy holidays and may the next year be greater than this one!

December 23, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 9 Comments 

Flash Player 10.1 beta 2 is available

You can download the latest beta for Flash Player 10.1 (for PCs and Netbooks) from here. What’s new? The global error handler is there, and you’ll find debug versions this time too :)

Additionally, if you want to be among the first to try Flash Player 10.1 beta on a Palm Pre smartphone, you can register here.

December 18, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

Help shape the future of Flex, Flash Catalyst, and Flash Builder

… and get a chance to win a nice gift in the process!

If you have 15 minutes to spare, then click here to fill a survey. You can literally shape the future versions of our tools and frameworks.

I know this doesn’t matter , but just in case you want to know, the prizes are:

LATER UPDATE: Unfortunately, the prizes are only for those living in North America.

December 18, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 2 Comments 

First iPhone app built in the pre-release program is out

On December 11th, the “Boost your Brain” iPhone application became available on iTunes. This is the first application created in the pre-release program for Flash Professional CS5 that was accepted on iTunes. The creator of this game is Francis Bourre. You can find the application here.

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December 14, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 6 Comments 

Acrobat.com reloaded

We just launched a new version of Acrobat.com our online solution for office applications. There is a text editor (Buzzword), a spreadsheet editor (Tables), a presentation tool (Presentation), and a web conference tool (Meetings with screen sharing, voice and video). And because this is hosted in the Cloud, you can uset it wherever you have a web browser and Flash Player, you can upload files to your account and share them with other users, you can work on the same document at the same time (text documents, spreadsheets), and you can create PDF files from the documents you create using this suite, or from documents from your computer.

acrobat1

Acrobat.com is offered as a free product and premium one. Some of the differences between them are related to how many people can connect to your meeting room or how many PDF files you can create. But believe me, even the free version offers a lot of functionality. I’ve been using this suite for the past year and I’m quite happy.

acrobat2

acrobat3

There is an AIR application that enables “dragging and dropping files and folders from your local computer directly into your Acrobat.com account, and browsing, previewing, sharing or publishing files easily from your computer”.

If you have a BlackBerry or an iPhone you can try the Acrobat.com mobile application. Using this app you can view or fax documents from your account, and you can upload document images from your phone and have them automatically stored as a PDF (OCR is performed).

And finally if you run on Windows, you can install the Acrobat.com Outlook add-in. When you want to send a document to others, you can have the document uploaded to your Acrobat.com account instead of loading your mail server with this task. Or you can invite people to your meeting room right from Outlook.

Try it and don’t forget to drop a comment!

November 22, 2009 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment 

Cool 3D Game created in Flash made in Japan

My fellow Japanese evangelist, Teiichi Ota, showed us a cool Flash 3D game made in Japan. You can actually try it for yourself despite having the instructions in Japanese. Here is how to play the game (click here to open the game):

1) You get presented with 10 questions. You’re supposed to click on one of the three circles. Just click them randomly.
2) After the 10 questions you get to name your robot using 3 letters. This is easy.
3) Now you have a robot, with all the custom parameters automatically set.
4) You are presented with 3 buttons:

[Random Match]      [Search for Opponent from the Ranking List]
[Challenge the Boss (very strong)]

5) Click whatever button you want.
6) The fight starts. You get to click 3 buttons each once in the battle. Each button represents a special move or weapon.

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jp_2

The image quality is excellent, the design is very clean, and I have to say I’m really impressed by this game. Behind this application, there are IMG SRC/Non-Grid, Kaibutsu, and Masayuki Kido (he’s the one who created the 3D library used by this game).

Not so long ago, Mariko Nishimura (Field Marketing Manager with Adobe Japan) posted a series of articles (Community Power at Adobe MAX and What’s going on now in the Japanese Flash world) that shed light on the Japanese Flash developers. I think their work and especially the quality of their projects may be a surprise for many of us.

November 16, 2009 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment 

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