Flash Player and Google’s Chrome integration

Today Google made available an initial integration of Flash Player with Chrome in the developer channel. This the result of the collaboration between Adobe and Google and more will come from this collaboration, so stay tuned.

From Chromium blog:

When users download Chrome, they will also receive the latest version of Adobe Flash Player. There will be no need to install Flash Player separately.

Users will automatically receive updates related to Flash Player using Google Chrome’s auto-update mechanism. This eliminates the need to manually download separate updates and reduces the security risk of using outdated versions.

With Adobe’s help, we plan to further protect users by extending Chrome’s “sandbox” to web pages with Flash content.

What is even more interesting is that we are working with Google, Mozilla, and others on a new API that will improve the integration between plug-ins and browsers. This API will replace the venerable NPAPI and it will make the browser/plug-ins combo much faster, reliable, and secure.

More about this on Flash Player Team Blog and here you can read about the current integration.

What do you think?

March 30, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Player | 9 Comments

Acrobat.com Workspaces

Today we launched a new release of Acrobat.com (hosted services for working with documents in a collaborative manner, including online conferences). Probably, the most important addition to this platform is Workspaces:

team members can store and organize project content online, and easily share and manage team access to files – eliminating the need to continually e-mail updates.
Teams can create Shared Workspaces to store and share a set of files related to a project, letting distributed team members work together across times zones and firewalls, with no special file sharing software or IT involvement necessary.
Workspaces help increase the productivity of project teams by letting members efficiently work together through central, easy-to-use Workspaces. Users simply access an online Workspace to review and collaborate on documents.

If you have the free account you can create one Shared Workspace, if you have Premium Basic you can create 20, and for those having Premium Plus the number of Workspaces is unlimited.

March 29, 2010 | Filed Under Others | Leave a Comment

White Paper: debugging Flex and PHP projects

I’ve just published a white paper on debugging Flex and PHP projects using Flash Builder 4, Eclipse PDT, and XDebug. You can read the article here.

In case you want to watch the webinar I did on the same subject today, you can go here. Thank you to all the people who joined my webinar!

PS. It seems we’ve come a long way when it comes to writing Flex applications. Out of 250+ registered people, only 60 decided to drop by. This is really good news, soon there will be no more bugs in our software :D

March 24, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Builder, Flex, PHP | 6 Comments

pocket BLU announced

Deluxe (the same company who’s providing technology solutions for Hollywood studios) announced pocket BLU:

The perfect companion to enhance the Blu-ray™ movie watching experience. pocket BLU™ enables your mobile device to communicate directly with your Blu-ray™ player to extend your movie experience in ways never before possible.

They have solutions for both desktops (Windows and Mac OS) and mobiles (iPhone, BlackBerry, Android, and soon Nokia). The clients for the desktops are created using Adobe AIR and Java.

March 23, 2010 | Filed Under AIR | Leave a Comment

Secret agencies catching up on Flash Builder 4

After we’ve launched Flash Builder 4, I received a number of strange calls. Luckily for me, I had my camera nearby and I was able to record the calls. I edited them a little bit, you don’t want to mess with the secret agencies :D. Here’s the video:

This is the catch: if you recognize who’s impersonating the American, English, and French agents, you get a Flash Builder 4 license (please don’t ask me about the Russian guy, I have a family :D). There are three guys to recognize and I’ll give away three licenses (for each correct guess you get a license; you can get only one right and you’ll get the license). Hurry up, there are only three licenses. Just drop a comment (make sure you fill in your e-mail address)! Good luck!

LATER UPDATE: There’s one more license for who’s getting right the person doing the American. I’ll give you a hint: he’s an American and he is part of the Flash Platform.

LAST UPDATE: I stopped the contest. The American is Bill Heil, platform product manager for Flash Builder, he’s overseeing server services area.

I know this one wasn’t easy at all. But then I never said it will be . Next time you should know better!

I did the raffle and the winner of the last license is Mr. Benz. Congratulations!

Thanks to everyone for taking part and I hope you had a great time!

March 22, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Builder, Video | 151 Comments

Get up to speed with Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4

There are bunch of online resources if you want to get up to speed with Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4. And because there’s a lotthat’s new, you may want to check these resources.

First of all, if you are new to Flex, we’ve updated the Flex in a week training free online course. Or, if you are in a hurry, use this Flex Test Drive to build a Flex application in an hour. Next, you can find here more about the new features of Flash Builder 4 and here you’ll find an introduction into Flash Builder’s Data-centric development feature. The pages for Flex and ColdFusion, Flex and PHP, Flex and Java, and Flex and .NET integration were updated too, so if you are using these technologies you may want to have a look.

If you want to quickly understand the Flex 4 framework here is a list of resources:

A brief overview of the Spark architecture and component set
Spark layouts with Flex 4
Introducing skinning in Flex 4
Differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 (overview of the Flex 4 architecture changes, migrating applications to Flex 4)
Chet Haase (Flex SDK engineer) has many videos explaining the new Flex 4 animations engine

March 22, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Builder, Flex | Leave a Comment

Debugging Flex and PHP projects webinar

We’ve just launched Flash Builder 4, our latest IDE for building RIAs with Flex and ActionScript. If you use PHP on the server side, you may want to join my webinar on Debugging Flex and PHP projects.

I will talk about the new features of Flash Builder 4 that can help you while debugging and I will show how you can use Flash Builder 4 with Eclipse PDT and XDebug. The webinar will be this Wednesday (March 24th), 11AM Central European Time. You can register here.

March 22, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Builder, Flex, PHP | 4 Comments

Flash Builder and Flex 4 are out

We’ve just launched Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4. In case you didn’t know, Flash Builder 4 is the new version of our IDE for Flex and ActionScript, formerly known as Flex Builder.

As a former Flex/Flash Builder engineer I will always have tears when a new version is launched. This time I think my tears are bigger because both the Flash Builder 4 and the Flex framework 4 represent huge advancements.

You can group the new features and improvements of Flash Builder 4 into three big groups:

increased productivity: much faster compiler (do I hear a hooray?), improved debugger, better intellisense, Flex unit testing support, network monitor, command-line build
data-centric development:support for ColdFusion, Java, PHP, REST, SOAP services, as well for generating the form based on value object
design-development workflow: Flash Catalyst – Flash Builder integration, round trip support between Flash Builder 4 and Flash Professional

You can read more about the new features here. You can grab a sixty-day evaluation copy of Flash Builder 4 from here or you can buy the product from here (it comes in two flavors Standard and Premium and it is available for Windows and Mac).

Many of the new features from Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst were possible due to the new features from the Flex 4 framework: the new component mode (Spark) which separates the business logic and data of a component from its appearance or skin, and the FXG interchange language, an XML language that is “understood” by Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder. You can read about the differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4 here.

And the last news I want to share with you is about the new version of the Flex.org website. Enjoy!

March 22, 2010 | Filed Under Flash Builder, Flex | 6 Comments

Air Analytics has become App Analytics

Maybe some of you have heard about Air Analytics, a project that enables you to record analytics for your AIR project. I blogged about this last year, and despite really wanting to use it myself, I never had the time to start another AIR project.

I the meantime they started to rewrite the core of the app and at the same time they changed the project name from Air Analytics to App Analytics. Although this project is still in beta I encourage you to give it a try and don’t forget to send your feedback if any!

March 16, 2010 | Filed Under AIR | 2 Comments

Photoshop: the first demo

Just a coincidence: yesterday I was talking about Creative Suite Buzz Hub and today you can watch a recreation of the first Photoshop demo John Knoll did 20 years ago (John is one of the Photoshop’s creators).

Enjoy!

March 16, 2010 | Filed Under Others | 1 Comment

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