Flash Player Confusion, Flash or No Flash

The image should explain it all!  (I was just looking at the video a few page clicks before this came up)

Add comment September 15th, 2006

Google Finance is JavaScript and Flash, Adobe says so!

When Google introduced their new Finanace website a while back of course wanted to figure out what they where using.  I do my normal first test of using the right click button on the mouse to see if Flash comes up in the context menu.  Sure enough Flash is used on the charting part of the Google finance.

The more interesting part of this and why I bring it up is that Adobe actually acknowledges Google’s use of JavaScript and Flash in a technical document.

Also, because Flash Player is integrated with the browser runtime environment, developers can easily deliver applications that combine user interface logic written in JavaScript with components or entire applications written in Flex. For example, Google is taking advantage of both JavaScript
and Flash as part of its Google Finance site. As shown in Figure 12, the application uses common Ajax techniques to update news stories and highlight news items, while the interactive chart takes advantage of the Flash Player runtime to draw a rich data visualization and show the connections between breaking news and changing stock price.

Adobe® Flex™ 2 (page 18)
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/whitepapers/pdfs/flex2wp_technicaloverview.pdf

They go on to talk about the Flex-Ajax bridge (FA Bridge) but nothing concrete that Google is actually using FA Bridge.  Either way its nice to see high profile uses of Flash and JavaScript/AJAX being referred to in an Adobe’s technical white paper.

2 comments September 15th, 2006

Flex Features Marketing Material

After following the Flex 2 depoyment since the beging Alpha I kind of ignore marketing materials.  But today I found myself on Adobe’s site looking at the Flex product page.  Click on the “View the Flex Feature Tour” button found on most Flex product pages.

The presentation gives you an overview, popular case studies from SAP and Yahoo, and a bit about why its helpful to developers.

This is a nice quick marketing piece if you want to present the technology to business people not aware of Flex.

Add comment September 15th, 2006