Archive for May, 2007
I just noticed the blurb on apple.com abot Apple TV and being able to view YouTube videos. It says it wont be out til June (coming soon i guess), but it has me thinking. It has me thinking of Adobe Media Player (as known as Philo) or AMP and the future. Adobe Media Player is an Apollo application with many great features for consumers as wells a content providers.
It would be cool to see Apollo runtime make it on to more hardware appliances like Apple TV and see the AMP be the standard way for devlierving the content. Just like what iTunes did for podcasts I see AMP having a big potential to doing the same for Video RSS aggregration. In that light a partnership between Adobe and Apple would be cool. I guess only the future will tell. Either way if we see FLV’s being played on Apple TV and the iPhone maybe really getting a Flash Player 9 on it then we might just be progressing nicely.
So video conversion is at the heart of it:
http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/video/tubetv.html
May 31st, 2007
Jame’s is going over the basics of RIA’s and Flex/Apollo. Showing of the auto insurance use case app outlining the reasons for RIA’s. He showed how do a Flickr mashup with Ely’s DisplayShelf with two lines of code. It show the power of using Flex components.
The second half of the meeting James talked on Cairngorm and Modules. Plenty of people showed up and there were plenty of questions. Turned out to be a real nice user group meeting.
May 25th, 2007
I came across the sys-con link about a series of Flex Bootcamps today. I hadn’t noticed it before. I found it off a sys-con marketing email about SOA World. It looks like the Flex Bootcamp are a series of one day intense training. The first is in New York, NY on June 24, 2007. There are 4 others listed below:
July 23, 2007 - Washington D.C.
August 27, 2007 - Austin, TX
September 23, 2007 - Santa Clara, CA
October 15, 2007 - Minneapolis, MN
The speakers are from Farata Systems, featuring Yakov Fain and Dr. Victor Rasputnis.
Is makes Flex a hot conference topic this year, which can only help Flex’s exposure and us as Flex developers.
May 15th, 2007
My year of speaking engagements are filling up. I am excited to be able to speak at both the 2nd installment of 360|Flex in Seattle and MAX in Chicago this year. 360|Flex Seattle is coming up soon and they are starting to fill out the speakers and sessions.
For 360|Flex Seattle I will be speaking on something that I have been working on for a while but with the recent changes in my life haven’t been able to finish for the wild yet. The topic is “Flex and the Logging Framework”, this is a topic I started really diving into when writing a couple chapters for the Professional Flex 2 book by Wrox. I believe the Flex logging framework is one of the most under used and understood features of the framework. Its way beyond just the old Flash “trace” method.
For MAX in Chicago I will be doing Flex and PHP hands on presentations. This should be interesting and fun. I am currently pulling together Adobe training material and starting to formulate the session.
Check out both 360|Flex Seattle and MAX, its a great place to meet many Flex Developers for a great time and learning opportunity you can’t pass up.
May 15th, 2007
This is probably old news but I figured I would bring it up again as I found it interesting. I can across a Flex ad on http://eclipsezone.com. The ad has a picture of Bruce Eckel, author of “Thinking in Java”, along with quotes in regards to his book and thinking in Flex. Something to that affect. This ad compared to some of the early ad’s where Flex 2 did a little comparing with other technologies seems a much better approach. The Flex 2 comparison with AJAX ad’s had to many issues to help people want to embrace Flex 2. But the ad with Bruce Eckel and his quotes about Flex are a nice developer to developer approach. It gives Flex alot more branding and trust then the first ads.
On a side note, it would be pretty cool to have a list of the Flex ads that go out to see/help with the campaigns. Any one know if there is a list?
May 5th, 2007
I am listening to Matt Chotin and Ely Greenfield talk about the Flex Open Source announcement again to some of the Community Experts. There are of course many questions and comments about what all this means. I’ll provide some of the insights I have gained by hearing the pitch a second time, an maybe a little of what it means to me.
There is mention of Charts and Advanced Data Grid that will still be closed source. So Adobe will still be keeping certain components closed and provide them with a license. In a sense this is creating a market place for components. And if the base is open then it will make more people apt to create better components. I hope this will help a real component marketplace take roots.
Governance is a part of this whole open source Flex plan. Although we wont really be able to interact with this governance model for a while, second half of 2007, we will be able to help out with submitted bugs into a database by June of this year. The second phase of the governance model will be fully implemented sometime in 2008, this is where we’ll probably see the opportunity to share our code to the code base.
What do they expect by doing this? Gain a bigger community of developers and help spread Flex. Also in that cycle it should make Flex a better product. I like David Zuckerman’s comments about taking on other products that will integrate Flex compilers and compete with the Flex Builder.
Another area of questions is about IP review of code submissions. This is an area where Adobe wants to engage the developers and figure out what they need to do to make it work.
So it was thrown out there that since the compiler is open you could right a VB interperter that would compile SWF….? I don’t think this is the point of the open sourcing but in some regards this does open the compiler for some interesting projects in the future.
When Flash Lite (Dave George is on the Flash Lite team, went from Flex Builder to Flash Lite) has AS3 then Flex compiler will look at providing tools to compile SWFs for that platform. That is a lot of factors and Flash Lite has its on issues, like device differences and speed of those devices. I’ll be surprised if they can get a good AS3 Flash Lite player that implements the full set of features of Flash Player 9. But everything changes with time.
The new Flex profiler will not be open sourced and will be tied to a license of Flex Builder. I am excited what the end profiler will be because its a much needed tool for many application testing and performance benchmarking.
May 2nd, 2007
