AIR 1.5 for Linux is shipping!
Good news for Linux users – AIR 1.5 is now available. You can get the release at http://get.adobe.com/air/ . This should fix issues for a number of Linux users who used apps like Tweetdeck and Twhirl that upgraded to AIR 1.5 before the Linux release is out.
MAX 2008 is going to rock!
I spent most of today watching the final keynote dress rehearsal for MAX 2008 at Moscone West. I’ve seen it all before, and I STILL got chills! We have a lot of cool stuff coming out today – AIR 1.5 launches, with the new SquirrelFish engine, support for encrypted SQLite, and full Flash Player 10 awesomeness inside. Speaking of Flash Player 10, a 64-bit version for Linux is now available on Labs. The long awaited Thermo release – now to be known as Adobe Flash Catalyst – will be available for Mac users at the show (and will be up on labs for Mac and Win in a few months). Along with Flash Catalyst is the Flex Builder 4 preview release, code named Gumbo. In addition to the streamlined design/develop workflow that it enables with Flash Catalyst, Gumbo will also have additional functionality to support data-centric development. For anyone who wants to understand where Adobe is headed with our programming tools, you’ll see it with Gumbo.
We also have new FMS releases available, and the cocomo api’s will be available on labs for Flex developers to add social functionality quickly and easily into their apps.
There are some cool surprises in store for all the MAX attendees – you’re going to have a great time, and walk away with all the latest and greatest on the Adobe Flash Platform. See you at MAX!
Oh, and see you at MAX Milan on December 1st – that’s going to rock too!
Flash Player 10 now available!
We shipped Flash Player 10 tonight – it’s now available on Adobe.com. In my nine years at Silicon Graphics I saw a lot of amazing 3D. With the support for 3D now in Flash, along with Pixel Bender filters, sound and awesome text functionality, developers are going to bring that same level of richness and immersion to the web. I was pretty blown away when I saw some of the stunning content that takes advantage of the new features – it’s amazing that you can do this in a browser! It’s really incredible what the Flash team accomplished in FP 10, and I can’t wait to see the apps and content that are going to come out on this. Justin Everett-Church has a great write-up on his blog.
Congratulations to the Flash Player team on another stellar release!
Adobe enables Flash searchability
Adobe announced today that we’ve been working with Google and Yahoo on technology that will allow Flash content, specifically SWF files, to be crawled and indexed by their search engines. Our new searchable SWF technology basically acts like a virtual human in that it moves through your applications, gets data from the server and captures text and data in context, and as such enables search engines to pull out much more meaningful information about the Flash content on a site than they ever could before.
The great thing is that this is retrospective – the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.
I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.
Ryan Stewart and Justin Everett-Church have great coverage on this, as does the Google Webmaster Central blog.
Adobe announces the Open Screen Project
Today Adobe announced the creation of the Open Screen Project. Adobe, along with a large number of partners including Intel, ARM, Marvell, Nokia, Verizon, NTT DoCoMo, NBC Universal, MTV Networks and many others, will be working to create an environment that enables designers and developers to create rich content and applications that can run across devices and desktops, without having to write different implementations for the different mediums.
Adobe’s part in all of this will be in releasing future versions of the Flash Player and Adobe AIR that run consistently across smartphones and other high-end devices, including set-top boxes, the way they run consistently across desktop operating systems today.
The reality is that both the content and application experience from desktop to device today is broken. If you send your friend a great video, chances are that they can’t view it on their phone. If you send that same video to a friend in many parts of the world, chances are that the ONLY way they could view that would be over their phone because they don’t have access to a computer…which means today they can’t view it. While Adobe is uniquely positioned to create runtimes that will deliver on the promise of consistent experiences across devices and desktops, we can’t do this alone. We need hardware partners to help optimize the chips and device manufacturers to help us get the runtimes onto their various systems. And we need to work with content developers to think about the best way to go about creating these experiences.
I think this is an exciting, visionary step for Adobe. As we look to the future, more web content is going to be viewed and used on devices than on desktops, and we need to ensure that it works in a logical, consistent fashion for consumers. This isn’t about “webifying” your client apps. It’s about making the web really work on devices.
As part of this announcement, Adobe has done three things today:
1) removed the licensing restrictions on the SWF specification and the FLV/F4V specifications. The SWF spec has been published since 1998, however you could not build your own Flash Player from it. That restriction has been lifted.
2) removed the licensing fees from future versions of the Flash player for mobile. While this does not affect Flash Lite, our current implmentation of Flash on phones, it will significantly open up the ecosystem around Flash in the future.
3) committed to publishing the porting layer for Flash.
Flash Lite is available on over half a billion phones today. We expect it to be on over a billion phones by 2009. That’s only partial penetration of the device market…and which will dwarf the desktop numbers. This is why it’s so critical that we make the web work consistently on devices as well. We’ve laid out the plans, but these are only the first steps – there’s a lot more to come.
Ryan Stewart has great coverage of this, and if you’re interested, you can hear the news directly from Adobe CTO, Kevin Lynch.
Adobe AIR 1.0 has launched!
I started interviewing at Adobe back in the summer of 2006. I wasn’t really looking for a job. I was gainfully employed consulting for some really awesome startups and was having a lot of fun. But I was persuaded to come in and talk with Kevin Lynch, and he told me about this project they were working on called Apollo.
If you have worked in technology your whole life, you realize that if you’re lucky you might get the opportunity to be at the ground floor of a technical breakthrough that will change everything, again. Five minutes into my conversation with Kevin, I knew Apollo had the potential to be one of those breakthrough technologies that would change the way people work and play with the web. And I knew that I had to be a part of it.
Eighteen months later, we’re launching AIR 1.0 with a fantastic set of customers on board, a robust runtime and phenomenal potential. I have never been so excited about a product (and I worked at SGI when it was fun). The ability of AIR to work with Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript and Ajax and create web apps with desktop power gives developers a ton of options. All along we had said that the cool thing about creating an innovative runtime is that we didn’t know exactly what developers would do with it…and they have lived up to our expectations. We’re seeing big partners like AOL, NASDAQ, the New York Times, eBay, salesforce.com, Yahoo!, and Nickelodeon making some amazing applications that really push the limits of the technology. We’re seeing startups like Pownce, Finetune, Acesis, Fabrik, and Konolive to name a few creating cutting edge applications that blur the line between the web and the desktop. We’re seeing big enterprise players adopting AIR for internal applications – from Business Objects to Sharp, they are using Flex to create web apps with incredible UI’s for visualizing large amounts of data, and putting them on AIR, giving them a lot of additional functionality. For me personally, having worked at Excite and AOL, the fact that both eBay and AOL were shipping their AIR applications on a beta runtime was a big testament to what we had achieved.
And the really cool thing is, there is a lot more just down the road a bit. We truly have just started.
In the big hubbub of the AIR launch, a lot of people have forgotten that the Flex 3 framework is being released to open source tomorrow, along with BlazeDS. I’m really excited about how the development community will enhance Flex. We’ve seen Flex just explode in the last year, and I fully expect to see that continue this year. The whole RIA marketing is growing really fast as more companies understand that usability drives revenue.
I love launching products. It’s sort of like having a baby (without the mess..but with the sleepless nights!) I’ve been lucky to have launched a number of cool things over the years. But AIR holds so much incredible promise for the future – it’s not just about increased revenue, or an update to an existing technology. The team truly has done something revolutionary that will drive major changes in how we all use the web, and the applications that we that we use every day. Congratulations to the AIR and Flex teams on an enormous accomplishment!
Great new Adobe Developer Connection launched!
The Developer Relations team released our all new version developer site, called the Adobe Developer Connection http://developer.adobe.com. It’s a major upgrade from our old site, much easier to use and with really great information.
Give the new site a spin, and get an account (it’s free). It’s the best way to stay on top of what’s happening with all the development products at Adobe. If you sign in you’ll get:
- ADC IntroNetwork – A social network just for developers
Find other developers by technology and product expertise. Connect with other professionals to find answers, partners, and jobs. Locate developers who are certified on Adobe technologies. - Newsletters – Adobe Edge and Developer Connection Update
Get the latest news on projects and techniques delivered right to your inbox. - Developer Desktop – An AIR application for Flex developers
Stay on top of updates to the Flex bug base through automatic desktop notifications, plus additional features that are coming soon. - O’Reilly book discount
Buy two O’Reilly Books, and get a third free, plus free shipping. For a limited time only. - Cookbooks
Share, rate, or comment on coding solutions for Flex and Dreamweaver. - Developer forums
Post questions and get answers from experts in the developer community.
The other thing to check out is the new AIR developer center in the ADC that’s loaded with a ton of new content for Flex, Flash and HTML/Ajax devs who want to create apps on the AIR runtime.
The other cool site that launched this week is the Adobe AIR Marketplace, part of the Adobe Exchange, which is a site where people can post their AIR applications. If you have an AIR app and want to get it shown, get it into the Marketplace. People can rate the apps and leave reviews, and the highest rated apps get higher placement, naturally. It’s a great community feature that will get expanded and integrated into the ADC over time.
Adobe MAX is Sold Out!
Wow, we sold out MAX this year! Our annual big fling for designers and developers is in Chicago this year, and we blew past the record for attendance a few weeks ago. This years MAX is going to be amazing – we have incredible speakers, great sessions and a really fun event planned. We’re seeing some great apps come in from our lighthouse partners and our developer derby participants, and it’s just incredible to see the innovation that’s been happening around the RIA space, particularly with Flex and AIR.
Looking forward to seeing everybody there next week. It’s going to be a LOT of fun!
Flex to be open sourced
Adobe just announced that we will be open sourcing the Flex 3 SDK under an open source Mozilla Public License (MPL). This will be a dual license model that will allow both open source and commercial developers to extend and enhance the Flex framework to suit their own needs and to contribute to the evolution of Flex. We will be releasing all of the components of the Flex SDK that developers need to create Flex applications, including the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger, and the ActionScript libraries that make up the core Flex framework. Flex Builder, which is the Eclipse-based IDE, is not part of the open source announcement. More information about the announcement can be found on the FAQ.
I’m very excited about this because I really believe it will help the adoption of the Adobe platform. Flex is a great software development framework – it really makes it significantly easier to develop rich internet apps. Prior to coming to Adobe I really wasn’t aware of Flex, and didn’t know too much about ActionScript. I had Mark Anders take me through a comparison of coding in ActionScript vs. FlexBuilder, and it was a huge eye opener. I don’t code, but I’ve spent many, many years doing product management for IDE’s, and I’ve seen my share of Ajax development so I have some perspective on this. Flex Builder is awesome. And the core Flex SDK is extremely powerful. It also makes it very easy to build Apollo apps – as we saw with Scrapblog, apps built in Flex move over to Apollo with incredible ease. We’re seeing some really interesting innovation with Apollo already, and with Flex moving to the open source community I think we’ll just see that innovation grow exponentially.
Apollo Camp takes off
I’m a bit late in posting something about this (so what else is new) but we hosted Apollo Camp last Friday night at the Adobe San Francisco facility. It was a very cool event. The Apollo Team was there, hot of the release of the bits, totally excited to see all the people who had come to learn about their product. The Flex Team was also there, ready to help people get going building their first Apollo apps and help out in general with Flex issues. Mike Chambers, Danny Dura and Christian Cantrell were cranking out new Apollo apps up until the last minute.
The greatest thing about Apollo Camp was the slew of new apps we’re starting to see. Leslie at jinsync.com has Gmail running on Apollo. Lee Brimlow has created a cool Apollo Twitter app. And Ely Greenfield from the Flex team has an awesome app called FlexBook that you have to see to believe.
Mike Chambers and Ted Patrick have been devoting a bunch of time to creating a great video site for Apollo and Flex, and all the most up-to-date videos can be found there at video.onflex.org. If you know Mike Chambers and Mike Downey, it’s worth hitting the site just to see the latest video from webDU in Australia, where they showcase the cartoons from nectarine. Be sure to watch all the way through to the last one!
