Coghead 2.0 flips to Adobe Flash and Amazon EC2
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The hosted application-assembly service moves to Adobe's Flex development environment and Amazon's hosted computing infrastructure.
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(InfoWorld) - Developers have high hopes for Adobe's newly named AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) software, but reservations remain about the technology's cross-platform capability and learning curve. Formerly called Apollo, AIR is described by the company as a cross-OS runtime enabling developers to use existing Web development skills to build Internet applications that can run on the desktop. Currently available in a beta release, it is due to ship by the end of the year. "I would say that [AIR] creates kind of a new breed of applications that are somewhere between traditional desktop applications and Web applications," said Lee Brimelow, senior design technologist at early AIR user Frog Design. "It kind of opens up a new world to Web developers. It enables Web developers to enter the desktop space," Brimelow said. "It allows you, for example, to take an online e-mail account like Yahoo Mail [and] you could have an offline app that allows you to read your mail and compose mails," he added. "One of the major [benefits] of AIR is that it is cross-platform so we donât have to worry about 'Is it a Mac thing, is it a PC thing?' " AIR is more or less a wrapper for Flash, said Gabor Vida, president of Teknision, a rich media application developer. But it is not tied to the operating system, he said. "We just deploy an AIR file, and it's the exact same file whether on a PC or on a Mac," with Linux support due soon, Vida said. AIR, however, is not as powerful as Microsoft's Windows Presentation Foundation or Apple's Cocoa development technologies, Brimelow said. With those, developers have fuller access to the user's hard drive and OS capabilities, he said. But WPF is only for Windows, Brimelow noted. One developer who said he has not tried AIR nonetheless was interested in it. AIR could be an improvement compared with third-party solutions for running the Flash projector offline, such as FlashJester, said Kurt Suchomel, founder of the Vermont Flash User Group and a developer at Draftfcb, an ad agency that also develops Web sites. "Itâs exciting to me to hear that there's a possible product that's something similar to that," but could offer more versatility, Suchomel said. But he expressed concerns about how effective AIR will be on different operating systems, wondering if there will be "possible gotchas on each platform." AIR is supposed to be identical on the Mac and on the PC, Suchomel said. "I would just hope that it is truly that way," he said. "It will "be interesting to see what the bugs are. "My natural concern is the learning curve for developing with Apollo, even though it does support all the major Web technologies [HTML, JavaScript, CSS, XHTML, and Flash]," Suchomel said. "I am looking forward to developing in Apollo since it gives me a way to create one rich Internet application and run [it] on multiple operating systems." Another developer who also had not experimented with AIR expressed similar curiosity. "It just seems like it's going to be really cool," said Steve Farwell, marketing director at Traveland USA, which sells recreational vehicles. He also is host of the Orange County Flash User Group in Southern California, or OCFlash. Farwell said he liked the idea of combining Web applications with desktop applications that can work with the local file system.Â  AIR could have benefits in applications such as hospital systems, where a physician has intermittent connectivity to the network, he said. Self-employed developer and AIR beta user Robert Hall, manager of the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group, reiterated what Adobe said about the project. "It makes it really easy to take your existing Web apps and all the skills you have â¦ and repurpose them for desktop apps," he said. "For me, the big benefit is I'm able to leverage my existing skills that I've been working on for years," Hall said. As the product still in a beta form, the feature set is not complete, Hall cautioned. AIR "fills a major, major niche," said Gordon Clarke, manager of FlexUserGroup.org.Â  Developers can move to the desktop and create client-server applications without having to learn a new language, he said. Sometimes-connected applications offer advantages, Clarke said. "If you want to have rich media, it's better to have a lot of it coming from your desktop than having to download it off the Web," he said. Clarke likened AIR to the iPod, where music can be downloaded or heard on the Web, and Microsoft Outlook, which lets users browse e-mail offline. At effectiveUI, which developed the eBay Desktop shopping application using AIR, the president of the company said AIR could supplement or displace Java in different instances. AIR could be used to help build GUIs (a weakness for Java), while Java could reside on the back-end server, said effectiveUI President Anthony Franco. "One of the things that Java developers struggle with is developing interfaces," Franco said. "[AIR] could replace Java in the GUI development of an application." Adobe's Flex and Flash are part of the Apollo, or AIR, framework, Franco said. But AIR differs from Microsoft's new Silverlight technology, in that Silverlight is more of a competitor to the Flash Player, he said. AIR has enabled effectiveUI to develop the type of application sought by clients and to do so within budget, Franco said. The advent of AIR also will mean development of office suites running on AIR, said Chris Charlton, group manager of the Los Angeles Flash Users Group and a Web architect at Adobe solution provider Almer/Blank. Packaged software, chat applications, and business tools will result, he said. AIR applications are going to pull some market share from existing applications that have been on a single platform only, Charlton said. Adobe's new technology represents perhaps the next evolution of how people engage with the Internet,Â  providing functions of theÂ  browser without all the overhead, said Michael Lebowitz,Â  CEO of Web design firm Big Spaceship. The firm is using AIR to build a media center application for energy drink company Red Bull. "The browser right now is sort of monolithic. It's a one-stop shop for anything you might do on the Web," Lebowitz said. "The problem with that is that's not always effective."
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Aspiring animators on a budget may want to take a look at the latest version of AdobeÂs video editing program, Adobe Premiere Elements 3.0.
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Adobe debuted updates to both its Adobe Photoshop Elements photo editing software and Premiere Elements video editing suite on Tuesday, which it billed as major upgrades to both products. The company also rolled out a photo sharing site called Showcase.
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(InfoWorld) - With itsÂ acquisition of Macromedia in late 2005, Adobe Systems won control of the Flash technology that has become a nearly ubiquitous way of authoring and viewing interactive and multimedia content on the Web. Now, the 25-year-old software company with deep roots in creative applications and an iron grip on electronic documents thanks to its de facto-standard PDF document format, has its eye on development and content presentation across all sorts of platforms and devices. President and CEO Shantanu Narayen recently sat down with a group of IDG journalists to talk about the opportunities that mobile platforms and digital video present for Adobe. Joined by David Mendels, senior vice president of the enterprise and developer solutions business unit, Narayen also described the company's hopes for its multiplatform runtime environment, code-named Apollo, that is designed to run Web applications using Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and PDF and is due for public beta release later this year. IDG: What are the key areas of growth for Adobe? Narayen: Clearly, the creative customer is still a very important customer to us, and there what we're trying to do is enable them to create content across print and the Web, but also increasingly video and wireless. We're seeing a tremendous explosion of digital video, which we think is a huge growth area for us. And also wireless because creating content for wireless devices is very hard. So in the next version of our Creative Suite applications, we're going to be looking to dramatically expand how we can help people create content. This year, we're going to be releasing Creative Suite 3,Â which will be the first generation of applications that combines products like Photoshop and Illustrator from Adobe and Dreamweaver and Flash from Macromedia. We think Apollo is going to enable a new generation of applications that combines the power of the desktop as well as the interactivity and connectedness of the Internet. IDG: Tell us more about your plans for the mobile data arena. Narayen: We work a lot with handset manufacturers and operators. The current offerings we have include Flash Lite on the client. Handset manufacturers or operators can provide a really compelling experience, and people using these phones can browse the Web and get Flash content. What's even more exciting is that we now have a new service we're offering through operators called FlashCast.... What we've introduced is a new metaphor, a TV-channel-like metaphor, which allows you to have, say, weather or news or sports or specialized channels. You now have the ability to subscribe --Â all the data is automatically sent down to your phone. We've introduced FlashCast services in conjunction with [NTT] DoCoMo. This server-based offering, it's more subscription based, [so] it's an ongoing revenue stream, for us as well as for the mobile operator. Moving forward ... Apollo, the runtime will also be mobile-aware. The benefit to a developer or an enterprise or to an author is you author once, and you have the runtime everywhere, you have the ability to run applications everywhere. So that clearly is why we think that we have the ability to provide all the authoring, all the runtime, and a way to deploy it in a scaleable way in an enterprise. IDG: How do you see your competitive stance versus Microsoft right now, especially with its Expression Web tool? Narayen: We certainly compete with Microsoft; however we've competed with them in the past, and I think that's an important thing to also remember. We competed with them in print technology very early on. We competed with them in fonts, we competed with them in imaging for many years. We competed with them on the Web for years,. Dreamweaver versus Frontpage. You know, as it relates to the creative community, we still believe we understand that creative community. And that community wants a heterogeneous environment. Mendels: The fundamental issue is cross-platform. There's almost no one I talk to who doesn't want to either be heterogeneous and work on Linux or Mac or Windows, or want the option in the future to do that.... If developers want to build things, express themselves heterogeneously across the Web, across devices, you know, that isn't Microsoft's strength. They've got a lot of strengths, but that's not their strength. Their big opportunity is people who have a Microsoft end-to-end environment. IDG: Adobe has a long history as a software company -- over the years, how have you seen business models in software change? Narayen: If you think about the company, it's actually changed very dramatically over these 25 years. We started with a completely royalty model. With Postscript, we had HP and IBM and Apple as large customers, and that was the business model, royalty based. And we built a very successful applications business on top of that. And then we moved into the enterprise, and that's license revenue, it's consulting services, etcetera.... So we already today have some very different business models all sort of coexisting in our overall company's financial model, which is clearly very successful and profitable one. Clearly, we see the trend toward both delivery of software through hosted mechanisms and subscriptions and the ability to monetize it differently. Second is the need for us, for a certain set of customers, to not monetize it by charging them for it but through other advertising mechanisms.... It's the spectrum of delivery and business models. Piracy is huge for us in other countries, and that [advertising-supported model] is a way in certain countries to also monetize. IDG: What might be some applications you could offer in this way? Narayen: Well, take video. With YouTube, right now people just have the ability to upload a video. Wouldn't it be really cool if we provided something that enabled people to do basic video editing through a hosted service, or image editing through a hosted service, or even run your entire enterprise offerings as a hosted service? (IDG News Service Senior Writer China Martens and Infoworld Assistant News Editor Paul Roberts joined Heichler in conducting the interview in Boston.)
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Apollo runtime is dubbed 'Adobe AIR' and due for testing along with Flex update.
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New service lets Adobe customers transmit documents for commercial production.
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Mike Potter shines a spotlight on a new web conferencing system created by Vyew that's being set up as a competitor to Adobe's Acrobat Connect.   Vyew allows you to share and collaborate on documents, including Microsoft Office files, photos and videos. However, unlike Connect, Vyew is based on Flash and PHP, and uses AMFPHP for messaging between the client and the server.   They (Vyew) compare themselves to Adobe's product in an included comparison chart. You can also check out video demos of the application in action or check out some screenshots to get a feel for how it works.
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Plus: More Office holes, and a major Adobe problem that affects all browsers.
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(InfoWorld) - Adobe Systems on Tuesday is announcing Adobe Captivate 2, an upgraded version of its Flash-based software for developing computer-based demonstrations and interactive simulations. Geared to e-learning professionals, trainers, and others who provide computer-based instruction, Captivate 2 generates interactive content in Flash and does not require users have programming knowledge or multimedia skills, Adobe said. New in version 2 are workflow enhancements for developing scenario-based training that visually branches out to different learner paths depending on the user's choices. A simulation wizard in version 2 helps in developing "soft skills" simulations, adding content to placeholder slides and setting up branching with point-and-click functionality. Soft skills are skills relating to the ability to communicate with other people, such as in customer support, Adobe said. A placeholder slide is an empty slide to help authors get started with presentations. A zoom capability in version 2, meanwhile, lets users zoom into specific areas of the screen. "Adobe Captivate is a tool that empowers people," to do things they could not do before, said Silke Fleischer, product marketing manager for Adobe Captivate. Flash video can be imported into Captivate presentations. Captivate 2 content can be integrated with other e-learning systems such as Macromedia Breeze, Macromedia Authorware, and Questionmark Perception. Available on October 5, Adobe Captivate 2 costs an estimated $599. Registered users can upgrade for an estimated price of $299.
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A few days after Microsoft released its Silverlight 1.0 plug-in, Adobe Systems has begun to disclose new features in its upcoming Flash Media Server 3. Many observers see Silverlight as being positioned as a major competitor to Flash and Adobe&#39;s other media technologies.
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Adobe Systems Inc.'s Flash video, the format that made Web video a hit, is coming to a version of Flash for mobile phones.
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Mike Potter has posted about an event happening this Thursday (June 28th) - a webcast to help developers learn more about integrating Flex and PHP.   Are you interested in building rich Internet applications with PHP as the backend data service? Join me this Thursday as I present at an Adobe online e-seminar. The session is scheduled for July 28th, at 11:00 AM Pacific Time.   You'll need to register for the event to attend and you'll get info on "why rich internet applications" and some examples of companies using it in their web-based applications.
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On the ParanoidFerret.com blog today, there's a new tutorial showing how to get the Adobe Flex technology to talk happily with PHP over a JSON interface. Their example is a simple form that, given a person's information, finds matches from a backend XML.   To make sure we don't get too stuck in a rut with our tutorial posts I decided to branch out a little bit and talk about Adobe Flex 2.0. I recently spent a lot of time figuring out how to do this. Basically what I am going to go over here is how to use php and json to send data to your flex application, and then how to use that data in Flex.   He includes an example of the app in action plus all of the PHP and Flex code you'll need to make it work on your system. Since Flex has built-in JSON functionality, it makes it simple to query the resource and pull back the information that matches.
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Blog: The web and the desktop are increasingly blurring, as Adobe's Apollo project demonstrates.  Unfortunately, open source licensing remains in beta while we're about to go into production....
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Here's a screen shot of the HTML source.  Looks like it's trying to serve some kind of ActiveX control. Happy to be using a Mac.  PS: Scoble just showed up and TM works on his cell phone so there's something weird going on.
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InfoWorld - Opera Software&#39;s plans to beef up its browser so that Adobe Flash Player-like functionality will be intrinsic to the program are a move in the right direction.