Coghead 2.0 flips to Adobe Flash and Amazon EC2
103541
The hosted application-assembly service moves to Adobe's Flex development environment and Amazon's hosted computing infrastructure.
578636
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.
85919
Rounds up the collaboraters with V.8 Adobe's cash cow, Acrobat, gets a makeover in November, upgrading a version number to 8.0, and gaining a new companion.â¦
604793
At least someone likes Eclipseâ¦ Interview Along with Scott Guthrie, Mark Anders was one of the fathers of ASP.NET. Then he led the Flex Builder team at Macromedia. Now at Adobe, heâs in charge of making Flash a development platform for rich Internet applications.â¦
507022
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.
236135
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.
769480
(InfoWorld) - Adobe Systems plans to launch the beta of a new runtime later this month that will allow rich Web-based applications to run offline, technology that could threaten the popularity of programming platforms such as Java and Microsoft's .NET. The release of a developer preview of the runtime, dubbed Apollo, will coincide roughly with an ApolloCamp event Adobe will hold in San Francisco on March 16, according to sources familiar with the company's plans. ApolloCamp will give developers a chance to kick the tires of the new runtime. Apollo delivers on the promise of technology Macromedia originally introduced in 2003 called Macromedia Central.Â Adobe purchased Macromedia in December 2005. Macromedia Central was an environment that allowed Flash-based applications to run offline so they didn't need to make continuous calls to servers on the back end, allowing them to run more quickly and efficiently. "Macromedia Central was an early [version] of Apollo," said Pam Deziel, director of theÂ Platform Business Unit for Adobe. Apollo will allow developers to take applications built not only in Flash, but also in HTML, AJAX, and other Web development languages and create them to run locally on a user's desktop, she said. According to Sean Christmann, senior developer at EffectiveUI -- a Denver-based company that has had an early look at Apollo -- the technology acts as a wrapper, which makes it easy to take code from an existing Web application, wrap it in Apollo, and transfer it to the desktop. The key to making this transfer is Adobe's Flex Builder tool, which developers can use to wrap their code with the technology, Christmann said. The Apollo runtime must be installed on the desktop or embedded directly in the application to enable it to run locally, similar to how the Flash player runs Flash applications in the browser, Deziel said. Apollo will be available for free to both users and developers. Anthony Franco, founder and managing partner of EffectiveUI, said Adobe plans to use Apollo to promote revenue-generating products, such as Flex Builder and Flex Data Services, which connects the Flex application framework to back-end data and business intelligence. It also could lure developers away from Java and languages used to develop .NET applications on Windows, Christmann said. "A lot of users start learning programming online, and now they don't have to learn a new language when they want to go to the desktop," he said. Though Apollo is not available for public release yet, EffectiveUI has used it to build a desktop application for eBay so its auction site can run on the desktop without being connected to the Internet or accessed through a browser, Christmann said. EBay will not confirm or deny the existence of the application. There are several benefits for companies with popular Web sites to also have a desktop version that can run in Apollo, Christmann said. It allows companies to interact directly with their users without having to access a browser, and it also takes a load off of their back-end servers if users can access their applications offline. Users benefit from running applications on Apollo, too, he said. If they want to put new products up for an eBay auction, for instance, they can type all of the information about the items and post photos of them while they are offline, then access the Internet later and have that information automatically uploaded to the site, Christmann said. Franco said Adobe plans to release a final version of Apollo in the third quarter, and eBay likely will go live with its desktop application then. Adobe's Deziel would only say that the company plans to release Apollo in the second half of the year.
737427
As Mike Potter mentions in his new blog entry, Flash, Flex and PHP just got a great leg up when it comes to using the combination:   Patrick Mineault, who runs the AMFPHP project, has released a new version of AMFPHP 1.9, beta 2 now. However, the real big news in his blog post was the news that there is now a C based AMF extension for PHP.   According to the test data Patrick gives, the speed jump is well worth implementing the different functionality - a 100% boost, in fact, than the standard PHP version of AMFPHP. Check out Patrick's blog for the rest of these amazing stats.
713406
(InfoWorld) - Honing in on browser incompatibility issues in Web development, Adobe Systems on Thursday is launching CSS Advisor, a Web site that documents these problems and offers solutions. The site is geared to users of Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) and features best practices for Web page development. "With CSS Advisor, the problem that we set out to solve is that people are wasting a huge amount of time trying to make their pages look the same across different browsers," said Kenneth Berger, Adobe product manager for the company's Dreamweaver technology. CSS Advisor provides a central resource to show developers what they might run into, such as dealing with content overflow on an Internet Explorer page that was not a problem with Firefox, Berger said. Developers can access lists of issues focusing on margins, he said. About 30 browser issues are featured now. CSS itself has introduced a lot of compatibility issues, Berger said. "There's a major change in Web design, with people changing from table-based layout to CSS layout," said Berger. But CSS offers advantages such as making pages more lightweight so they download faster. CSS pages also are more searchable and more easily accessible by disabled persons. Adobe has seeded CSS Advisor with a lot of information but the community-driven site allows for user input as well by anyone with an Adobe account. Adobe is administering the site to prevent inaccurate information from being posted. Adobe plans to integrate its Dreamweaver technology with CSS Advisors next spring. "What you'll be able to do is automatically detect top issues within Dreamweaver proactively," Berger said. Dreamweaver is Adobe's HTML-based tool for building rich Internet applications that do not use the company's Flash technology. CSS Advisor is a "great idea," said Dreamweaver user Jason Brightman, Web director at Harris Publications. Serving as central repository, CSS Advisor gathers together information now scattered over hundreds of sites, Brightman said. Developers are running into all sorts of cross-browser compatibility issues these days, Brightman said. "A lot of them have to do with IE 6, which is not a very CSS-compliant browser," he said. CSS itself allows for faster development of Web sites and it separates design and content layers to make it easier to redesign or update, he added. Also on Friday, Adobe is announcing version 1.4 of its Spry Framework, which features a JavaScript library to help developers get started using AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML). "Essentially, the problem with AJAX is that it's really not as easy as folks would like, to get started with," Berger said. Version 1.4 is a preview release that features a higher level of maturity than the initial 1.0 release offered in April. Developers can use version 1.4 in production systems. Featured in version 1.4 are form validation widgets, enabling pages to feature forms that can be validated by users on an e-commerce site. Data such as credit card information can be validated. A general release of Spry is expected with the 2007 availability of Dreamweaver.
75537
No patch in sight Researchers from Google have documented serious vulnerabilities in Adobe Flash content which leave tens of thousands websites susceptible to attacks that steal the personal details of visitors.â¦
258872
(InfoWorld) - Adobe's ColdFusion software for building Internet applications and Web sites is being improved with Microsoft .Net support, enabling .Net objects to be invoked from within the ColdFusion language. A public beta of ColdFusion 8, accessible here, is to be offered on Wednesday. The general release is set for mid-year. Version 8 is the first Adobe-branded release of the former Macromedia technology. ColdFusion is a server-side Java application; it is partnered with a markup language for writing ColdFusion applications. .Net support in the upcoming version 8 bridges the Java and Microsoft worlds. "Customers don't need to select one technology to the exclusion of the other," Tim Buntel, Adobe senior product marketing manager, said. Also featured in ColdFusion 8 is generation of PDF documents as well as capabilities for working with PDF forms and manipulating existing PDF documents. Support for the JBoss application server has been added, also. For developers, Adobe is adding interactive debugging based on the Eclipse IDE. A Server Monitor capability, meanwhile, identifies bottlenecks in the server. Adobe's Flex rich Internet application technology and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) components are leveraged in the new product for integration of complex environments with intuitive interfaces, Adobe said. ColdFusion differs from Flex in that Flex is a client-side technology featuring a language and compiler to convert code to Flash content. With ColdFusion, the server-side technology can integrate with databases and Java and .Net objects while also offering text searching. However, ColdFusion also can generate an HTML interface for Web applications. The ColdFusion upgrade puts to rest questions about Adobe's commitment to the technology after acquiring Macromedia, said analyst Ray Valdes, research director for Internet platforms and Web services at Gartner.Â  "People may have wondered if Adobe appreciated ColdFusion, and I think they do. I think it's part of their enterprise software strategy," Valdes said. While Adobe recently offered the Flex software development kit to the community at large via open source, there are no plans to open-source ColdFusion. This stance gives the company the ability to make certain ColdFusion integrates with other Adobe technologies, Buntel said.
284359
Here's an interesting Howto on connecting FlickrFan to the Mac desktop. I love this stuff.  Here's a movie that demonstrates this coolest of hacks.
647262
In a new post to his blog today, Mike Potter talks about the WebORB for PHP software and a new feature based on Adobe technology - a Flex-based console.   [It] includes a service browser, as well as a number of useful examples, showing both the client side code (in Flex) and server side code in PHP. The getting started guide (again, built into the console or available on the web) provides a good tutorial for creating your first WebORB powered application.   He likes the project overall, but notes a small issue he has with starting a new project - a prompt to use the Flex Data Services. Overall, though, he has high hopes for the future of the project.
640900
Mike Potter is happy to announce that Adobe is officially a "Gold Sponsor" of the upcoming Zend/PHP Conference & Expo as well as a mention of his involvement at the conference.   I'm happy to announce that Adobe will be sponsoring the Zend / PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose in late October.  I have a speaking session there on Rich Internet Applications, and we'll have a booth where we'll be showing off integrating Adobe Flex with PHP, using open source tools such as AMFPHP or WebORB from the Midnight Coders.   He also reminds potential conference-goers that the Early Bird discount is still in effect (until September 15th - just two more days!) to get the dicsounted price. Head over and register today!
578385
Blog: In a major revamp, Adobe LiveCycle customers can choose between PDF or Flash for Web-based work-flow applications.
753808
I've not made much of a secret of the fact that I've been working on a new product, and am getting close to offering it as a public pre-alpha thing for Mac users only.  It's fairly Flickr-centric, sucking photos down from Flickr in a variety of ways and pushing up photos in others. Like Radio 8 and Google Reader, it has the ability to maintain an output feed of stuff you want to pass on to friends and associates. As I was developing this I wished that Flickr had the ability to store simple text files, because I needed a place to put an RSS 2.0 feed with enclosures on behalf of each user. Of course I used Amazon S3, but I had to implement my own lightweight identity system so that Juan couldn't accidentally or intentionally replace Alice's feed. If only every user had a place where they could store stuff that's net accessible so that once and for all we could stop inventing new places. I was inspired to write about this when I read an Uncov review of Pownce where they reminded me that they were reselling S3 storage at a big markup. What if the users had their own S3 storage that they paid for themselves?  Then it occurred to me to ask if people thought S3 could be an end-user thing. I'd like to find out, so if some non-technical users who have Amazon accounts would like to try setting up an S3 account, I'd be interested in hearing how it goes. Here's an idea of how you get started. 1. You must already have an Amazon account. Nothing special about it, if you buy shirts or books or stereo equipment from Amazon, you use the same account for S3 storage. Already that's pretty easy, millions of people have Amazon accounts, right? 2. Visit this page on Amazon, ignore all the stuff about objects and buckets. In the right margin is a big button that says "Sign up for this web service." Click the button. A very familiar page appears, asking you to sign into your Amazon account as if you were going to buy something (you are!). 3. From there, I'm not sure what you see, because I have already enabled my account. But the end result of signing up is that you get two strings with weird names: Your Access Key ID and Your Secret Access Key. Any software that would save a document in S3-space on your behalf would need these two strange strings. In return each document would have a URL just like any other document on the web. Nothing strange about that.  4. You could also use the space to store stuff using an FTP-like app that runs in Firefox called S3 Organizer. It's about as hard to use as the Mac Finder or the Windows Explorer, i.e. it's no challenge for a moderately geeky user. The cool thing about it is that you're able to share anything you upload into S3 space with anyone else. You can even use BitTorrent to access any file to save you bandwidth bills and distribute the load round the net. It's all very easy to do, imho. As a developer who has to pay for his users' storage needs I would very much like to see users learn how to use S3 to store their stuff, so I can focus on writing software and fixing bugs instead of paying to store your stuff.
36424
Complaints roll in claiming a problem in which QuickTime 7.4 disables Adobe After Effects.