Mark Anders on Flash development
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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¦
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Blog: Adobe Systems issues three critical security updates designed to address vulnerabilities in its Flash Player.
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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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Photo flash memory leader focuses on the masses.
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COMMENTARY -- Jim Allchin has a thing about video. The Windows chief is a brilliant engineer, keeper of Redmond&#39;s crown jewels, and easily the most powerful person at Microsoft after Bill Gates and Steve Ballmer.
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Blog: In the Official Google Webmaster Central blog, the Flash-based image replacement technique sIFR is given the thumbs up.
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Blog: A look at the video conversation site Friction.TV
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InfoWorld - Adobe Systems&#39; Flash video, the format that made Web video a hit, is coming to mobile phones.
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Search Engine Friendly Design and Coding (Especially Flash)  Its been almost a year since I attended a session of this nature. I was not too impressed last time, so I am hoping things have changed within the year. Brett introduces the panel, by saying its the first time WMW is doing ...
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Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer announced the public beta availability of Popfly, the company&#39;s mashup creation tool for non-technical users introduced in alpha form in May.During Ballmer&#39;s appearance on Thursday at the&#160;Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco, a Microsoft staffer gave a demo of Popfly in which he showed how the tool can be used to create applications for sites like Facebook&#39;s social network and Microsoft&#39;s Windows Live Spaces without the need to write code.Popfly is built on Silverlight, a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering video and interactive applications. Silverlight is Microsoft&#39;s answer to Adobe&#39;s ubiquitous Flash technology.While acknowledging that Adobe has done &quot;a good job in rich media&quot; with Flash, Ballmer nonetheless said there are plenty of opportunities for Microsoft to innovate as Web applications &quot;continue to get richer and richer.&quot;Speaking at the same event on Wednesday,&#160;Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen downplayed Silverlight&#39;s threat to Flash, saying Flash has been around for 10 years, is widely adopted and has a broad ecosystem.Ballmer, who answered questions from conference chair John Battelle and from attendees, said that the clamor over Web-hosted office productivity applications like Google Apps and suites from Zimbra and Zoho as major threats to Microsoft Office is misguided.In the communication and collaboration software space, Microsoft is focused on making its applications accessible in whatever way customers require, and that the issue isn&#39;t a black-and-white opposition between packaged and hosted software.He acknowledged that Microsoft pays attention &quot;to what the other guy is doing&quot; and is receptive to implementing good ideas in its products.As the interest in hosted applications rises, critics have said Microsoft has been slow in responding with a hosted alternative to Microsoft Office, and that it risks missing an opportunity that others are eagerly pursuing.Asked if he was getting impatient with Microsoft&#39;s search and online advertising efforts, where the company lags far behind leader Google, Ballmer said he&#39;s confident his company will continue to improve in the coming years as it focuses on several key areas.For example, Microsoft will continue improving its search engines, because they are key for generating online ad revenues. It will also continue to strengthen its consumer communication services, like webmail and instant messaging.Key as well is having a strong ad platform, which is why&#160;Microsoft spent $6 billion on aQuantive, and a strong ad syndication business, he said. Ad syndication will go through a major transformation in the next five years as the focus shifts from matching ads based on a Web page&#39;s content to based on users&#39; online behavior, he said.Ballmer declined to comment when asked about rumors&#160;Microsoft is buying a stake in Facebook, but he said&#160;the companies&#39; existing online ad partnership&#160;is going very well.He dismissed questions about the consistent speculation that&#160;Microsoft might buy the embattled Yahoo, saying Microsoft is confident in its strategy to at some point generate 25 percent of its revenue from online advertising. &quot;We believe in our independent path. We like what we&#39;re doing,&quot; Ballmer said.Microsoft also released at the event a beta version of the Windows Live Photo Gallery photo management tool that adds publishing support for Yahoo&#39;s Flickr photo-sharing site. As of Thursday, the Microsoft product has a &quot;publish on Flickr&quot; option in addition to its ability to post photos directly to the Windows Live Spaces blogging and social network. The Windows Live Photo Gallery is available on the Windows Live beta page .Microsoft further announced new features for its Live Search for Mobile search engine and launched Live Search 411, a toll-free directory assistance service accessible by calling (800) CALL-411 (800-225-5411).Additionally, Microsoft provided an update on the adoption of&#160;Silverlight, whose 1.0 version was released a month ago. The number of partners in the Microsoft Silverlight Partner Initiative has grown to more than 50 organizations, and more than 40 customers have delivered Silverlight applications.Microsoft also said that Silverlight 1.0 is now available in 10 languages, including simplified and traditional Chinese, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and Japanese.
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Tycho:  To fully communicate Lair, you really to need a video component - and the review over at Gametrailers really sets things straight.  The abrupt storytelling, technical stumbles, and strange behavior are all much better delivered by the game itself than by my hyperbole.       (CW)TB
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Gabe: I know we don't talk about our game much. We really don't want to beat you guys over the head with it. Honestly we handle most of our big projects that way. We try to make coming here "easy" and I don't want you guys to feel like you're constantly being pitched something. Balancing that against the fact that if we don't tell you about things like new shirts and books you are less likely to purchase them is tricky. another reason for the lack of coverage is that we really weren't sure the game was going to be any good. We're doing a lot of the art and all the writing but the reality is that this was a collaboration with the Hothead guys and until very recently I wasn't convinced making the game was a good idea.Tycho said it best in a couple interviews "games look like shit until they look awesome." it's really more than that though because they also play like shit until they are fun. I remember getting the first build months ago and telling Tycho we should scrap the entire thing. The builds kept coming though and they kept getting better and better. I understand now that that's just how game development works. It wasn't until the most recent build that I finally saw something genuinely fun. The Hothead guys obviously knew what they were making but for me it was like looking at a sketch and not understanding how it could ever be a finished painting. I've played through it multiple times now and I can tell you truthfully that it's funny and it's fun to play. If you like PA I believe you will enjoy it. If you don't know about PA I think you will still laugh and If you hate us you'll hate our game. The game just hit beta and Hothead is polishing it more and more every day. I can tell you that what I see right now I'm honestly proud of. Tycho has written some of his best stuff for this game. Like me, he hates himself and hates the things he makes so he would never link you to this, but I feel like he deserves it. A while back Tycho spent a week at the Hothead studio writing non stop for the game. Ron Gilbert was up there as well and he posted this on his blog shortly after."Jerry from PA is up here as well doing the writing and it's a thrill to see him work.He's a top-shelf writer, right up there with Tim Schafer and Dave Grossman."I'm sure when Tycho sees I linked that he'll go right for his wrists, but it's true. An early build of the game recently made its way through the media digestive system. The result is that you will see coverage of it popping up at many of your favorite game news sites. Everything I've seen so far has been very positive but I guess that's the way it is with previews. I think the best place to go is Gametrailers as they simply post high quality video of the game being played. You can make your own decisions based on what you see. If you want more you can watch the 1up show where a narcoleptic Jedi will tell you that the game is "like not really like PA but also like totally like PA." Maybe that's helpful to someone? The Gamelife blog over at Wired also has a very complete write up of the game if you want more than just raw footage. It's funny, before the game I never would have thought twice about calling someone a narcoleptic Jedi. After I had typed it out though I paused. Am I Derek Smart now? Will this effect our PR persons relationship with 1Up and other media outlets? Will they savage us in their review and will that hurt sales? Should I not talk about the coverage at all?Even if all of that is true should I care?Obviously the answer is no. -Gabe out
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Felix Geisendorfer is in the process of moving his blog from Wordpress to a customized "light-weight CakePHP replacement" he's developing to be extended later on. His post shares some of the tips he found so far.   In this post I'm simply going to throw out some snippets to show how I'm currently approaching the whole process in order to give both my insight into what works and what doesn't, while also hoping to get some people to share their insight into migrating legacy apps to CakePHP.   The tip in this post is primarily about the database side of things - his porting over of the information from the Wordpress table model to his new customized schema. His code example for the migration is included.
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Inexpensive flash-based player isn't perfect, but it serves its purpose.
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If you can't get Firefox to use the new version of the Flash player, you've come to the right place. I just got finished fighting with Flash and Firefox. It was a long fight, but I won.
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(InfoWorld) - Microsoft held another dog-and-pony show Friday to tout its prized Silverlight rich media technology, which will take on Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player for the hearts and minds of developers. The company's ReMix07 event, held at company offices in Mountain View, Calif, was a slimmed-down replay of the larger Mix07 conference held in Las Vegas in April. Featured were demonstrations of Silverlight benefits for Internet browsers, leveraged with Microsoft's Expression and the Visual Studio tools. "The core [function] that Siliverlight delivers is rich media capabilities," including video and graphics, said Scott Guthrie, general manager of the developer division at Microsoft. Silverlight, which is still in a pre-release stage, is deployable on Windows and Macintosh via a lightweight download. Net and AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML) programming models can be used with it. "Our goal is to have [Silverlight] run on as many systems as possible," Guthrie said. Microsoft wants to see it installed on hundreds of millions of clients. Microsoft officials are bullish on Silverlight, viewing it as having higher quality than Adobe Flash and of great use to venture capital-funded companies looking to provide a differentiated Web experience. "I think Silverlight gives you the richest possible way to watch video on the Web," said Dan'l Lewin, corporate vice president for strategic and emerging business development at Microsoft. "I think that's something that most people in the industry have acknowledged and are pretty excited about." Flash, however, already is installed on more than 700 million Internet-connected desktops, Adobe said. Silverlight technologies currently accessible include the beta release of Silverlight 1.0, which is focused on adding media like graphics to existing Web sites. It is due to be generally available later this summer with a release candidate due soon, Guthrie said. An alpha release of Silverlight 1.1 is also available, geared to rich Internet applications and leveraging .Net programming. Silverlight tools also are planned for the Visual Studio 2008 platform due later this year. Silverlight will be supported on mobile devices and other OSes in the future, Guthrie said. A Linux client version is possible at some point, but Microsoft is focusing on Windows and Macintosh now because they have the largest installed base, Microsoft officials said.Â Â  Featured during this morning's presentation was a demonstration of a Silverlight-based video-editing application developed by Metaliq. With this application, videos could be dragged and dropped onto a palette and edited together. A ReMix attendee saw promise in Silverlight. "It seems like Microsoft is doing what they usually do, [which is] coming out with a tool that really goes over the top and does as much as if not more than what the other competitors do," said Craig Benson, vice president of engineering at InnerAthlete, which is an online athletic training site. InnerAthlete could use Silverlight to show video demonstrations, Benson said.Â  Also at ReMix, Guthrie stressed Windows Presentation Foundation. "It really enables you to build much richer desktop applications and push the boundaries of what the desktop can do," he said. He noted that another item on Microsoft's agenda is the planned Internet Information Services 7 with a rich hosting infrastructure. "This is a major update of our Web server stack," Guthrie said. In a separate, Windows-related development this week, Microsoft offered a "Windows Vista Momentum pack to its OEM partners to promote deployments of Windows Vista. The pack features information on what Microsoft calls "the great momentum and readiness" in the market from the Vista ecosystem.
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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.)