I returned yesterday from an amazing four days in Zurich, Switzerland where I spoke at the first edition of “Flash at the Lake“. Its always difficult to know what to expect from a first time event, but I really think the organizers did an outstanding job.
One thing I found particularly interesting is having workshops as part of the conference and included in the ticket price. It worked really well and gave people the opportunity to deep dive for several hours into a specific topic (I for example joined the “Extending AIR” workshop by Ferdi Koomen and am looking forward to experimenting more with Qt).
The venue was unlike any other conference I’ve ever attended. Rote Fabrik is an interesting building with a lot of history and graffiti all over, just by the lake side. When first arriving the street side of the building sort of reminded me of the Adobe Townsend street office in San Francisco.
Ticket prices were very reasonable at just 135 Euro for two days of sessions and workshops including lunch. There weren’t a huge amount of attendees but it worked out well and based on the success of this edition I’m sure next year and beyond this event will sell out very soon.
It was great as always hanging out with fellow speakers and the organizers, who joined us every night despite their massive workload and getting little sleep. The conference had a real community vibe and am happy to have met a lot of new Swiss designers, developers and students and hear how they’re using various Flash Platform products. Looks like I might even have found some victims to help me build out my SQLite wrapper project and work on adding some additional features.
If you ever get the chance to attend or speak at this conference, I highly recommend it!
Earlier today at the Flash at the Lake conference here in Zurich, Switzerland I presented my “Introduction to SQLite in Adobe AIR” session. I’ve done this one a couple of times before but have updated it to include more information on:
Database encryption
Synchronization strategies
Using Data Access Objects
SQLite wrapper classes
You can find my slides below, and the demo files are available for download here. Enjoy!
This morning Adobe announced that the HTC Hero phone will be the first Android based phone to support Flash. Adrian Ludwig did a nice video showing off some of the features.
Its important to note that, while it is not explicitly said, this is in fact Flash Lite 3.1 running on the phone not a full version of Flash Player 10. Last week, Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen did announce there will be a developer release of Flash Player 10 for mobile made available at the MAX conference in October.
Initial platforms that they want to target is smartphones running Symbian, webOS, Android and Windows Mobile.
This is all part of the Open Screen Project, which HTC has now also signed up to. The Open Screen Project is a collaborative effort between different hardware, software and distribution partners to bring a single unified platform across mobile, devices and desktop.
I think its worth setting expectations, while we might be moving towards a unified cross-device runtime that does not mean you will necessarily be able to just run anything you have on the desktop on any mobile device. I’m sure there will still be a need in many cases to optimize for different platforms.
A “developer release” as is scheduled in October will likely still be very rough around the edges. More likely 2010 will be the year where we’ll get the real breakthrough with Flash on mobile and devices.
Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:
I managed to record most of Cyril’s talk on ColdFusion 9 and Bolt, which was targeted mainly to non-ColdFusion developers.
Think he did a really nice introduction for those not familiar with the language to get a glimpse of what is currently possible and what the upcoming ColdFusion 9 “Centaur” will deliver.
It seems Google did an update to how it indexes Flash content yesterday. Some of you might have already heard about the headless Flash Player aka “Ichabod” that Google and Yahoo got from Adobe — it seems it is now being put to better use.
Google has been indexing Flash content for years, basically extracting any static text that might be embedded in there. If you do a search with the filetype:swf flag you’ll see what that turns up.
Now with this new headless Flash Player, rather than trying to extract static data from the SWF file, it runs it over a command-line (non-visually) and gets back information about the contents of your Flash file, it will simulate button clicks etc. and capture the text results for indexing.
The important update now is that Google will also follow external resources, so for example XML files or other data that gets loaded in and not index it as a separate URL (as before) but in context to your Flash content. If you want to avoid your SWF files from getting crawled you can simply include them in a robots.txt directive like any other content.
I’m excited to have gotten invited again to give a talk at this years Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, October 4-7th.
The session is called “Community Matters” and is not the usual technical talk I do but targeted at a more general audience. This is the official session description:
“Explore the broad landscape of active user communities for the entire Adobe product range, from open source projects using Flash technology to public bugbases and mailing lists to worldwide user groups and tutorial websites. We’ll look at the range of programs available, including both Adobe and third-party resources. Walk away with all the information you need to get involved and share your knowledge, network with fellows and make your life easier.”
I will mostly be discussing Adobe’s various community programs and how you can get involved, contribute and get the most out of connecting with the online community.
If you’re interested to attend, be sure to mark it in your MAX session scheduler — Monday October 5th at 2pm in meeting room 503 of the L.A. Convention Centre. Hope to see you there!
[update] I got some unite services working now from any browser, must have been a glitch earlier — feel free to leave a comment on my fridge
Opera announced that they would “reinvent the Web” today — having spent some time going through what was announced I’m not sure they managed to reinvent a whole lot.
So what happened? They announced a beta of Opera Unite, with what they call a “Web server on the Web browser”. Trying to make my way through the marketing speak the best description I found was in the FAQ: “share the content directly from your computer rather than loading it and sharing it through a third-party server”.
This is essentially P2P technology, a term many companies now seem to avoid like the plague for its association with illegal filesharing through bittorrent (which is a whole different issue). Opera has some services that you can install in their browser that run over a unite:// protocol (file sharing, a fridge message app, media player, photo sharing etc.). According to what I’ve read this is supposed to be accessible from any browser, though haven’t been able to get that to work — partly because the service seems to be overwhelmed.
That might sound a bit strange a P2P service getting overwhelmed, isn’t the whole point that it goes directly from one computer to the other? Well when you run a service like this it need to go through a server to resolve the connected clients so they can continue further data interaction directly between themselves rather than passing through the server. This is I assume also why you’re required to have an Opera account and sign in to that to run any of these services.
I really like the idea of what they’re doing, and P2P, client-to-client, UDP or a host of other names it gets advertised as is definitely the way forward. Not necessarily for services like they currently demo on Opera Unite but certainly for live audio/video streaming and other situations where bandwidth throughput is still a real issue.
The author suggests that QuickTime X supporting FLV playback is somehow an indication that the Flash Player will come to the iPhone. While I’m sure that is what many of us would like to see happen it is one of the most ridiculous statements I’ve heard in a long time. This is not unlike saying that because your home entertainment system supports JPEG images it’ll soon run Photoshop (or because its a technology blog its authors will research what they publish for that matter).
Flash Video (FLV) is an open container format that can contain other codecs, such as H.264 and AAC for example. Since QuickTime supports playing back H.264 video, it is already able to play back FLV encoded with that particular codec.
What I find most disturbing is that the original article gets edited multiple times without a clear indication of exactly what the author has changed.
This is a post for my Dutch speaking readers about the new and improved FlashFocus.nl community site.
Wat betreft nederlandstalige Flash community websites is er weinig twijfel dat FlashFocus.nl aan de absolute top staat. In 2003 was Flashtival, een evenement van FlashFocus, trouwens een van de allereerste conferenties waar ik een lezing gaf.
Of je nu een beginnende of reeds gevorderde gebruiker bent van Adobe Flash Platform technologie is dit de plek om vragen te stellen en ideeën uit te wisselen. Ik ben echt onder de indruk over de inzet van de vrijwilligers van de vereniging FlashFocus om deze community site al zo lang actief te houden.
Dit weekend hebben ze hun nieuwe website gelanceerd met een vernieuwde design en een aantal nieuwe features. Ga zeker een kijkje nemen!
"Schöne Harz Ferienwohnung im Herzen von Deutschland. Weitere Ferienwohnungen im Harz finden Sie auf der angegebenen Urlaubsseite. Falls Sie einen Partner für erfolgreiche Suchmaschinenoptimierung suchen, sind Sie bei Bullz-Eye an der richtigen Adresse."
Recent Comments