Peter Elst

For the next week I’ll be in San Jose, CA for the annual Adobe Community Summit with fellow community experts and user group managers.

This is always one of my personal highlights of the year, we get to see some of the exciting projects that are being worked on and hang out with project managers, engineers and other random folks of interest at Adobe.

Unfortunately most of what we’ll be seeing is covered by a non-disclosure agreement but will do my best to give a general impression of the event and where I see things going.

I’ll be spending a couple more days in San Francisco before heading back home and hope to make it to the Computer History Museum if I find the time. If you’re in town and would like to meet up just email me or leave a comment.

 

So, what can you do with an old PC notebook and some time on your hands? Why not try getting Mac OS X Leopard to run on it.

Turned out not to be too difficult at all, if you look around you’ll find detailed walkthroughs on how to get it done.

These are some specs of my old Acer TravelMate 8006 LMi notebook:

Intel Pentium M 755 2 GHz
512 MB DDR SDRAM
ATI Mobility Radeon 9700 - 128 MB

As you’ll see in the video above, it takes a little while for Leopard to boot but it does run pretty slick. Unfortunately my wifi card (Intel2200BG) was not supported out of the box so had to go with a third party port for Darwin which is not quite there yet making wifi connectivity a bit of a pain to set up.

You mileage may vary in getting it installed, what worked for me was formatting the partition as Master Boot Record using Disk Utility in the setup and then customizing the install, deselecting everything except for the EFI boot loader for MBR.

From there onwards the install is pretty straightforward, when you boot up again afterwards it appeared to be stuck on the Apple boot screen. That is in fact not the case, it for some reason takes an incredibly long time to get through it the first time you run — probably close to 45 minutes.

Its an interesting proof of concept, nice to play around with but I think I’ll end up installing something like Ubuntu after I’ve tested it some more — unless of course Apple decides to officially support it (and pigs fly)

Yesterday, I download the latest MacBreak video and what do I see —

<rant>

This is probably the worst description of any product I’ve ever seen. First of all, Bordeaux is not Thermo — secondly there’s already quite a bit of information out on Thermo since the MAX conference last October.

Two minutes of research or just checking with someone at Adobe would’ve been welcome (they’re standing right outside the stand for goodness sake).

I’m sorry to see the LA Flash user group being mentioned here, sure as hell they’re not spreading that kind of misinformation. I don’t mind the occasional speculation on a podcast but if you’re at NAB, in a position to easily confirm with an Adobe representative, and then present this dribble as ‘breaking news’ you lose my vote.

</rant>

http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak148

 

Kevin Lynch did a great video explaining with the Open Screen Project is all about, definitely worth a look if you want a little more background information on the announcement.

SWF Technology Center
FLV/F4V Technology Center

Some exciting news today with Adobe partnering up with companies across the board like Nokia, Sony Ericsson, NTT DoCoMo, ARM, Intel, NBC, MTV, BBC, etc. for an initiative they call the Open Screen Project.

What the Open Screen Project attempts to address is getting a consistent runtime not just on the desktop but across to mobile and devices. Adobe has a clear solution for web with the ubiquitousness of the Flash Player, Flash Lite is getting traction with over 500 million copies shipped with mobile phones so far and AIR is bringing RIA’s to the desktop.

When I initially heard about the project I was a bit skeptical thinking it was more of a marketing announcement than anything else, but there are a few important points to consider and I’ll walk you through them.

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Its that time of the year again, one of the very best multimedia events of the season, Multi-Mania is happening on Friday May 23th at the Kortrijk Xpo, Belgium.

Where else do you get to see people including: Ralph Hauwert, Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, Marco Casario, Stephanie Sullivan, Rob Chiu, Hoss Gifford etc. not to forget several of the Adobe evangelist all stars completely free of charge?

With four different tracks plus a workshop track, free lunch (if you register before Monday, May 19th) an award show and a fantastic party to close the day this promises to be bigger and better than ever before. With an expected attendance of around 800 this is the perfect place to do some networking, meet students, colleagues and companies.

You really have to credit the crew for putting this together every year (and the sponsors for supporting the initiative), its astounding how far we’ve come with this event.

I think this is going to be the fourth year that I’m attending and will this time be speaking about “SQLite in Adobe AIR” (don’t worry if you saw my talk at one of the on AIR tour events, there’s lots of new stuff I’ll be covering).

More so than during previous editions we’ll be having sessions presented in English so if you fancy a weekend in Belgium, catch a kick-ass event and sample some of the best beers, you’re more than welcome to come down!

Some very interesting sessions from the looks of it, this is what I’m hoping to catch:

- The GAE SWF Project - Aral Balkan
- Having fun with Flash and AIR - Wim Vanhenden
- Design Challenges, Standards Solutions - Stephanie Sullivan
- Flex with AJAX - Marco Casario
- Flash 2D and 3D Effects - Ralph Hauwert
- The Pixel Whisperer - Mario Klingemann

And of course the award show with Hoss Gifford doing his no doubt very entertaining talk.

 
Register here

Just as I did last year I’m helping out a graduating multimedia student of the Arteveldehogeschool in Ghent, Jo Van Snick, who is doing his thesis on Adobe AIR.

If you’re a company based in Belgium or the Netherlands, regardless of your level of experience with the Adobe Integrated Runtime, I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time to participate in a little survey (questions in Dutch).

We already got some great feedback from various businesses but more information is still very welcome. Thanks!

http://www.cammeth.be/onderzoek/start/

 

I attended the MIX Essentials event in Louvain-la-Neuve this Thursday in an attempt to get some perspective on Microsoft’s roadmap for Rich Internet Applications (yes, you read that right — Internet) and Silverlight 2.

Note that I’m looking at this as a Flash Platform enthusiast, while I walked away excited about what Microsoft is doing don’t expect me to hold back on criticism where I see things lacking. It is in no way meant as a personal attack and welcome your thoughts.

Here’s breakdown of the sessions I attended, with my commentary and a couple of videos.

 
Opening Keynote - Luc van de Velde
Building RIAs with Silverlight 2 - Tim Heuer
Beauty & the Geek - Ian Griffiths & Paul Dawson
Data and Web Services in Silverlight 2 - Gill Cleeren
Steve Ballmer Keynote
Summary

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If you want to distribute AIR applications the install badge is definitely the best way to go. The one problem I had with it is that its a pain to prepare and embed on your blog.

To help remedy this I started working on this AIR Badge plugin last night, it allows you to simply use an [airbadge] tag and a couple of arguments in your blog post which will then be replaced by the AIR install badge.

 

[airbadge] application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg [/airbadge]

[airbadge]Contact Manager,
http://www.peterelst.com/downloads/sqlite/sqlite-contactmanager.air,
1,http://www.peterelst.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/contactmanager.jpg[/airbadge]

 
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If you missed my SQLite talk at one of the onAIR tour events earlier this month, Mike Chambers recorded it in Brussels and its now available to watch online.

Upcoming events where I’ll be covering Adobe AIR are Multi-Mania, Scotch on the Rocks and another In-the-Brain session on “The Evolution of the Flash Platform” with Skills Matter as part of the London Web Week.

Hope to see you there!