Its safe to say that the general theme of Creative Suite 3 is “integration” and what a fantastic job they’ve done with it.
In a way I see the March 27th announcement as the actual closure of the acquisition. Adobe and Macromedia tools now place nice together.
Today is the day, Adobe Creative Suite 3 is getting launched!
Don’t got overly excited yet, it won’t be shipping just yet but the announcement of all those new goodies to play with should have you grabbing for your wallet to preorder (lets not get depressed about the whole Euro vs USD pricing issue here).
I’ve been reading up vedic maths the last few weeks and its an absolutely fascinating topic. It basically consists of 16 formulae as written down in age-old sutra’s of India and allows for very easy mental calculation of complex division, multiplication, square roots etc.
Just under a month to go and I’ve got a whole series of conferences to attend — starting of course with FITC in Toronto, Canada. It’ll be my first time to the city and have a few days extra so if you’ve got any suggestions on sightseeing (worth the trip to Niagara falls?) or would like to meet up feel free to drop me a line.
I’ve been having a lot of fun with Apollo so far and want to walk you through one of the first applications I built.
The FLVSnapshot tool allows you to load in an FLV file from your local drive, scrub through it and take frame captures as a JPEG or PNG.
The long awaited Apollo runtime public alpha and SDK are now available for download on labs.adobe.com!
You can now start getting your Flex apps over to the desktop and work with HTML content rendered right within the DisplayList. Can’t wait to see what apps people come up with!
If you haven’t had a chance yet, be sure to grab the free “Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers” book from labs as well. Great initiative by O’Reilly, and kudos to Mike Chambers and the other authors for making it available under a Creative Commons license!
You can expect me to do more than a few blog posts on Apollo in the coming days and weeks.
There’s been a lot of talk around what the final product name for Apollo should be. Many people, including myself would like the code name to stick. Just think about all the publicity Apollo has gotten, would be a shame to have to go out and market a new name when there was a perfectly good one all along.
Watch the recording of David Zuckerman’s session at 360Flex on “Flex Builder secrets”, a great overview of features in the tool that will make you more productive working in Eclipse.
Also well worth checking out is the Flex Builder editor cheat sheet on David’s blog.
For the last few weeks there’s been a lot of excitement around an imminent public beta release of Apollo to Adobe Labs, with ApolloCamp San Francisco happening in just two days there’s no doubt that attendees will get their hands on the runtime and can’t imagine it taking much longer to have it available to the general public.
Its alway difficult to say what is and is not supported (yet) in a beta release but from the looks of it, no matter what Flex developers around the globe (and more than likely the AJAX crowd as well) are getting geared up for some serious late night coding. Better stock up on Red Bull and other forms of caffeine before the stores run out!
I’ve got high hopes for the technology in bridging the gap between web applications and the desktop and giving developers the chance to break out of the confines of the browser. One important factor is that there is nothing really new to learn, you’ll leverage Flex, HTML and PDF and get API’s to deal with Apollo specific functionality.
*Bring it on Adobe!*
Last year I blogged about a wonderful piece of public art by Ben Rubin installed on the top floor of the Almaden tower at the Adobe HQ in San Jose.
Turns out just a few days after I posted the story they announced that two research scientists from San Jose have broken the encryption and decoded the message.
The challenge remains open until the 10th correct entry is received or August 7th 2007, whichever comes first. At that time they will reveal the identities of the winners and runners up and post the solution.
Look forward to seeing the semaphore in action when I’m over there in June!
