Archive for April, 2007
Back from FITC
I’ve been back from Toronto for a couple of days now and have had a wonderful time. It was my first time attending FITC and it didn’t disappoint — good venue, great sessions and parties going on every night. Congrats Shawn Pucknell and team!
Adobe Flex goes Open Source
Adobe announced their plan to open source Flex, I’m very excited about this news!
Just got back from Toronto today so just blogging some resources to check out, will certainly blog more about this move when I’ve had a chance to review it all.
Flex vs Flash
There’s been a lot of talk about Flex versus Flash and the ability to integrate Flash content into your Flex applications. To be honest its always been a bit of a pain to get that all working seamlessly until I saw the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3 demo’d just now.
Its basically an extension that lets you package up a Flash movie clip as an SWC for use in Flex, complete with code-hinting, states, transitions, custom events etc. You won’t believe it until you see it — the improvement in workflow is just tremendous, its now easy to get that creative look from Flash over to Flex and you’ll save hours implementing it.
Be sure to check out labs.adobe.com early next week!
Adobe Media Player video
Kevin Lynch presenting Adobe Media Player at the Web 2.0 Expo, looks very promising and shows the potential of Apollo apps.
(via Danny Dura)
ActionScript 3.0 Debugger
Just heard my article on the ActionScript 3.0 debugger in Flash CS3 has been published on the Adobe Flash Developer Center.
Its great to finally have a powerful debugger available in this latest release of the Flash IDE that just works — I’m sure you’ll love it!
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flash/articles/as3_debugger.html
Its a big day for Adobe
First and foremost, Creative Suite 3 is shipping today (the Design and Web editions that is)! Its latest suite of products looks really tasty and the focus on integration will make peoples lives a lot easier. Can’t wait to start using it for production work.
Then another interesting announcement at NAB, the Adobe Media Player (which you might have heard about as a project with codename Philo) brings FLV to the desktop with optional DRM. Stefan over at Flashcomguru.com has a good writeup on what it does.
FITC 2007 schedule
Its become more or less a tradition to list the sessions I plan to attend at an upcoming conference, so here goes for FITC in Toronto next week.
Stay tuned for Skip Intro
I’m happy to announce that Keith Peters is joining the Skip Intro podcast as a co-host and the next episode is just around the corner!
We’ve got some great content lined up for episode 3 and moving forward have plans to make it more interactive, have guests over for round table discussions, do interviews and take your questions.
Its really great to have Keith working with me now, it sure breaths new life into the project and we should now be able to turn out episodes on a more regular basis. Just finishing up editing the recordings and you can expect a new show in the next couple of days.
In the meanwhile, check out the new home base for the podcast:
Microsoft vs. Adobe
Just read an interesting post by JD where he talks about how little Microsoft staff have commented on Apollo compared to the rest of the blogosphere — Scott Barnes, seems to be one of the few that is open to some debate on the topic and, although his position is pretty clear, he does at least come up with some valid arguments (as opposed to Parvez Ansari’s recent post which caused a bit of a stir ;) )
AsProject launched
I’m absolutely blown away by this new project Luke Bayes and Ali Mills (of AsUnit fame) have just released!
AsProject is a cross platform open source ActionScript development tool set that supports both ActionScript 2.0 and 3.0 and leverages tools like MTASC, Swfmill and AsUnit using rake tasks to automate the build process.
Its distributed over Ruby Gems, so the only thing you need to get started is Ruby and Ruby Gems installed — everything else gets handled for you and you’re literally doing open source actionscript development in minutes. This is really huge, open source Flash development wasn’t rocket science before but this sure lowers the threshold for anyone still doubting to give it a try.
Best practices development at your finger tips, I love where the community is going with these open source initiatives!
