Not exactly breaking news but this certainly deserves a blog post. Dr. Shai Avidan, co-creator of the impressive “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing” demo you see above has joined Adobe and will be working from the Newton, MA office. Looking forward to seeing this technique make its way into a future version of Photoshop.
(via Techcrunch)
Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last few days, you’ll have heard about the “Moviestar” Flash Player update Adobe is releasing in beta on labs.adobe.com. I’m really excited to see them embrace the H.264 codec, which has essentially become the industry standard and enables delivery of HD quality video.
I’ve had my sneaky suspicion something like this was in the works looking at features like hardware acceleration, full screen functionality etc. that were getting added in previous Flash Player updates. Now you can use the normal NetStream approach to progressively download .mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mov and .3gp files as well as regular FLV files obviously.
Tinic Uro has a great blog post covering all the technical details:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html
There’s no doubt in my mind that Flash remains to be the best medium to deliver video to the web, look forward to seeing Flash Media Server support the new codec — I’m sure we’ll see some great high quality video experiences popping up.
There’s no place like India to clear your head and get away from work — I’ve returned a couple of weeks earlier than expected but spent a good month chilling out. The cool thing about traveling around with (close to) zero luxury is that you start to appreciate what you’ve got at home. Its nice not having to worry about power outages, if there’s any water coming from the tap or whether you’ll find some food non-spicy enough not to burn a hole through your intestines.
All kidding aside, I’ve had a wonderful time and will no doubt be heading back in the not too distant future. For now though, some exciting times ahead! On a personal note I really look forward to becoming uncle Pete, will be traveling to Stockholm soon for a new project and have some great speaking opportunities coming up at Flashforward Boston, Adobe MAX Chicago and Barcelona.
We’ve got some great things coming up with our local AUG as well so should be great fun hanging out with the local geek crowd. The “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″ book has finally been published and am very happy with the final result.
So all in all this is just a post to say, happy to be back and stay tuned for more blog posts (and hopefully a new podcast episode)!
