Archive

Archive for May, 2008

The Evolution of the Flash Platform

May 31st, 2008

I did a talk last night on “The Evolution of the Flash Platform” at Skills Matter as part of the London Web Week. Had a nice group of people turn up from various backgrounds and all seemed very interested in seeing the direction Flash is heading in.

 

Tried to cover as much ground as possible within limited time talking about Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Lite, Flash Media Server, ECMAScript / ActionScript, Adobe and open source.

Also discussed a few common misconceptions related to Flash content and SEO, deep linking and browser button support. Then moved on to showing several of the sneak peeks from earlier conferences — Flash “Next”, Pacifica, Thermo, etc.

 

Slideshare.net is having some problems with the Flash Player 10 beta, if you can’t see the slides above you’ll find them at the following URL:

http://www.slideshare.net/peterelst/the-evolution-of-the-flash-platform

 

AIR, Events, Flash, Flash Lite, Flex, Open Source

2M08 in review

May 28th, 2008

What can you say about 2M08? Its amazing how fast the conference has grown up in just a few years. Koen, Wouter and the rest of the team did an outstanding job and with the help of the sponsors made it an event that you can easily compare to many of the well known international industry events.

One difference though, its completely free of charge. Sure its just one day but four different tracks and all those international speakers gave enough choice for anyone to find interesting sessions throughout the day.

 
Adobe Keynote
Aral Balkan – “Ruling the Web”
Peter Elst – “SQLite in Adobe AIR”
Wim Vanhenden – “Having Fun with Flash and AIR”
Stephanie Sullivan – “Design Challenges, Standards Solutions”
Marco Casario – Flex with AJAX
Serge Jespers – Up close and personal with the AIR API’s
2M08 awardshow with Hoss Gifford

 
Read more…

General

2M08 Flash Lite Mobile Guide

May 21st, 2008

Thomas Joos has done it again, after doing one for FITC Amsterdam and Toronto this time he has worked on a Flash Lite mobile guide for 2M08.

I’ve just been playing around with the app and its really useful, you get an overview of the conference schedule, a map of the venue, information about the party and even a basic Twitter client.

I’m sure I’ll be using this throughout the day on Friday, if you’ve got a Flash Lite enabled phone be sure to download the mobile guide!

 
Read more about the mobile guide on Thomas’ blog –

http://www.thomasjoos.be

 

General

Adobe Community Summit 2008 is a wrap

May 16th, 2008
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Adobe Community Summit 2008

This years Adobe Community Summit has sadly come to an end — since we’re all under NDA we’re unfortunately not at liberty to discuss what was shown but it certainly was impressive.

The group of user group manager and community experts is definitely growing, the Park conference room at the Adobe headquarters in San Jose could barely accommodate us all.

Jonathan Wall and the team did an outstanding job as always with the logistics and geting us information from the various product teams and execs. Speakers included: Michelle Turner, Scott Fegette, John Nack, Doug Benson, Mike Chambers, Bill Perry, Johnny L and many more.

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General

Adobe AIR versus Microsoft Silverlight

May 15th, 2008

I love reading some analysis about the evolution of the RIA space but what is it with tech reporters these days?

There seems to be very little research done and some absolutely ludicrous comparisons made. Here are some examples highlighted by fellow bloggers:

John Dowdell
Brajeshwar Oinam
Mrinal Wadhwa

 
To avoid any confusion, here’s a little cheat sheet:

- Adobe AIR is a runtime
- Microsoft Silverlight is a browser plugin
- Adobe Flash Player is a browser plugin

Or to put it differently AIR != Silverlight, a runtime is not a browser plugin.

 
AIR != Silverlight

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<a href="http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2008/05/15/adobe-air-versus-microsoft-silverlight/"><img src="http://www.peterelst.com/buttons/air-silverlight.jpg" width="150" height="56" alt="AIR != Silverlight" /></a>

 
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Twitter followers tip

May 15th, 2008

Twitter Noticed recently I’ve been using Twitter for well over a year now (February 5th 2007 to be exact), and some might say I’ve become addicted.

I’m closing in on the 2500 twitter post mark, have about 465 followers and follow 241 of those myself.

Now to be honest, things have come to a point where things are beginning to get a bit too crowded on my friends timeline.

When Aral twittered about looking for a way to unfollow twitter users that don’t follow him back I started looking for an easy way to do that. Was looking for all sorts of crazy mashups that would help manage friends but in the end found a very simple way to get it done.
Read more…

General

Adobe Community Summit 2008

May 9th, 2008

Adobe Community Summit

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.

 

General

Acer notebook running Mac OS X 10.5

May 1st, 2008

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) ;)

Mac

Podcasts exempt from doing research?

May 1st, 2008

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


 

Rants

Kevin Lynch on the Open Screen Project

May 1st, 2008

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

General

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