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.

 

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

I’m very happy to see the Technical University of West-Flanders, PIH department is adding a new track to their Multimedia and Communication Technology (MCT) offering starting in September, namely Digital Media and Design.

The focus for “Devine” as its affectionately called includes storyboarding, motion graphics, web design, video editing using industry standard tools like Flash, Flex, AIR, Photoshop, After Effects, 3D Studio MAX etc. The scripting languages covered include PHP, ActionScript, XML, HTML, CSS, Javascript.

I’ve been thoroughly impressed with the level of education they offer. This new track is without a doubt going to result in some of the best creative web professionals coming out into the work arena in the next few years!

Having met with many of the MCT students and lecturers at conferences and user group events over the last few years its clear how passionate they are about multimedia — the annual Multi-Mania event is just one example.

Adobe should really take note of initiatives like this and support them any way they can, just think — how many bachelor degrees will be out there covering AIR just months after its release?

The first information session was held yesterday, read more about it on Ronny Welter’s blog: http://nocreativity.com/blog/devine-digital-media-and-design (in Dutch)

 
www.digitaldesignandmedia.be
 

Trust Aral Balkan to come up with some great projects to support the community — Singularity a three-day online conference is coming later this year and Pistach.io is going into beta soon.

Pistach.io is an ad network that targets a specific topical pack of influential websites and blogs. As a company you’ll have the unique opportunity to promote your business by advertising on these sites and get the best exposure possible. As a blog author you no longer have to worry about finding advertisers or negotiating rates.

I’m very excited to have been asked to join the Pistach.io Flash Pack with this blog, if nothing else it’ll be a great incentive to keep giving back to the Flash community!

 
Read more about it on Aral’s blog

Just two weeks ago Ted Patrick launched a wonderful initiative where he auctioned some rare bags he had lying around for charity. He pledged to personally double the proceeds and Adobe has a program whereby it doubles any gifts to charity by employees.

I managed to get the winning bid on the “Platform Evangelist Team” timbuk bag and look forward to showing it off at conferences in 2008. I figured, if you can’t get the job at least get the bag and do your bit for charity.

In total the auction raised $5774.76 USD for the San Francisco Food Bank which is pretty impressive! If you still like to get your hands on one of these bags, there are two more Flex bags being auctioned and another 24 hours left to bid.

In this holiday season we can all do our bit to help those less fortunate, I’ll be donating proceeds from amazon affiliate purchases for this quarter to my favorite charity and urge everyone to contribute in their own way.

 

Need inspiration? Here are some projects that I personally support:

www.premahome.org

PremaHome offers orphans and children from poor and broken families a new home where they receive free food and accommodation, medical care and an education. They are presently looking after 600 destitute children and teaching 750 children in its school in Tamil Nadu, South India.

www.theforgivenessproject.com

www.oxfam.org

www.amnesty.org

I just had an interesting discussion on Twitter with some friends about the French speaking Flash community in Belgium and the apparent lack of them at our local Adobe User Group events. That’s actually a very good point and never really understood why that is the case or if we’re simply not reaching them.

They must be out there but I’m afraid to say I personally know very few of them (Stéphane Bebrone, Gilles Bertrand, Cyril Hanquez — sorry if I’m forgetting someone I know) and would tend to say I’m generally pretty clued in on the scene.

Would love to get some links to personal blogs, community sites, courses, events etc. to follow up on what’s happening there and hear what would help to get our French speaking colleagues involved.

For those new to the Adobe User Group Belgium it might be worth noting that — except for one or two presentations in the past — sessions are always done in English, events are free of charge and its an excellent place for networking (usually with free drinks and great raffle prizes).

www.adobeusergroup.be

P.S. if there are any Flash/Flex or other Adobe software users in the German speaking community in Belgium please don’t hesitate to post a comment or get in touch either and let us know what you’re up to!

When opening a simple HTML document in Dreamweaver CS3 (Mac OSX 10.4.10) this afternoon I got this modal dialog pop up. Clicking Cancel or OK didn’t close it, and had to force quit the application.

Never seen this happen before, and haven’t been able to reproduce it since. A quick Google search seems to indicate this is some remnant from Fireworks or Freehand but don’t have a definitive answer as of yet.

Anyone else seen this happen?

In a bit of a surprise move (at least to me) Bruce Chizen will be stepping down as Adobe’s CEO as from December 1st and Shantanu Narayen, the current COO, will be filling his position.

We’ve had the opportunity to talk with Shantanu during the Adobe Community Summit last summer in San Jose in a more private setting and he left the impression of a very open and committed person with a passion to push the company forward and I have no doubt he’ll do extremely well as a CEO.

 
Read the press release here

Google just made my day by introducing IMAP support in Gmail — it might not be a big deal for some but I like the idea of having access to my mailbox on my different machines directly from my mail client rather than having to go to gmail.com or download all mail via POP3 to every computer.

From what I hear not everyone has access to this feature yet but it should be coming soon to a mailbox near you!

via Andy Jarrett

The evidence is out there for everyone to see — what else could you expect from the rogue Boulevart guys. Adobe employees and community leaders in various states of sobriety.

I’m surprised a lot of them remembered their job title let alone were still able to pronounce it.

I’ll just keep a low profile in case any footage of myself is still sitting around on someone’s hard drive. Safe to say MAX Barcelona was a huge success!

via aboutnico.be