Peter Elst

I attended the MIX Essentials event in Louvain-la-Neuve this Thursday in an attempt to get some perspective on Microsoft’s roadmap for Rich Internet Applications (yes, you read that right — Internet) and Silverlight 2.

Note that I’m looking at this as a Flash Platform enthusiast, while I walked away excited about what Microsoft is doing don’t expect me to hold back on criticism where I see things lacking. It is in no way meant as a personal attack and welcome your thoughts.

Here’s breakdown of the sessions I attended, with my commentary and a couple of videos.

 
Opening Keynote - Luc van de Velde
Building RIAs with Silverlight 2 - Tim Heuer
Beauty & the Geek - Ian Griffiths & Paul Dawson
Data and Web Services in Silverlight 2 - Gill Cleeren
Steve Ballmer Keynote
Summary

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If you missed my SQLite talk at one of the onAIR tour events earlier this month, Mike Chambers recorded it in Brussels and its now available to watch online.

Upcoming events where I’ll be covering Adobe AIR are Multi-Mania, Scotch on the Rocks and another In-the-Brain session on “The Evolution of the Flash Platform” with Skills Matter as part of the London Web Week.

Hope to see you there!

Aral got interviewed on Singularity while attending the LIFT08 conference in Geneva last week. Its great to see such excitement around the project and it gets you to appreciate the potential of an online conference of this caliber.

Of course it was also nice to hear a plug for our very own Multi-Mania, one of Europe’s biggest free multimedia events, right here in Belgium — which you’ll no doubt hear lots more about in the coming weeks!

Richard Galvan, Ted Patrick and Andrew Shorten presented the Adobe keynote on Monday to open Flash on the Beach 07. There wasn’t a lot of new information but I have to say they outdid themselves in creativity to bring the same message across.

At the very end there is a little sneak on how inverse kinematics is going to work in the authoring environment, its pretty nice and they didn’t show that before but I kind of expected it to work like that.

Flash “Diesel” does look incredibly promising between the new stage core, no more keyframes with the object tweening model, 3D ‘postcards in space’ by adding a Z axis, inverse kinematics both at author as at runtime and they promise a lot more to come.

Hope they’ll have a prerelease program starting for it soon!

In case you didn’t pick this up with all the announcements Adobe made this last week — Adobe Media Player is now available on labs.adobe.com as a prerelease product along with beta 2 of the AIR runtime.

Adobe already has some content providers lined up such as CBS, PBS, Yahoo! and services like blip.tv help you with creating feeds that target Adobe Media Player (one of the reasons why I used them for uploading the MAX conference sneak peek video’s).

Its really cool to finally see Adobe with a product that plays back FLV files on the desktop, something we had to rely on third party apps for in the past. Although AMP is still pretty rough around the edges, the feature set looks very promising.

Here’s a little walkthrough of how to subscribe to a feed not listed in the catalog.

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Its incredible what the Papervision3D guys have been doing — pushing ActionScript to the limits in creating a powerful 3D engine for Flash that we could only have dreamed of. Another example of how the community drives the evolution of the Flash platform.

Although their API was easy enough for any developer to get started with, John Grden has now announced a component set for the Flash authoring environment that actually shows you the rendering at design time. You basically just browse to a Collada file, set up your scene and camera rotation, zoom, focus and you’re all set.

The component even allows you to assign new materials (bitmap or movie clip). Unfortunately that doesn’t give you a live preview because the library items are not accessible for the component, but they’ve handled that nicely by just applying a color fill so you can see what material you’ve used.

Read John Grden’s blog post for more information on the Papervision3D components and be sure to check out the video below!

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)

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.

Chris Brichford, Apollo engineer at Adobe, talking about leveraging HTML and JavaScript in Apollo at the MAX 2006 conference, Las Vegas.

via Mike Chambers

Now that is one cool geeky art project…