Seattle.BloggersPub

I got to thinking about what a day without Flash would be like, and it isn’t pretty. Maybe you can assume that other technologies would fill the void, but just sit back and see how pervasive Flash has become.

Using Goowy means that without Flash, I’d be without email.
No more checking out the previous day’s sports […]

I caught that the LinuxQuestions.org podcast talked a bit about Flash 9 this week, and I thought it was interesting because of this quote:
As much as I completely loathe Flash Ads and in many cases Flash in general, many interesting things do happen in Flash. Increasingly, those things require Flash 8 or greater.
Why is that […]

This was too good not to post. Over on Yay Hooray they are redoing famous company’s logos and giving them a web 2.0 feel. Health put this one for Adobe together.

Hopefully this will be my last post on a Linux version of Flash, but I thought it was interesting that the recent attention garnered a mention over on News.com (even if they couldn’t find Emmy’s name). Clearly Linux is a big issue, any time Mike posts, it hits digg’s front page - and he didn’t even know what digg WAS. Keep the Linux news coming Adobe, all of us are following it very closely.

I caught this job posting over at the Adobe jobs site. The Kiwi team is looking for a Computer Scientist and here’s the job description:

Adobe is seeking a Computer Scientist to join the Kiwi Project, to be responsible for Flex application development on projects related to emerging web 2.0 publishing standards designed to showcase the new Apollo runtime still under development. The role includes work related to emerging standards in blogging, RSS and Atom. The Kiwi Project maintains a public blog at: http://blogs.adobe.com/kiwi/

It sounds like this position is specifically for building Flex applications on the Apollo runtime. If you are a Flex developer and want to build some cutting edge applications, this would be a great way to go.

Jeff Jarvis is reporting that tomorrow Ad Age will release (link should work tomorrow) some numbers for the ABC streaming video. The skinny is that research showed an 87% recall by users of the advertiser compared with the typical 24% on TV. That’s a big jump, and good news for anyone looking at the online video world.

Flash Video makes it so easy to view content that I can see how 87% of people would remember the advertisers. Instead of messing with a complicated plugin, users with Flash can just focus on watching the video (and the advertising).

I don’t usually repost, but I posted an article with the same title over on ZDNet at 11:30 Friday night, so just wanted to hit the aggregators again as everyone comes into work today. The post follows up some of what I mentioned in my post about The Most Important Person at Adobe and some of my commenters on ZDNet brought up the issue of a 64 bit player.

I really like the fact that Adobe has the Penguin.swf blog which tracks Linux Flash Player development. I think that level of transparency is awesome. It’s clear from the amount of comments that there is a lot of energy in the Linux community. I think Adobe could make a big splash with Linux, and not by open sourcing the player, but by talking to the community and working with them. I don’t use Linux, but the people who do are smart, geeky, and good evangelists. Adobe could use that.

There are a lot of people to choose from, whether you’re a Kevin Lynch fan, or you like how David Mendels is constantly tracking the scene. Maybe you’re a big boss fan and you like Bruce Chizen. Or you could even like guys like Mike Chambers, John Dowdell or Matt Chotin, three examples of people who are really involved in talking to developers and making products better. Another choice might be the Ben Fortas and Ted Patricks of the world, evangelizing the products we all know and love. But you’d be wrong, the most important person at Adobe is
Mike Melanson, a Flash Player Engineer working on the Linux version of Flash Player 9.

I’m planning on writing a couple of posts over on ZDNet about this, but as I see it there are two sides to cross-platform, the economics of a cross platform solution, and the potential impact. In many ways, they go hand in hand, and the importance varies depending on whether or not you are looking at the short term or long term value. Mike, and the rest of the team working on the Linux version of the Flash Player are the people that Adobe will depend on to truly be as disruptive it can be.

You may not agree that Adobe should be disruptive, or you may think they won’t be - those things are up for debate, but what is crystal clear to me, is that Linux is the key. I’ll try to quantify that more on ZDNet later this weekend. Mike, if you read this, drop me an email. For that matter, anyone from the Linux Flash Player team should drop me an email.

So if you haven’t heard the worlds (disputed) number one site is now requiring all of its users to upgrade to Flash Player 9. The downside is that the reason for this is a MySpace hack that exploited features in Flash Player 8 and have been fixed in the newest version of the player. Because it was security related, it’s probably not in Adobe’s best interests to be too vocal, but if I were them, I would declaring today Beer Friday and there would be much dancing on the desks.

Seriously, how huge is this? MySpace accounts for 4.5% of ALL website visits and has about 95 million members. 95 million people having to upgrade to Flash Player 9 all at once? Are you kidding me? The Flash Player penetration stats are going to be insane, and everyone who has been busy developing Flex 2 applications and worrying about the new version of the player can relax. What a break for Adobe.

When Adobe and Macromedia first announced the acquisition, I instantly started looking into LiveCycle. As Adobe’s only major server product, I wanted to see how they used it. At the time, I thought it might make a good roll in for ColdFusion, but it appears lately that I was looking at the wrong product.

I’m starting to see an awful lot of LiveCycle/Flex resources. First it was Mike Potter introducing the intern, Zee, now I see that we have Formnation a blog dedicated to developing “rich applications using Adobe LiveCycle Forms and Flex”. There are also a couple of sessions at Max under the Vertical Market Solutions category.

I think this is the start of something very big. I’ve heard rumors of what LiveCycle is capable of, and the kinds of things that may be possible, and Flex fits into those very well. Keep an eye on these blogs, because this very well could be the next big step for Flex 2.