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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.

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.

If you haven’t seen the news, last night Gotuit Media announced Gotuit.com, an on-demand, broadband video portal that is probably one of the coolest Flash RIAs that I’ve seen. Instead of sites like YouTube and MySpace that use Flash to show videos, Gotuit has built an entire application in Flash around viewing the clips.

What makes Gotuit interesting is that it isn’t user-driven, they have actually gone out and gotten content. You can see the news, listen to music videos, check out sports clips. As Michael Arrington says, this application furthers television’s demise. It is a great example of how Flash can be used not only to deliver multimedia, but deliver an entire experience around that multimedia. It is one of the selling points of the platform, and Gotuit does it very well. Richard McManus has some great info on the launch.

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.

Knowledge@Wharton, the newsletter of the Wharton School has two great articles that are worth reading for anyone interested in the future of software. The first is a good summary of a panel at Supernova which discussed specifically how desktop software will look in the future. The panel got into some of the most important issues that need to be worked out, privacy being first and foremost. It’s an excellent summary and rounds out the issues nicely.

The second is more fun because it is an interview with Kevin Lynch (where’s the podcast?!). It is always interesting to hear Kevin’s take on things as he’s ‘behind the lines’ and one of the major factors directing the vision at Adobe. In the interview he talks about Microsoft, WPF, Apollo, and where Adobe is headed with the Engagement Platform.

Okay, I said it. Adobe should buy Jumpcut (obligatory TechCrunch profile here. I had taken a quick peek at Jumpcut when they arrived on the scene, but I didn’t really dig in until I got an email from an old colleague at Wharton the other day. It’s an impressive application both for its target audience as well as its technical merit. As far as RIAs go this is the real deal - something that could just as easily be an intro-level video editing application for the desktop.

Which is why Adobe should buy them. Jumpcut would make a perfect compliment to their video suite, and with Adobe’s inside video knowledge could become a very powerful tool for the white-hot online video market. Buying Jumpcut would give Adobe a complimentary product to Pemiere and would target a less professional market - the kind with low costs and high margins. Combine that with the fact that it’s running Flash and outputting Flash video and this has Adobe written all over it.

Jumpcut could gain a lot from Adobe’s technical video talents and Adobe would gain a lot from Jumpcut’s head start. Besides, all of the other kids in the Valley are buying Web 2.0 start ups, why not Adobe?

I had the chance to take a look at the Flex 2 Essential Training series by Lynda.com and thought it was worth highlighting. I have never been a big fan of video training suites, but I was actually pleasantly surprised with this one. It isn’t meant for people who know Flex 2 already, but if you’re starting from scratch, or coming from a Flash background, I think you’ll get a lot out of it.

It does a good job of going through the basics of Flex (and these are free for you to check out) and showing people the how and the why of both Flex Builder and the framework. Once you drill down into the more specific tutorials, you get into the nitty gritty parts of Flex.

I thought the range of topics covered was quite good. If you sit through all 4.5 hours of the training, you’ll have a very good understanding of Flex 2 and what it takes to build applications. As I said, this isn’t going to be for advanced developers who want to push Flex 2 to the limits, but it’s an excellent starting point for learning the technology. By the end, you’ll have all of the tools you need to start, finish, and then want to explore more, which is probably the best kind of training.

I’m hoping to review some of the Flex 2 books, because one of my biggest complaints about Flex 1.5 was the lack of training materials. I realize that this goes hand-in-hand with the price, and with the general target audience, but the only way we’re going to get to 1 million developers is with a lot of training resources. I think it’s a good sign that Lynda has jumped on.