Are you in the Chicago area? Do you like RIAs? If so, are you attending RIAPalooza? If not, why not? If you are planning on attending, drop me a line. Also, be sure to follow the RIAPalooza feed at Twitter. I will be tweeting from the event, and hope to have a nice long recap post on my site sometime Sunday. Here’s to a 1st time for a promising event! Hope it goes well, I’m excited and optimistic. They have some interesting speakers,  great sponsors, some excellent sessions and its in my favorite city in the USA.

Man Adobe is just cranking em out. Labs has fresh new betas of some CS4 applications. The new Fireworks CS4 beta looks especially nice for RIA UI design. Cool features, indeed. I will be checking out the Dreamweaver SVN integration this week, for sure. I have little faith in using Dreamweaver for my dev work, I just like Eclipse and BBEdit too much, I think. We’ll see if this new Dreamweaver CS4 Live View which uses Webkit changes that. I do like that they are willing to support other JS libraries besides Spry. We’ve pretty much standardized on JQuery at work.

Anyway, fire up your pipes and try em out… The Mac version of the Dreamweaver CS4 beta is 252MB! The Mac Fireworks CS4 beta is a whopping 633MB! Best turn off your Last.fm while grabbing that puppy. I won’t be checking the SoundBooth beta… I don’t really touch the audio stuff.

Some things in the new Fireworks:

• New user interface
• CSS-based layouts
• PDF export
• Live Style improvements
• Adobe type engine
• AIR authoring

The new Dreamweaver touts these features:

• Live View
• Related Files
• Code Navigator
• CSS best practices
• Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks
• HTML data sets
• Photoshop Smart Objects
• Subversion integration
• Adobe® AIR™ authoring support
• New user interface

Very nice list of features indeed. A little more on this is available at Scott Fegette’s blog. I will really have to give these a workout. Can’t wait for the Diesel beta! Should be around the corner, I would think.

At The Iona Group we have hundreds, probably thousands of videos that we have shot or somehow acquired from client asset libraries, etc. These videos are stored and logged in a pretty big legacy database (Don’t laugh, I think it’s Access). We also have some clients where stored their video assets in a big fat digital asset management system, (DAM) (One in Cumulus, the others proprietary, I believe). These tools make it easier to access the vast array of clips, tapes, etc. we have amassed over the years. Often though, all we have in the record or DAM is one lonely thumbnail image, some timecode info, the log notes about content, acquisition information (date, location, shooter, etc) and maybe, if we are lucky, a short preview clip. This makes selecting stuff for B-Roll or determining what archival footage might be needed a bit tough. Certainly time consuming, too. (more…)

I recently had the pleasure of spending a full day at a client’s site along with some representatives from Adobe. It was great day for networking, introductions and demonstrations. A number of technologies were shown, from Acrobat 3D to LiveCycle, to InDesign/InCopy and finally Flex with Data Services. This client is already using Flash on their site in a number of presentational media methods, and also in their eLearning initiatives. I wold be willing to bet this profile fits a lot of large corporations current state of media affairs. They have recently begun transitioning from some other print publishing tools to the Adobe Creative Suite. They really haven’t tapped into using Adobe tools for business applications yet though.

I have a couple theories on that reluctance. Much of that is due to their long entrenched legacy systems, built using a myriad of technologies. Some of it though is due to what I am dubbing the “Flash Hangover”. You know what I mean, right? The hangover from the type of Flash that caused Jakob Nielsen to write the Flash: 99% Bad article so long ago. You know the type. The Skip Intro Flash. The extra beepy or seizure inducing Flash. The un-backbutton friendly un-search engine friendly un-content management system friendly Flash content we’ve all come to know and loathe. Flash is either viewed as a acceptable annoyance or a toy.

It’s clear to everyone deep in the industry that Flash Player 9 and the current state of affairs in the Flash ecosystem is a little bit past that, but for people that are only tangentially involved in the electronic publishing aspects of a large corporation, the A-HA moment has probably not happened yet. I witnessed it happen for a room full of people the other day, and I’m sure there are many many companies out there may need that moment to push them away from the tired old HTML powered apps they currently have a towards true RIA development.

Silverlight does not have this hangover to recover from, and I must say, we had many of the people at the event asking about a comparison to Siverlight in regards to the data services we were seeing displayed in the very cool Flex visualizations.

It should be an interesting next couple of years.

I know that not everyone likes tech books. My wife and family being some of them. Anyway… I do. I have a huge arsenal of text for the last decade or so that I read, lend to friends and students and then keep around for further reference. In reality there are actually more than ten books in my collection worth sharing, but these ten in this list are especially of use to Flash designers. Of course this is just a list, and my opinion, but, it is based on research through judging my own, my students, friends and colleagues benefit after reading and using these books. Some may be a tad long in the tooth when it comes to coding chops, or specifics etc, but in the end they have still sound principles or extol virtues of best practices or standards. Read on… (more…)

So, I downloaded the Flash Player 10 Beta and the Pixel Bender Toolkit and I must say, it’s fun. I have yet to do anything truly productive with it, but as a creative tool or something that shows the amazing possibilities of Flash 10 off, there isn’t a much better demo out there then downloading the tools, playing with them, exporting a PBJ file (yes, the Flash Filter ByteCode is called a PBJ - hehe.) and running it through the Pixel Bender Demo here. Read on to see some samples and download a few simple sketches. (more…)

I’ve just added my second application to the Adobe AIR Marketplace. You can check it out and download it here. For those that may have missed it, you can learn more about SWFShot in this post. Previously, I added my LOLCat Viewer application to the exchange. You can learn more about that app in my post here. You can download that here from the Adobe AIR Marketplace. That silly LOLCat application now has over 500 downloads, so I’m pretty happy that I put it on the exchange. I doubt it would have gotten that many people trying it out if it were on on my blog alone. That’s one of the main benefits of using that Exchange to get your stuff out there. It’s a great way to get some exposure for your extensions and applications past your blog. Many mainstream designers and developers that may not necessarily chance upon your application via your blog can see it there. So, the added visibility is just great! I highly recommend submitting your app there.

On top of that… Adobe is currently cosponsoring application signing certificates for developers that submit unsigned AIR apps to the marketplace. This means you can get one for free! These certificates from Thawte are worth about $300 if you wanted to buy one. If you have an app that is done or nearly done, my advice would be to finish it and submit it soon! The process of submitting to the exchange and  getting the certificate is pretty painless, and after that you get a nice cert that you can use to sign your app and get rid of those red X warnings on the install screens of your apps. A good way to put you users at ease when installing your shiny new apps. I’m pretty sure this is a limited time offer, so you better get compilin’!

Last April, I wrote a post listing some reasons why I felt Silverlight would not succeed. That post garnered a lot of visits, comments and a few trackbacks. It’s still a highly trafficked post of mine. Furthermore, that post is the number one Google result for “silverlight IDE” and ranks pretty highly for a number of Silverlight related phrases like “silverlight penetration”, “silverlight market penetration”, and a few others along those lines. I’d like to revisit some of those points to see how things have changed in the past year. I was inspired to revisiti this after reading Robert Scoble’s friendfeed topic on this subject. Read on to see the progress. (more…)

Too good to be true. Seriously. Flash Player 10 Beta is available for download. My favorite feature I intend to play with Pixel Bender filters. Woohoo! Go get it now! I fully intend to abuse this once I wake up from tonight’s sleep.

Mitch Anderson and Brian McMurray were both students of mine at Bradley University, and later, they became coworkers of mine at The Iona Group. Both were obviously talented when they came onboard, with their talents only growing by leaps and bounds while they produced stellar work for us at Iona.

Alas, things were not meant to last. Mitch is leaving for L.A. with sights set on the mograph, vfx pantheon. He’ll do well. His aesthetic is top notch and he is driven. Brian is leaving Iona to work at MIT in the Mobile Experience Laboratory. He’ll be tying together Drupal, Flash and SMS to produce some wicked cool stuff. (Note the use of wicked there, Brian. Get used to it.) He is always willing to try something wild and new, so he’ll fit in well in the air of experimentation that I’m sure is so appealing to him at his new venture.

I couldn’t be happier for these guys. Of course it’s tough to see two friends go. It’s tough to see two collaborators leave. But, I know it’s for the best of both of these great guys’ careers to try and shoot for the stars this early in. Really, I’m even maybe a little jealous of the opportunities, these wide open futures, but I wouldn’t dream of letting on. Hopefully one of ‘em will hire me when I’m old and doddering.

Seriously, though, I wish them both the best.