Alright… so unless you you’ve been living under a rock for the last couple years, you know that TDD, Source Control and Build Automation have fully hit the Flash design and development scene. It seems as though everyone is talking about it. A lot. And then commenting on it. A lot. (more…)

So, I’m not going to MAX this year… The economy has made a lot of extra spending go away and conferences are no exception to this rule. I do plan on virtually attending the webcasts and keynotes this year, though, so I definitely am staying in the loop.

I’m not putting together a prediction list, but rather a wishlist… Will any of these happen? I dunno, but I do know they would make my life in the Adobe universe better and more productive.

1. AIR on iPhone – It’s unlikely that I am going to be learning Objective C anytime soon. And while I would love to take a stab at creating an app on the iPhone, this is really about the only way to do it. If I could compile an AIR app for the iPhone, this would help bridge that gap.
2. A release date for Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst – Believe it or not, I’ve been using these tools for some time on real work. Flash Builder a bit more, but I have been able to get some nice stuff out of Catalyst from time to time. I’d like a formalized release schedule and a price so I can put it in my budget ASAP and get it on my team’s desktops for real.
3. Some word on what the Omniture buyout means for Flash platform analytics – Is it going to be a LiveCycle product? A Flash Platform SaaS? What? How can I get integrating this into my experiences and RIAs?
4. A bit more concrete info on AIR 2.0’s deeper features – FOTB leaked that C++ and other API integration was coming, but what about Google Earth? Open GL? BYOAPI (Bring your own API)
5. More Hardware acceleration control and/or better threading/CPU support. – Building 1080P+ experiences on Flash sucks. There I said it. I’ve been burned enough over the last couple of years to know this. At The Iona Group we often build large HD resolution kiosks, presentations, installations etc. We prefer using Flash for our rich media development. These two things collide in unpleasant ways more often than they should. In many ways, Director is still more capable at performing in world class fashion at high high resolution. Processing is too. This could be for Flash Player 11, AIR 2.0 or whatever… Just the sooner, the better. Grant Skinner has made pleas to Adobe to improve CPU usage and performance, so maybe that will be enough.

So there you have it… not sure if any of these will happen, but it sure would be grand if they did. What are you putting on your MAX Wishlist?

As most of you who visit here know, I love Flash. Pretty much always have (Flash 3 baby! I ditched Director as quickly as I could.). Sure, we’ve had our differences on and off again over the years, but overall, I continue to be a strong advocates for the technology and love to use it whenever I can on projects for myself and clients. Many of you are probably also are aware that I am also an Apple geek. I have owned over a half dozen Macs myself, and used them long before I was able to get my parents to finally pick one up for me at the end of high school.

Usually, this works out well together. Adobe/Macromedia software pretty much always runs on Apple hardware, with only a few exceptions. A big one happened a couple of years ago with the advent of the iPhone. Here I was, lusting over the phone, but a little heartbroken that the “real internet” as they put it in the first ads for the phone would be missing a key component, Flash. I bought the phone, and yes, at first, I did miss not having Flash on the mobile Safari browser packaged with the phone. More than a little.

Tease after tease, rumor after rumor, here we are, two years later, two major hardware and software revisions later, and still no Flash on the iPhone. The desire to actually have the plugin on the phone, though, at least for me has greatly waned. I’ve simply moved on. It’s not that I wouldn’t welcome it, but with YouTube encoding the videos in H.264 and a lot of other sites out there doing the same, it’s less important to me. Furthermore, many sites have mobile optimized versions of the site available for iPhone users, so browsing the “real internet” isn’t really relevant as an argument anymore. When you add the app store and all the specialized apps for viewing box scores, Twitter, Facebook and the rest, I actually find myself opening Safari less and less with each passing month as an iPhone user.

Beyond the adaptations that content producers have gone through to make their experiences better on the iPhone, there are just as many things that haven’t been “optimized” for the iPhone actually makes the experience even better. In two years surfing using mobile safari, I have yet to be harassed by an annoying Flash banner ad or crazy iframe popover atrocity. That’s nice, if you ask me!

Now, on the flipside, I as a content producer would love to be able to bring some of my creations to the best small screen platform out there, the iPod Touch/iPhone combo. Of course challenges like multitouch, and lack of a hover state for UI feedback among others would need to be worked out. Who wouldn’t love to hack together some sort of GeoLocational Augmented Reality Papervision freak out awesomeness? With the addition or accelorometers, compass, live Google maps and so many other nice things that phone has to offer, building Flash on the phone would be a ton of fun…

But then again, we’d get so many ad banners. I don’t know about you, but when you sometimes have little control over your mobile bandwidth (eg. dropping to Edge, getting fewer bars than 3, etc), I’m not too keen on giving up those precious bits to some video banner being crammed down my narrow little pipe.

The sheer amount of fun stuff built in Flash would add a ton of great content to the phone, from casual games, to chat apps or even Acrobat Connect. It’s very likely that the App store is the reason that we don’t have Flash, think about how many $0.99 apps would be obsoleted the instant that Flash hit the phone. That is a lot of income that Apple would lose. This is all but obvious, and widely discussed amongst the Apple and Adobe faithful alike.

What are your thoughts? Miss Flash? Not so much? Why is it on virtually every other major mobile platform, but not iPhone? What would you build in Flash for the iPhone that would be a perfect blend of the hardware’s capabilities and the software’s strengths?

Nearly 1.5 years ago, the Adobe community was treated to a demo of Codename Thermo at Adobe Max in Chicago. Thermo is a next generation tool for designing and developing RIAs. It’s come a long way since then, renamed Flash Catalyst and had a significant refining of its purpose in many many presentations by Adobe personnel, evangelists and community members. The title of this post, making reference to the mythical beasts of lore like the Griffin (Gryphon), is an allusion to the fact the Flash Catalyst is no small bit of work. It draws from the complete Adobe software catalog for various pieces of it’s makeup. It’s got a little of Adobe’s complete DNA strain sprinkled throughout it. Built on Eclipse (like Flash Builder), complete with drawing tools (like AI/PS/FW), possessing some timeline functionality (AE/FL), allowing for interactivity and design time data (FL/DW), Flash Catalyst is one tool from many many sources. Can something so varied in heritage and huge in scope deliver? Well, the community at large is just starting to determine that.

The Flash Catalyst beta (FC) has been in the hands of the general public for a week or so. I’ve been playing with it, too. No question about it, it’s a cool tool. The potential to create fully custom skinned MXML based apps leveraging the Flex framework by designers is very near a “holy grail” of XD judging by the level of interest around this application. So, what’s on everyone’s minds now that it’s more than a MAX demo or screencast?

First off, the toolkit… It’s a little feature incomplete to be used for production work right now, since it’s missing a large number of absolutely necessary components for proper RIA design and development. I’m sure they have planned to dramatically increase that number of of available components, but I’ve started a list for that in the user forums, here, to serve as a community point for discussing this topic. It can’t be easy thinking through the nearly limitless permutations of Advanced Datagrids, Item Renderers and ways that components can be combined and then providing a bridge between design tools, so it’s no surprise that some of those pieces are still absent from FC. The Flex framework is mature and robust, and providing Spark components (the new Flex 4 SDK components) for the entire suite is a big big undertaking. This is largely an effort of dumping tons of resources towards finishing this, so I’m confident this will be taken care of prior to sale.

Secondly, the use cases… There are a number of users/community members out there still a bit confused about how and when FC would fit into their workflow. Most have to do with questions about integration with various Adobe apps, but some deal with roundtrip issues and integration with Flash Builder. An interesting post on that can be found here. I don’t think Adobe can possibly make everyone happy here. There are simply too many masters to serve.

Thirdly, the app has some pretty big stability issues and install problems for a good chunk of users. I’m not going to link to each one here, but a quick scan of the topics in the user forum shows a full third of the posts are about basic app launching issues and very basic feature issues. Now, of course, these issues will be fixed prior to release, but it does go to show just how very far they have to go to get app performance up to par for a retail release. I wouldn’t expect a Flash Catalyst release party at MAX… as awesome as that would be. There is so much un-Eclipsing this Eclipse build, so much Adobe-ying to do. I’m sure they want this app to feel like a CS family memeber, and it’s close, but there is a ways to go (just export the project and read “Invoking Flex” as the progress bar advances, examine the Edit menu using Eclipse icons, note the missing preference panel, play around with the code view a little) before it’s an Adobe app.

So, enough complaining, what are some of the real bright spots in this tool so far?

• Illustrator and FC go together like peanut butter and jelly. I’ve imported a dozen or so AI files into FC and had only minor aesthetic issues with any of them. This bodes well for my RIA mockup tool of choice and FC working well with each other.
• The tool is a fantastic wireframer! I use Omnigraffle pretty much exclusively for this now, so it may be tough to usurp this for me, but if FC continues to add widgets and an extensibility layer to allow new components to be added to the basic library, I can see big big things for this. One of my biggest problems with doing wireframes revolves around it essentially creating a dead document. There is not really a tool out there that allows you to take a wireframe and use it as a part of your final deliverable. Flash Catalyst looks to proivde a way out of this.
• It really does work as advertised. You can indeed wire up a CS4 created mockup to XML schema in minutes. Not kidding here.Very nice!

So, to recap… Not complaining about the tool at all. In fact, the contrary. FC is a brave new world in RIA design. There are so many unknown tricks and suprises in this mythical software beast, though, it’s difficult to see how to get to a downloadable purchase from where we are today. The product is sure to elate many, and possilby disappoint just as many as well, at least in this 1.0 release. I’ve got high high hopes. Maybe that is part of the problem.

How about you, are you enjoying the Flash Catalyst beta? Is it what you expected? Where do you this fitting in your workflow? What part of this Gryphon are you most interested in?

Last year Adobe announced a partnership with device manufacturers to bring the Flash platform to devices other than PCs and Mobile. There was some question as to what types off devices would see the widely distributed runtime first, though. It looks as though NAB this year sheds some light on that one.

Engadget, NYTimes, and the BBC both report that a number of television manufacturers have models coming in late 2009, early 2010 that will feature the Flash player for use in widgets, tickers, search and much more.

This is a big move for Adobe in getting to the set top world before Silverlight and is a big boon for Flash platform developers. Working in the embedded systems market opens a largely untapped market, with many Flash developers (here) expressing interest in getting into that large market. Look at this:

More than 420 million TVs, set-top boxes, and media players are expected to ship globally in the next three years and increasingly they are capable of being connected to the net.

That is a big big market to create content and content delivery systems for. I see casual games, small utilities, custom video channels and a ton of other great applications coming around the bend.

Another thing about this that excites me… Often we create video kiosks for tradeshows, museums, etc. consisting of a low-end PC/Mac Mini and a large screen touchscreen. These configs usually just act as a video jukebox of sorts with a small amount of network connectivity required. If it turns out that the sets with the Flash system can have custom content loaded onto them via network, USB or SD cards, this could dramatically simplify the way we develop these solutions. No PC required!

Do you have Flash content ideas that will benefit from this development? How will this affect your day to day Flash platform projects? How can you take this development to market in your niche?

Think you’ve got what it takes? Write a Flash ActioScript sketch/application in 140 characters or less. It’s harder than you think. Check out Grant Skinner’s overview and then read the rules. After you are thoroughly confused, check out the entry page for a little clarity and some great work. Prepare to be amazed at what a very creative community has put together. I have a couple I tossed together in the mix, but the real beauties belong to Quasimondo. His mastery of ActionScript has made 140 characters seem effortless.

With talk of more rounds to come and murmurs of various permutations of the gimmee code included to help you along in your quest, this should be fun to follow. Think of it as a communal geek Actionscript tennis carried on for all the world to be confused at.

I’d love to see a TweetCoding that offers Flex as a option, or perhaps allows for a couple external packages as some of the gimee code. URLRequests (for e4x madness), maybe extra audio stuff, a little 3D, maybe some filters. I feel tired thinking about the late nights already.

Have you created something cool in TweetCoding? Post a link here.

Green Projects are everywhere. Infrastructure, industry, and of course interactive exhibits. The company I work for recently launched a very cool installation at The Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago that has a green focus, but with a bit of a twist. You see, they installed a water reclamation processing system in one of the high traffic restrooms at the museum. This facility takes the water flushed washed down the sink, cleans it, making it “grey water“. This grey water can then be used in the toilets. This conserves a massive amount of water. here’s where we come in.

The bathroom is touchless. The Sloan brand sinks, toliets and urinals (yes, now my blog has the word “urinal” in it, twice, even) are all automatic. In addition, the urinals are of the “waterless” variety. The hand dryers are those cool Dyson airblade ones. All of these devices report to a central server tracking usage. That’s right… the toilets let the server know how many flushes happen, the sinks report the water usage, etc.

We built an interactive presentation that taps into this data via a webservice. The data is then overlaid on some fantastic HD footage of water doing watery things. Washing up on beaches, splashing, gurgling, being water. We used Flash’s H.264 support to its fullest, displayed on 120hz 1080p displays. Looks great. On specified intervals, the metrics are updated, letting viewer know about the environmental impact they are making by using this facility.

Take a look at a couple images (I apologize for the photo quality, they were shot by my iPhone in some low light conditions)… Click on em to see the full size version.

The second image has some data on the display… This image was shot at about 10AM, and the facility had already saved 114 gallons that day! Cool. It states there that the current average savings is 2031 gallons per day. Woot! Now that’s some cool data you can use. All built in flash by The Iona Group. Erik Peterson was the primary developer. He’s on Twitter. You should follow him if you like pithy comments and electric pineapples (I don’t know what they are either). Heather Ford was the primary designer. Follow her on Twitter, too. She does good work.

What a fun project. A great client too.

I have shared tools, and components and source code libraries here in the past, primarily focusing on free and open-source libraries. I do enjoy using and getting to contribute to these community projects, but sometimes, there is no way to get around it, you just have to buy a component or plug-in to get the project done. When doing so, it’s really difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff. Here are a few commercially available tools or components that I have used that aid in creating web, RIA or other rich-media experiences like kiosks or tradeshow pieces. There are some add-ons that I have used in the past that I haven’t included here because they were troublesome or too buggy for final use, so view this as a list of only the ones that have stayed in my toolbox after a successful deployment.

• FlashLoaded’s 3D Wall/Spiral/Tube, etc – If you want to create a simple 3D gallery or touch-panel display, need it done quickly and don’t have a lot of time to to learn Papervision, this relatively inexpensive group of component will achieve most of your needs. It’s pretty much bug free and does have a fairly large and accessible API for managing and working with the properties, methods and events in the component. You can integrate video into the the 3d planes, and put interactive SWFs in the panels as well. Pretty cool. That said, if you are already adept at Papervision and have a grasp on how you might want to build image galleries using the library, this product would have very little use to use to you. FlashLoaded does a respectable job at offering support, updating the components when there are bugs or issues and even adding features after a components release, offering updates free of charge to registered purchasers. They are worth a look.

• JumpEye Component’s Menus – JumpEye is a well known rich media design/development consulting company, but they also offer a wide variety of components for sale at their JumpEyeComponents.com site. The menus they have there are pretty good in particular, and fill the void created after Adobe Flash CS3’s release, when the more advanced menu components and accordion panel were inexplicably removed from the product. It’s a shame you have to purchase a replacement for a component that Flash used to ship with straight from Adobe, but it seems that advanced UI components, etc have been migrated out of Flash and into Flex. This site has a number of add-ons available that help you overcome that shortcoming if you need to produce some advanced UI in Flash. For the price, it’s tough to argue for custom development of a menu when a deadline is looming. Highly cusomtizable and powered by XML, the components are flexible enough to make them useful for a wide variety of implementations. Find out more here.

• IconFactory’s IconBuilder- Do you find yourself needing to produce a wide variety of icons for AIR apps, Windows apps, Mac apps, websites, favicons, etc? If so, this will save you a ton of time. If all you ever need is a Favicon from time to time, this probably overkill, but Iconfactory’s IconBuilder is great for simplifying the process needed when moving through the design process for multi-sized icons inside of Photoshop or Fireworks. It can create icons of pretty much every size dimension and palette, even helping you verify how the color indexing will look for final output to older, or smaller icons used in list views, etc. It’s pretty indispensable for that reason. If you are delivering custom apps for clients and you aren’t creating custom icons for those apps, step up to the plate and add some polish to your deliverables. It really finishes off the presentation. This app is $79 for Mac users, $49 for Windows users, but the Mac version does have a few extra niceties for the extra $.

• ixis’s (formerly Softheap) Public PC Desktop – Have you ever produced a kiosk for use at a trade show, exhibit or other installation? How did you lock it down? You know, prevent those pesky users from monkeying with the system? An absolute necessity. This $80 app is super handy for keeping nosy people out of the OS. You can lock down the computer via a white-list for applications, URLs, services, firewalls/proxies or pretty much anything else. Additionally on lockdown, you can have Public PC desktop auto launch your kiosk app. This helps in the daily routine for a exhibit when the computer reboots after being off for the evening. I wouldn’t dream of putting in a touchscreen at a remote location that didn’t have some level of protection on it. This is a key step in setting up that final disk image that gets shipped on pretty much any project we do. This app is by no means the only out there that does this sort of thing, but is probably the easiest to use that still offeres enough configurability to fit your clients needs. The site is pretty poorly designed, but here is a link directly to the product page.

• Zoomifyer – This app gets a bit of use from time to time by me. The intelligent slicing, loading and simple navigation UI it adds for deep image viewing, panning and scrolling is pretty nice. Advanced hotspots, event management and other interactions make this a very nice choice for making an image viewer app. A simple version does ship with Photoshop, but the full product adds a suite of bells and whistles that make the upgrade worth it. To do this sort of thing by hand, you’d need an army of graphic prep artists and a very regimented workflow to ensure the proper consistency. Check out some samples here.

• Multidmedia’s Zinc – More than just a plug-in, this IDE allows for Mac, Windows, and Linux applicaiton compilation. Wht’s the big deal? Why would you use this instead of AIR? Well, not a lot of major client I encounter have made the jump to AIR yet. On top of that, Zinc compiled apps have deeper access to OS level APIs, file IO, Database connections and much much more. This compiler really does take your Flex or Flash app and turn it into a desktop program. It’s got an impressive list of features. My main complaint against it is that the developers seem to prize a rapid release cycle over a robust testing cycle, so sometimes even minor point updates can break previously stable code. I have learned this over the years and now only update Zinc after reading the suport forums and ensuring that the most recent release doesn’t mess things up. This is by far the best SWF to EXE tool out there IMHO, and I have used pretty much all of them. Check it out. Absolutely worth the $ if you have projects that require this sort of functionality.

So there you go, a group of tools I have found useful in my projects over the last couple of years. These get used again and again by me and my team, and maybe you will find a use for them as well. Got others in your toolbox you keep going back to? Share ‘em with me by leaving a comment.

As mentioned in my previous post, I’m making a list. Or in this case, two. The first list was a celebration of things that happened in 2008 that were perceived by me as being advancements in the Flash world. Well, in the interest of being a true pundit/critic, I have a list of the things that burn me when working in the Flash platform. I’d be interested in hearing what your thoughts are on this list and if you have some things you might want to add.

1. The Flash IDE wasn’t really improved – Now a thing of comic proportions, Flash CS4 Professional has all been but abandoned as a code editor by most professionals I know, respect and follow in Flash platform blog world. Flex Builder, FDT, Flash Develop and many others out there fill the function better. Adobe missed a huge boat by not enhancing this much begrudged part of the IDE. I mean, the autocomplete is dopey, the need or (un)need of import statements is erratic, and on and on. The language has evolved, with AS3 forcing you to write better structured code, but the editor itself is pretty much still a scripting sketchpad. It’s obvious this is an impediment to users learning AS3, as it seems to pop up as a topic on blogs a lot. Case in point (read the comments on Mike Chamber’s post).
2. The Flash Mobile Platform is still pretty much a mess – Now, I might take some heat for this view from some evangelists and others in the mobile trenches, but I don’t see a game changing strategy here. With Blackberry, iPhone and Android all out, all popular and not able to play Flash content yet (I hear Android is coming soon, though), it sure seems a bit disjointed to me. Some phones may use openscreen Flash players eventually, some Flash Lite, some Flash. It’s a bit of a mess, IMHO. Furthermore, when I visit Adobe’s Flash Platform page, I see no mention of Flash for Mobile, you have to dig a bit. I just think we need a concerted effort to put Flash mobile devevlopment front and center on Devnet, and make Flash part of mobile vendors lexicon in their sales pitches, i.e. “Did you know you can play Flash games and watch Youtube videos on this Phone because it has Flash?”, etc.
3. No standard animation syntax across Adobe products – Flash, Flex, After Effects, Spry Framework, Director, heck, even Photoshop are capable of producing animation. All use their own syntax. Some of it is due to mergers and tech acquisitions, some is just due to lack of a “motion czar” at Adobe. Sounds ludicrous, I know, but why should a CS4 user need to know so many syntaxes to make things dance around or produce transitions? Moses supposes propsed this over a year ago, and no movement has taken place on this AFAIK. Dont’ think its a big deal? Look at this diagram. Then look at this one. Which world do you want to work in?
4. Flash Player 9 never got it’s garbage collection issues patched – It’s a bit disconcerting that such a huge bug never got patched as a revision level thing and they waited to completely update the player to fix it. I’ve written about this in the past, and Grant Skinner has a great series of posts about it on his blog, but really when it comes down to it, the poor audio handling in Flash player 9 (also a well documented bug) and lack of a true unload and cleanup mechanism among other things illustrate to me that maybe a 12-18 month revision cycle is just madness. I’m sure it’s half marketing, “Well, Silverlight just bumped their number, so we have to do it for our player, too”, but that doesn’t make it right. Patch and update the software you have, save the revision number changes for big big revelations and allow your devs to sleep at night in stead of updating their code.
5. Ever Diverging APIs – I’ve mentioned this issue on this blog before as well… With a “platform”, it’s apparent that some features that Flash IDE can produce aren’t readily apparent in Flex and vice-versa. Add on top of that the AIR APIs and you start to get a LiveDoc soup. What can one do that the other can’t? What are the dependencies? Etc, etc. Flex’s Framework has some hot stuff in it, and, if you chance upon the docs from a Google search trying to do something in Flash, it may not be clear until you’ve read practically the entire class description and gotten your developer hopes dashed on the glacially slow LiveDocs frame based UI website.
6. Adobe still really doesn’t show the Mac much love at all. – Seriously. Not going to spend much time on this here, but Adobe products just run better on Windows. This pains me. I hate Windows and simply will not switch. Please
7. Death of Flash Paper with no successor in sight – This is a perplexing move by Adobe in my view. FlashPaper had it’s flaws, but it was a capable tech for replicating Acrobat Reader in a light and compact fashion. No more. End-of-Lifed this year and told not to let the door hit it’s backside bits on the way out, it left my team hanging, pretty much immediately after launch on a project. No IE7 support. Nothing. Not even a proposed replacement or simple way to write PDFs straight from the Flash player. Seems like it was killed on some sort of sacrificial altar of Adobe/Macromedia merger-y black magic. “One shall die to make the other stronger” crud like that. I’m sure I may be exaggerating, but c’mon… Where I am supposed to go after this? Print2Flash, AlivePDF, etc are all promising, but why no Adobe solution in CS4/Flash Player 10? The Flash API’s PrintJob class blows for much more than most simple jobs… Help us!
8. CS4 Installer not much better than CS3 installer – John Nack’s blog has been the hotspot of talk from the installer front, with several posts commenters lambasting the team and berating the children of the installer team’s developers. I won’t go that far, but wow. Just please please please make CS5’s better. Shock and awe us with its simplicity. Maybe even *gasp* use the OSes’ native installers (If Final Cut Studio can install simply on OSX and MS Office can do the same on Windows, Adobe can figure it out)! If nothing can be done here though, at least make Adobe Updater go away and stop making us quite all our apps while your yipping dog fails yet again.
9. SEO enhancements for Flash, but with no real documentation – Oh, how I wanted this to work out. This summer, it was announced that Adobe and Google would be working together to improve the searchability of Flex and Flash content. Ryan Stewart even ran a contest on it. Only real downside… no actual documentation. Or technotes. Or tutorials. Or, you get the idea. Just a simple little FAQ. C’mon! Peter Elst has a little more info on this at his blog.
10. Global Pricing for Adobe Products unfair as ever – The world definitely doesn’t seem flat when it comes to selling downloadable software packages. Take a look at this comparison of prices for CS4 across the world. Ouch. John Dowdell has a bit on this at his blog entitled CS4 painpoints, so it’s obviously a known issue there, but not sure what’s going on in this realm right now. I do know that it has to hurt to upgrade when the software costs twice as much if you live outside of the US. May as well fly to buy it, or just skip the revision and save the dough in this downtrodden global economy. I have a feeling alot of people may be doing just that.

So, there you go. My list of the ‘08 disappointments in the Flash platform. Any things I missed in your opinion… I’m interested in hearing from other designers and devs out there on this one.

It’s that time of the year. You see all the top albums, movies, tv shows, books etc lists written by critics and content producers on site’s like Pitchfork, Sterogum, etc. (BTW, I think my fave album of ‘08 is TV on the Radio’s “Dear Science”). Well, I have a list of things I’d like to commemorate as well, not music or videos games, but rather a list of things that took place in the Flash ecosystem in 2008 that I feel are significant.

1. A true defnition/clarification of the “Flash Platform” at Max – This is somewhat a marketing move on Adobe’s part, but it serves to consolidate the products, services and solutions that are available from them based around the SWF file format. They’ve even created a page just for that at their site.
2. Continued maturation and growth of Adobe AIR – With version 1.5, Adobe has tuned some things in the runtime that needed it, like adding Flash player 10 support, encrypted databases, and adding Linux support. Just as important, though, it sends a very strong message to everyone, developers, competitors and the entire RIA community that this time, they really mean it. They learned from Central and aren’t about to let this tech languish. Great news.
3. Twitter’s enormous growth – Tangentially, Twitter has actually been a boon for AIR. With Twhirl and Tweetdeck being two of the most popular desktop Twitter clients out there, there is no question that many people may have installed AIR just to use them. (I use Tweetdeck, BTW and love it. The ability to create groups of people is necessary for the large number of people I follow).
4. Continued transparency in development of Flex – With a site dedicated to the open source projects going on at Adobe, you can keep tabs on Gumbo, Blaze and any other number of apps in progress. This sort of implicit trust and collaboration with the community is simply amazing for a company of this size and with a project of such obvious strategic importance. The preview release of Flash Catalyst is yet another example of this great communication with developers.
5. Flash Player 10 – Well, of course this was a big deal. Ading a Z-axis, adding unloadAndStop, and lots of other enhancements. I’m not currently targeting Flash 10 for web content, but we do have plans to use some of the features in tradeshows and some exhibits very shortly. The player penetration survey numbers are due for an update soon, so it will be interesting to see what the uptake is.
6. Remoting’s growth – AMF continues to take root with more and more server side platforms due to its significant performance increases it adds and the relative ease of deployment. A Zend AMF component, traction gaining in the ASP.Net circles, and with the publication of the spec at the very end of ‘07, it’s clear it is not going to slow any time soon.
7. Google Analytics Flash platform enhancements – Via External Interface, it has always been possible to do very basic Google Analytics tracking for a Flash/Flex app. There is now a dedicated Google Analytics Tracking For Adobe Flash open source project, though that adds some major improvements to that methodology and really beefs up your ability to determine what users are doing in your apps. Jesse Warden has a good write up on his site about this. Highly recommended.
8. The Cloud and Flash – A number of cloud computing service providers have added support for Flash RIAs, with Intuit’s QuickBase offering a really feature rich API. Very interested in seeing where this is going.
9. The announcement of a forthcoming eLearning suite – After the death of Authorware and the continuous morphing of Breeze, the eLearning strategy for Adobe seemed to be floundering. In November, however, Adobe announced the upcoming eLearning dev suite, a sort of Creative Suite with additional components and scripting add-ons to aid in producing training content. Bring it!
10. Labs, Labs Labs – With new stuff being added every month and a continued grooming of the site, Labs.adobe.com is one of my favorite sites to visit. Cocomo, SwitchBoard, Configurator, the new Text Layout Framework, etc… it is a great resource to read and keep up with the latest news from Adobe.

So, that’s it… A list of 10 things I think Adobe got right this year. Don’t worry, I have a list of the things I think got missed this year and should be things to focus on for ‘09, as well. Should be up in a couple days.

What do you think? What might you like to see added to this list?