Lycos Europe is shutting down… Jubii (Denmark) to be acquired by Janus Friis & co. ?
It appears that Lycos Europe has failed to find a buyer… so they have taken the consequence and has sent out a press message that they will shut down and pay a bunch of money back to their shareholders.
Rumors are that Janus Friis and a couple of his usual gangmembers plan to purchase Jubii out of the bankrupt estate and keep it going… we will see what happens.
Adobe MAX 2008 Schedules
Having returned from Adobe MAX NA 2008 recently, it’s apparent that the EMEA version is so much smaller than the one in the US.
First of all, the US one was attended by more than 5000 people and the one in Milan has reached 1400 registrations (ref. http://onflash.org/ted/2008/11/max-europe-prep-in-milano.php).
The much lower number of attendees obviously reflects on the number of sessions, so I have chosen to share my agenda’s. There are some sessions only found in the NA agenda, which I would really have liked to see people in Europe get access to as well. Among those are the very technically concrete sessions such as “Extending Flex Builder” and the inspirational session “Dynamic Sounds” by infamous Andre Michell.
Adobe MAX EMEA 2008
Monday, December 1, 2008
09:30am – 11:00am MAX 2008 Opening General Session Auditorium
11:30am – 12:30pm Here Be Pixels Yellow 2
02:00pm – 03:00pm Optimizing Adobe AIR for Code Execution, Memory, and Rendering Red 1
03:15pm – 04:15pm Testing Your Flex Applications Yellow 2
04:30pm – 05:30pm Community and Flash Player Yellow 2
05:30pm – 09:30pm Welcome Reception in Community Pavilion Level 1
Tuesday, December 2, 2008
09:00am – 10:00am Developer Best Practices with Flex Yellow 2
10:30am – 12:00pm General Session Auditorium
01:30pm – 02:30pm Anatomy of a Seriously Sophisticated Adobe AIR Application Blue 2
02:45pm – 03:45pm Flex Development with Cairngorm Blue 1
04:00pm – 05:00pm Wireframing Experiences and Applications Red 2
05:30pm – 07:00pm Sneak Peeks Auditorium, Level 2
08:00pm – 11:30pm Customer Appreciation Event Special Offsite Location
Wednesday, December 3, 2008
09:00am – 10:00am Flash Player Internals Yellow 3
10:15am – 11:15am Mixing Open Source and Commercial Software Yellow 1
11:30am – 12:30pm Finding Away3D Yellow 2
01:30pm – 02:30pm Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex Builder Red 1
02:45pm – 03:45pm Structuring Your Development Team to Get the Work Done Yellow 1
04:00pm – 05:00pm Forms Gone Wild (2008) Red 1
Adobe MAX NA 2008
Monday, November 17, 2008
09:30am – 11:00am MAX 2008 Opening General Session Moscone West, Level 3 Ballroom
11:30am – 12:30pm Flash Player Internals Moscone West 2024
02:00pm – 03:00pm The Holistic Design Process for Interactive Agencies Moscone West 2020
05:00pm – 06:00pm Introduction to Thermo and the Next Generation of Flex Moscone West 2024
06:30pm – 08:30pm Welcome Reception in Community Pavilion Level 1, Moscone West
08:30pm – 10:30pm Birds-of-a-Feather and Meet the Team Level 2, Moscone West
Tuesday, November 18, 2008
09:00am – 10:00am Best Practices for Developing with Flex in a Team Moscone West 2004
10:30am – 12:00pm General Session Moscone West, Level 3 Ballroom
01:30pm – 02:30pm Dynamic Sounds in Flash Player 10 Moscone West 2024
03:00pm – 04:00pm Flex Project Workflows Moscone West 2002
04:30pm – 05:30pm Building Applications with Thermo Moscone West 2003
06:00pm – 07:30pm Sneak Peeks Level 3, Moscone West
07:30pm – 10:30pm Customer Appreciation Event de Young Museum
Wednesday, November 19, 2008
09:30am – 10:30am Extending Flex Builder Moscone West 2022
11:00am – 12:00pm Debugging and Profiling with Flex Builder Moscone West 2011
02:00pm – 03:00pm Designing in a Developer’s World Moscone West 2022
03:30pm – 04:30pm Here Be Pixels Moscone West 2002
05:00pm – 06:00pm Inside the Adobe AIR Cook-off: The Best Show Off Their Winning Chops Moscone West 2008
Adobe Flex Learning Paths… now available
Adobe has published a new sub-site, Adobe Flex Learning Paths, to provide an easy way to get started with Adobe Flex.
They have divided the paths into 4 distinct sub-paths according to roles:
Each path is an easily accessible way to acquire more knowledge about Adobe Flex which is custom tailored to each specific role.
To study the path relevant for your role is a must if you are starting with Flex or are considering to get started.
If you are feeling adventurous, Adobe has even created a Flex version of the HTML sub-site… however it’s still in BETA, so its full of wet paint and wrinkles that need to be ironed out.
Check it out… http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/learn/designer/learningpath.html
DJ Mike Relm Live at Adobe MAX NA 2008 Keynote
This is the full video of Mike Relm LIVE at Adobe MAX NA in San Francisco on Monday, November 17th 2008. Hopefully Adobe will provide a more hi-res version as soon as they get all the assets from the great conference organized.
Adobe MAX awards EU… make your vote count
The voting form for Adobe MAX Awards in Milan has been published.
If you think MyHome – Your Intelligent Home is the most visionary of the three finalists… you can follow this link to the voting form…
https://www.adobemaxsubmission.com/viewer/?projectid=96&location=EMEA
You can see the finalists here and get the links for the voting forms…
http://max.adobe.com/eu/experience/#?s=5&p=3
NASDAQ Market Replay won Adobe MAX Award
NASDAQ Market Replay won the Best Enterprise Application in the Adobe MAX Awards 2008 at the Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco.
The Powerful NASDAQ Market Replay application enables investment professionals to replay the market by slowing it down to the millisecond level for moment-in-time insight into trade histories.
The creative department at Hello helped Adobe design the NASDAQ Market Replay application, which helps investors by providing a validated replay and analysis of securities listed on all major U.S. equity markets. It is an essential part of a trader’s job to keep pace with the fast changing financial markets. As market data is played out over time on the trading floor, we wanted to represent this visually. We took our inspiration from sound editors when we designed the user experience. Similar to a sound sampler, you can replay a snippet of the entire data. One of the challenges was that a whole day of trading, for example in Apple stocks, can result in a 45 MB text file (trades are recorded down to the millisecond). Due to the massive amount of data that investors have to deal with daily, we used the Adobe Air framework. This platform lets you work with data offline, and only updates when a user requests it from the server. What came out the other end was a seamless user experience, allowing for data to become tangible in a smooth zooming algorithm that constantly redraws the screen as the user moves in and ponders the finer details of a market-play.
User needs drove the feature set here, making sure that we ended up with a focused, easy-to-use application and an elegant interface. Hello produced the IA, interaction design, algorithm – as well as the visual user experience for the NASDAQ Market Replay.
Alongside Adobe and NASDAQ, Hello took the challenge of making intangible mountains of data into an innovative and useful solution that resulted in giving a very high brand value for NASDAQ.
Learn more – and try the application here…
https://data.NASDAQ.com/MR.aspx
Adobe interviews Claude Courbois of NASDAQ OMX
http://max.adobe.com/blog/2008/11/max-awards-2008-nasdaq-market-replay.html
Adobe MAX NA 2008
Adobe MAX NA 2008 is over… it’s been great to be here in Adobe’s HQ city and meeting all the people responsible for the tools that we use every day.
It’s amazing how clever Adobe is in combining both driving the development by research and innovation as well as responding to the changes to the industry that more than ever puts strains on technology companies.
Now, to recap 2 of the really big things that have been presented to the public on this year’s MAX.
Flash Catalyst
This is the kind of application that fills such a critical role in our industry, so it’s really easy to get it wrong… so to be honest, I was very concerned about how Adobe were going to go about it… but to my positive surprise, Adobe has really been good at interpreting the needs of interactive agencies and created a tool that was even better than what I thought would be a good result. The seamless integration between CS4 and Flash Catalyst through a common object model and Flex Builder through FXG is actually better than I had hoped for.
Cocomo
Almost every application being built now and in the future will include elements of collaboration. Furthermore will future applications be using the internet as a part of its native architecture and base itself on functionality it gets from services in the cloud. These factors all point to a framework such as Cocomo, I can’t wait to be able to use it in applications now that it’s made it through to the public beta state during Adobe MAX in San Francisco.
(This picture is taken with my iPhone at the Keynote speech Monday)
Adobe Cocomo is now in Public Beta
Having been part of the prerelease program on Cocomo, it’s great to see the interest around it from everywhere in the community and industry and it’s really great to see that it’s now become ready to go into public beta.
Adobe “Cocomo” is a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities into their RIA (rich Internet applications). Comprised of both Flex-based client components and a hosted services infrastructure, Cocomo allows you to build real-time, multi-user applications with Flex in less time than ever before.
Check it out… and sign up for the beta if you are interested…
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/cocomo/
Introducing Adobe Flash Catalyst… formerly known as ”Adobe Thermo”
I’m sure you by now are very well aware that Adobe has announced the upcoming release of Adobe Flash Catalyst, formerly known as “Thermo”.
Adobe Flash Catalyst will eventually build bridge between the design world and the development world. By enabling Graphical Designers, User Experience Designers and Developers to work together in leveraging the design powers of CS4 with the development powers of Flex Builder and the deployment and execution powers of the Flash platform, we will be able to improve our process radically all together.
It has been interesting and humorous this year at Adobe MAX in San Francisco to experience that an entire community of various professionals who have become so used to say Thermo, have had to learn to say “Adobe Flash Catalyst” or “Flash Catalyst” instead.
It’s important to understand that Flash Catalyst primarily is a design tool targeted at User Experience Designers and not so much Graphical Designers and Developers. The activities that will take place in Flash Catalyst are wireframing the information architecture, skinning the user interface components and designing the motion graphics.
One of the primary use cases for Flash Catalyst is therefore to import a PSD file and then implementing the interface into the existing structure of the PSD document and then eventually passing it on to developers that will tie the user interface to the business logic and backend. For this to work smoothly it requires the Graphical Designers to structure the PSD document in a way that facilitates the way Flash Catalyst uses the contents of the PSD file.
Adobe Flash Catalyst and its counterpart Microsoft Expression Blend, are tools that allows us to dramatically improve our productivity… however, for us to leverage the power of these tools we have to change what we do and how we do … our collective mantra has be…
Hate it, you break it … embrace it, you make it !
This means that we need to reevaluate what it is we are doing and eventually also who we are… An important question that we have to think about is “What is a Flex Developer” and what it exactly they do… I certainly see Flash Catalyst as a huge step forward in optimizing our collective productivity in the interactive agency business, but it forces us to do take a couple of hard decisions about who does what, and certainly we all will have to kill some darlings and sacrifice some of our holy cows. The true price for utilizing the full potential of Flash Catalyst is not the license fee, but eventually that everyone involved in the development of a Flex solution, from graphical designers to business logic developers, have to adopt it whole-heartedly and to accept the constraints that come with using Flash Catalyst. There is no doubt that the pro’s far outweigh the con’s and there is no doubt that the agencies that stay in business are the ones that are willing to improve their operations and embrace change.
I am so fortunate to have the pre-alpha release which I will play around with so we can hit the ground running when it arrives in the beginning of next year (ooops… did I just write that).
Adobe RIAthon (India)
If you happen to be in India and working with RIA’s, you should consider joining the Adobe RIAthon 08.
Entries have to be submitted no later than the 26th November.
Check it out…
http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com/
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