I wasn’t a big fan of Microsoft before I worked for them as a contractor for the Xbox/Zune division. After working for them I found even more reasons to dislike them.

That’s how I feel about MS as a whole but I loved working with the team at Xbox/Zune and got to do some really cool things. But we were purposefully located off campus and so didn’t have to drink as much cool-aid.

Note: I always spit mine out when no one was looking. :-)

I was told point blank by my direct manager that I would never be a Microsoft employee as long as I was an Actionscript developer. I was given the option to migrate into User eXperience design work, like he did, and become an employee. But as long as I wrote Actionscript I would be a second class citizen at Microsoft.

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo then I wonder how all the Actionscript devs there will be treated. Certainly better than an Actionscript dev at Microsoft but how long will it be before they are getting visits from the Silverlight team?

Silverlight instructor says: Hey look, you like to write code, right? Well with Silverlight you can do the same things that you can with Flash in 10x the amount of code. That’s right. You get to write more code. Just what you’ve always wanted!

And not just Flash devs. Think about PHP. From what I understand Yahoo is PHP. They have contributed a great deal to the language over the years. Are they eventually going to migrate to .NET? I’m sure that would go over like a lead brick.

All I can say is that if I worked for Yahoo I’d be updating my resume just in case the deal goes through. Or come to the freelance world where there is more work than you can shake a stick at.

Note to Keith Peters: you were right. :-)

I’m bummed. There will be a 360Flex conference in one month, February 25-27, and I won’t be there. I went to the first two last year - San Jose and Seattle - and had a fantastic time. With my recent move from Seattle to LA and starting up a freelance business I just don’t have time to go to Atlanta right now.

One of the biggest headaches I had during the first two 360Flex conferences is trying to decide which session to attend at any one time. That’s inevitable that there will be contemporanious sessions that you must see at any conference but more so with 360Flex because of all the great speakers and topics that are covered.

If you’ve never been to a conference then this is the perfect opportunity to get your feet wet. Besides the obvious value of the sessions there are the discussions with your Flex peers in the hallways between sessions and at the end of the day that are invaluable. I’ve learned just as much, if not more, from the conversations with other attendees as I  did during the sessions.

There is no telling what can happen at a conference like this but one thing is certain. You’ll be a better developer for attending.

Hopefully there will be another 360Flex this year in the SoCal area. If so I’ll be first in line to get my ticket. ( hint, hint )

Ted Patrick presented last night at the LA Flex Users Group meeting about the upcoming release of Flex3/AIR. Here are my take-aways:

Release date for Flex3/AIR is in the 4-6 week time period. So the end of February, give or take a week.

$249 to upgrade to the pro version is an incredible value considering you get the memory profiler, advanced dataGrid, new charts, and a few other goodies I can’t remember. The profiler alone is worth the price of the upgrade.

Flex3 will be open sourced when launched. Personally I don’t think open source counts until Adobe mounts a webCam on Ely Greenfield’s forehead. Then, it will be open sourced!

Ted talked about AIR being a desktop platform right now but eventually becoming a device platform. The ubiquitous question was asked, “Does that mean the iPhone will eventually support some version of AIR?” Ted responded by saying something along the lines of, “I know Nothing!” and asking for another question.

So we are faced with this: either Apple is absolutely against supporting AIR in which case Adobe would want to deny any knowledge of Apple’s intent knowing that we developers will read into it that it’s inevitable thus creating a little more interest in AIR. Or, Apple is on board with AIR and work is being done to support it. But in Apple like fashion they have to keep this an ultra secret so that Steve Jobs can make the announcement on stage in front of thousands of sycophants. :-)

Bottom line is this: AIR will be on lots of handheld devices. Some of them similar in functionality to the iPhone. If it isn’t supported on the iPhone itself then Apple will wish it had when the competitors begin to take away their market share with cheaper more robust versions.

I’ve been saying for years that Adobe should build a handheld device that supports Flash/AIR and leave it to third parties to make the UI. Each would be identical with respect to hardware but there could be 10,000 versions of the UI. The cream would rise to the top.

I asked Ted about USB support in AIR. ( In case you didn’t know your AIR apps won’t natively talk to devices connected via USB. That’s because there are lots of differences in how each OS deals with USB. Project Artemis from EffectiveUI helps bridge the gap. Paulius Uza has also made some inroads in this department. )

Ted mentioned that Flash can see USB connected devices such as webCams and Mics. It isn’t impossible, just problematic to make it reliable on all OSes. But it’s something on the table. My hope is that it will be part of AIR 1.5 when AIR supports Linux.

Ted mentioned the internal app at Adobe that they use as a personal directory. It sounds like quite an amazing work and it supports P2P functionality. Basically an AIR client can talk to another AIR client, presumably anywhere. Ummm, I think that’s something that could rock the Casbah.

What’s really cool is that an AIR app can talk to a SWF or Javascript in the browser. That’s great for creating a bridge between a Flex/Flash/Javascript app and your AIR app. You could use this to sync data. For instance you could build an AIR app for offline work. When you go back online you open up your  webApp and tell your AIR app to update it.

Side story: while working at Xbox/Zune I did a prototype for a usability study for interaction between the Zune website and the Zune client. I enabled it so that the user could click something on the website and update something in the client and visa-versa. I mean this is Microsoft. They wrote the browser ( IE ), the OS ( XP/Vista ) and the client ( Zune software ). Turns out that they couldn’t do this without popping up lots of security warnings that couldn’t be shut off. Sound familiar?

I halfheartedly tried to talk the developer into building the Zune client with AIR so that they could have all this amazing functionality - plus cross OS support - but no luck.  Oh well, their loss. :-)

There was lots more about security, modules, framework caching, etc but that has been covered in lots of other places.

Is it late February yet? :-)

The Flash player got an update today and there is also a Flash Debug player update. I always have a problem finding the debug player download page. So I thought I’d share in case I’m not the only one.

Side note: I use FireFox as my primary browser but I use IE as the default player to publish my Flex apps in. Debugging crashes the browser fairly often, at least I do, and this way I don’t have to wait for those tabs to open up again on startup. Plus, FireFox isn’t the quickest launching browser by a long shot.

John Wilker twittered that he was going to make some cool announcements. Since I did a bang up job with the Adobe MAX predictions I thought I’d see if I could keep the streak alive.

• The next 360Flex conference will be in the SoCal area. I’m going out on a limb with LA, because, well it’s really big and they have a lot of conventions there.
• The conference will be held sometime around the end of July.
• Admissions will be $499
• We’ll get a catered lunch but not a dinner.
• Doug McCune and Deepa will co-host a session and mention their Dummies book 15+ times. ;-) (Yes, I’ll be there counting.)
• John and Tom will be the hosts

Okay, I’m guarantied to get at least 1/3rd of my predictions correct because of the last two.

See you there!

TheFlexShow.com has the first of a two parter discussion about the Adobe MAX 07 conference in Chicago. The three great reasons to listen to the discussion are that Ryan Stewart and Jeffry Houser do their usual great job of hosting and Tony Hillerson, of EffectiveUI.com has some great comments and insights that he shares.

Between the three of them they pretty much make up for the fact that I’m also there leading the discussion astray from time to time and mumbling in the background. The show is worth listening to if you want a good overview of the MAX/Chicago conference.

Of all the components that are supplied by Adobe the one that is missing is an Ads component. Something we can drop into our Flex/AIR apps to display ads and make some money off our work.

Here’s how I would see it working:

• I would sign up with Adobe, just as I would with Google Ads, for an affiliate account
• Then all I need to do is place the ad component in my app and give it my affiliate number
• I could also use data binding to feed it keywords to target the ad content
• I could specify certain ad attributes: media type - text, Flash, video, etc.
• Both me and Adobe Make some money

The component would also need to know if it’s in an AIR app and if so then cache some ads in case the user is offline. Then if the user clicks on an ad in offline mode the component would have to store that click and inform the user that they will get more info when they go back online. Or something like that.

The upshot is that Adobe becomes an ad server and will make money off it. Plus we developers will be able to easily place ads in our work and make some money so that we won’t have to work for the man.

Yes, you could do this would Google ads but it would take some work. Wouldn’t you rather have a nice component built by Adobe?

MAX was awesome. I got to join Kieth Peters and John Grden for lunch which was a real treat for me. I’m a big fan of Kieth and his Bit-101.com site. Then there are his books Making Things Move ( AS2 version / AS3 version ) that are incredible. If you’re a designer just wading into Actionscript then I highly recommend them as a starting place.

After Grant Skinner’s session I walked with him across the convention hall the next session and had a nice discussion along the way. I had to miss most of a session that I wanted to attend but it was worth it.

All of the sessions were recorded and it has been said that they will all be available as a channel on the Adobe Media Player. We just have to wait for a little while.

My favorite session was the Flash Player Internals with Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason. They did a great tag-team job of presenting. Getting a tour under the hood of the Flash player by the guys who work on it everyday was awesome.

A few notes from Flash Player Internals

• Astro may add fading and masking of device fonts without the cashAsBitmap hack.
• Astro may add chaining to embedded fonts.
• Avoid the scope chain to get the best performance out of your code. If you’re not really sure about the scope chain then read this article.
• Suppose you are creating a game or something that is extremely code intensive. If you would like to gauge the performance of each client machine and then tune your code appropriately then apply a blur filter to a video and render that to a Bitmap. Then see what sort of performance that client is getting. You could do something like that during the preload so that when the main code begins to run you can tune the code to run smoothly on that machine. Kind of a slow, medium, fast toggle for your code.
• A question was asked, “Have you written any code to explore giving authors access to multi threading?” The answer was, “No Comment” with a grin. Can you say Flash player 11 feature? :-)

A few notes from AS3 best practises:

• If it’s a constant then make it of type const.
• If you need to iterate over an ArrayCollection then use a for-each loop. It’s faster.
• Use weak reference listeners unless you’re doing something like loading content or creating a timer.
• If you remove a loaded image from the display list then UNLOAD it.
• null out references to get them garbage collected.

The Lego Vagina Award

Scott Petersen’s C/C++ interpreter for Actionscript wins this award hands down. When he showed Quake 2 running in Actionscript my friends just about fell out of their seats.

If there were such a thing as a lego booby award - second place to the lego Vagina - then it would go to Shai Avidan on “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing”. That shit was amazing.

Random Links

Hydra:

• Download the toolkit on Adobe Labs
• Kaourantin has a nice technical overview

Videos

• Peter Elst has a nice video overview of the sneaks session broken up by nicely so that you can watch just the sneaks your interested in. I’m sitting just to the left of Peter so when he pans to the left screen you can see my head in the way. Sorry. That’s also me adding narration, such as “You’ve got to be frakking kidding me” during Scott Petersen’s presentation about the C/C++ interpreter.
• Lee Brimelow has a nice interview with Justin Everett-Church about the Flash player 10

Peter deHaan has the play-by-play of MAX.

• Blogging from Adobe MAX 2007 - North America
• Adobe MAX 2007 Keynote (Day 2 Edition)
• Rough notes from the Adobe MAX 2007 North America Sneak Peeks

Geeks of the world unite

Doug McCune has a great shot of geeks in 3D glasses

Movement has meaning

I can’t remember where that quote came from. It just ended up in my notepad but it really strikes a chord. For years Flash has been dissed for people using it to create sites with poor usability. But Flash is only a tool and it took some time for the community to really learn how to take advantage of the capabilities to create more usable sites than can be created from a more static approach.

With the upgrades to text rendering and 3D coming in Flash player 10 there is really no limit to the sort of interface that we can create in Flash. The limit is now our imagination. Not the tool.

ColdFusion speakers rock

I attended two sessions about ColdFusion: Mike Nimer’s and Simeon Bateman’s. Both are just amazing presenters. I think it the secret is in the code. There must be some undocumented CFperfectPresentation tag that they know about.

There are a slue of reasons to attend a conference like MAX.

• It’s geek fun to the Nth degree ( I was going to say, “to the max”, but no.)
• You can learn a great deal about your field
• You get a good cross pollination of ideas. Designers hanging out with developers and visa-versa.

But I find the best reason to attend conferences is the connections that are formed. Here’s an example.

On Tuesday at MAX I ran into a friend of mine, Chris Hughes, that I originally met at the 360Flex conference in San Jose. I didn’t know that Chris was going to be there or I would have made a point to hook up with him earlier.

While we were catching up he mentioned that he would like to be involved in getting a volunteer group together in the Los Angeles area to do some coding for one of the local charities.

I told him that a group at the 360Flex event in Seattle had done something like that and he should look them up.

Ali Daniali is the Flex Users Group leader here in Seattle. He and I have meet only a few times locally and planned on meeting up at MAX. We were both distracted during the conference and never called the other to set up a time/place to meet.

On the final day of the conference we bumped into each other in the sponsors room. He was on his way to get some presents for his kids and didn’t have much time to hang out. So we planned on getting together later in Seattle.

As he was leaving I remembered what Chris had told me about doing some charity work. I ran after Ali and brought him over to meet Chris. The two talked for 5-10 minutes and then Ali took off.

Chris told me that they were going to talk more later but essentially Ali was going to help him set up a charity code jam at a conference in Los Angeles next summer. Just as Ali had done at 360Flex in Seattle.

The timing was near perfect because they were in the room together at the same time. I introduced them and as a result they will work together to help feed the needy in the Los Angeles area.

You never know who you’ll meet and what will become of it. A chance conversation in the hallway could lead to a startup being born, or charity work, whatever.

I made some predictions about what Adobe would be announcing at MAX about two weeks ago. I’m both happy and sad. On the one hand I only missed on one prediction. Unfortunately the one prediction I missed is the one I wanted the most: client side encoding options for video within an AIR app.

Adobe Office [ hit ]
Adobe has the first, and most important leg, of the office suite with Buzzword. Now the guys have to get busy with getting Buzzword out of beta and get to work on a spreadsheet.

Beyond that they only need to either purchase SlideRocket or build they own presentation app.

VoIP on AIR/Flash [ hit ]
No idea how this is actually going to be implemented but it’s going to be there for us developers to play with. Adobe did say that they have no intention of becoming a service provider. They only want to give us the tools to create the services ourselves.

Public access to transcoding video into FLV and possibly other formats. [ miss ]
For now it’s a no go but I talked to a lot of the Adobe staff about this and got a lot of, “it will be there soon” sort of responses. Perhaps it will be an intermediate upgrade to AIR after 1.0 comes out.

AIR2AIR [ hit ]
Going into MAX I had no idea what P2P capabilities inside of AIR or the Flash player would be like. And after MAX I still have no idea. But they did put it up on a slide for us to see at the Keynote. So they are doing something with this.

Authoring Flash 3D [ hit ]
I wonder if this is the most requested feature ever for Flash? Well, at least we don’t have to ask anymore. I can’t wait to give it a whirl.

I talked to some of the Adobe Flash engineers about Flash3D and Papervision3D and they said that this isn’t a competing approach. In fact they engineers are helping the Papervision3D effort to smooth out some of the issues and make it as good as it can be. These guys are awesome.

Always on Hardware Acceleration [ hit ]
Adobe was a little vague on this subject although it was hinted at. My feeling is that there will be hardware acceleration for the Flash player beyond just the fullscreen video that we already know about. But the engineers are still working on it so it’s not known what we’ll get.

Text going the other way [ hit ]
This one I already knew about going into MAX. It was announced it at 360Flex in Seattle back in August.

Next year MAX is going to be in San Fransisco. They are going to want to make some whopper announcements. I’m going to have fun guessing at what those might be. My long range radar says that it will revolve around partnerships and services. Maybe some Google/Adobe action? A full office suite? It will be fun no matter what. I can’t wait.