General 31 Jul 2008 12:30 pm
Adobe Platform Evangelist Lee Brimelow has posted a great tutorial on using SWFObject 2.0 for embedding SWFs in your HTML content over at gotoandlearn.com.
General 31 Jul 2008 09:00 am
PCWorld reports Adobe: Flash Gaining Traction in the Enterprise.
While most people know Flash as primarily a multimedia delivery and development technology for Web sites, it is catching on as a front-end user-interface (UI) technology for business applications, an Adobe manager [AIR Group Product Marketing Manager, Adrian Ludwig] said Wednesday.
The article goes on to discuss Flash’s growing use behind the corporate firewall and the impact that Flex has had in gaining interest from traditional application developers.
Adobe’s Flash has been making progress against legacy desktop applications — such as those built in C++ — although that progress hasn’t been widely publicized…
“One of the problems with Flash is people only think of it as being used to do public Web sites,” he said in an interview in New York Wednesday. “It’s a misconception. A significant percentage of [Flash] applications people are making now are enterprise applications behind the corporate firewall.”
He cited as an example an application that Siemens and development partner Thrasys created for Siemen’s health information system. The companies created a front-end, Web-based interface using Flash and Flex to unite several back-end applications and streamline how employees use information from different systems.
General 30 Jul 2008 05:18 pm
Adobe Platform Evangelist, Lee Brimelow, has posted a good interview of Justin Everett-Church, Sr. Product Manager for Flash Player on theFlashblog.com.
Today I was at Adobe HQ in San Francisco and got a chance to interview Justin Everett-Church, who is the Senior Product Manager for Flash Player, about some of the most frequently asked questions regarding Flash Player 10 and our new search technology.
Flash Player 30 Jul 2008 03:31 pm
When major corporations and small businesses alike need to promote their most important products with high-end, engaging user experiences that combine multiple media formats with dynamic data and motion graphics they must make tough decisions on which rich client technologies they should bet their business on.
Like so many other companies, Microsoft chooses Flash. Can you blame them?
[via Serge Jespers, Ben Forta, and Ted Patrick]
AIR 17 Jul 2008 09:28 pm
Alan Lewis, Product Manager for eBay Desktop over at eBay, has reported the very exciting news that AIR-based eBay desktop has been downloaded over 1 Million times! I first demonstrated this application at the DEMO conference in Palm Springs after Adobe CTO Kevin Lynch lost his voice the day before the presentation. I have since demonstrated this application to thousands of people in all parts of the world.
It is great to witness the ongoing success of this desktop application. I can’t wait to see what new features get rolled out next.
If you haven’t installed it yet, get it at desktop.ebay.com.
Photography 29 Jun 2008 11:09 pm
Wow - I just found one of the most gratifying software plugins I’ve ever used. Like many photographers, I’ve been struggling with excessive noise in a lot of my shots due to high ISO or compensation for poor exposures. On Scott Kelby’s recommendation I decided to give Photoshop plugin Noiseware Professional a try. Oh - my - God. I can’t believe how good this plugin is. I don’t know why we don’t ship something this good in Photoshop. I mean, wow.
So if you’re like me and you have a lot of low-light shots that just look super-noisy, do yourself a favor and buy this plugin (they also offer a standalone version).
Sidenote: Please don’t leave a bunch of angry comments telling me that I’ve carelessly overlooked some other plugin that you feel is the “best Photoshop plugin ever” - this is my opinion. If you do have other friendly recommendations, please comment away.
Flash Player & Flex 20 May 2008 04:28 pm
I’ve been playing around with Photoshop Express again, now that it supports importing from my Flickr feed. What an awesome application! It was built with Flex and ActionScript 3.0 and it’s extremely impressive.
One of it’s features is the ability to create a really cool slideshow gallery that you can embed on your blog, like so…
Flash Player 15 May 2008 06:38 pm
I tried doing my first 30-second video for 30onAIR but I wasn’t able to get my Flash Player 10 beta quick feature overview under 1 min 30 secs.
Quickly learn what some of the new features in the recently released Flash Player 10 beta.
Flash Video 15 Apr 2008 08:03 am
ReadWriteWeb reports that traffic analyst Hitwise is saying that YouTube now has a market share in the video sector of 73.18%.
Traffic analysts Hitwise released new numbers today indicating that while online video sites as a category have seen a 7% drop in traffic year over year since March 2007 - YouTube has seen a remarkable 32% growth in visits during that period. YouTube’s market share in the video sector is now at 73.18%, Hitwise reports.
That means that at least 73.18% of online video traffic is in the Flash video format. SEVENTY-THREE PERCENT!
But it gets better…
The study reports that the top five online video websites, representing 90.43% of video traffic, also use Flash:
…and it keeps getting better…
Among “Independent Online Video Websites” and rounding out the top 10, Flash also powers it all:
ReadWriteWeb also notes:
It is worth noting that ad networks report a seeing a substantial number of viewers on niche video sites - Hitwise here includes only general interest video sites. Thus these numbers cannot be used to conclude that there is no Long Tail in online video in general - that’s a separate question. The point is that among general interest sites, there is effectively no Long Tail.
The numbers presumably do not include viewership of videos embedded on third party websites like blogs, a factor that would undoubtedly only make YouTube’s dominance bigger if it were to be included.
With the addition of h.264, hardware-accelerated fullscreen video, content protection via FMS 3.0, and AAC+ audio in Flash Player 9.3 last December, I can’t imagine why anyone would use any other technology for web video delivery.
More info on this report here.
General 13 Apr 2008 11:56 pm
We’ve just announced that we’re leading an initiative to define an open file format for digital cinema files.
Adobe intends to leverage its successful Digital Negative Specification (DNG) file format as a foundation, and Adobe plans to work with a broad coalition of leading camera manufacturers, including Panavision, Silicon Imaging, Dalsa, Weisscam, and ARRI—along with software vendors, including Iridas and The Foundry, and codec provider CineForm—to define the requirements for an open, publicly documented file format that it plans to call CinemaDNG.
We’ve also announced an initiative to built more meta data into the digital video and audio production workflow.
c|net reports: Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file.
For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.
As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video.
For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.
Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro.
The company intends to support the feature in the next major release of its video work-flow software. There was a two-year gap between the releases of Creative Suite 3 and 2, so the next major version is likely to come some time in 2009.
The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe.
Good news for digital video and audio producers out there!