Wow. I’ve seen a lot of amazing things done with Flash. And as of late, I’ve seen some REALLY amazing things done with Papervision 3D. But this one resulted in me grabbing all of the co-workers that sit around me to all crowd around my monitor and stare.

During the development of The North Face Kiosk I never thought what they were doing with WPF would have ever been possible, with acceptable performance, with Flash anytime in the near future. I was wrong, take a look…

http://www.actionscriptarchitect.com/2007/02/28/flash-video-on-3d/

[via Ben Stucki and Chafic Kazoun]

Our team has posted the recording of my recent demonstration of Apollo and the Ebay desktop application (San Dimas Project) at the DEMO 07 conference in Palm Springs, CA.

If you haven’t had a chance to see this demo yet, you might want to check it out. It’s a quick, six minute demo of a very cool Apollo application being developed by Ebay and Effective UI.

Watch it here.

I’m happy to announce that we’ve finally gotten a couple of great people in place to lead the Flash authoring tool business. Jennifer Taylor, former Sr. Product Manager for Dreamweaver and most recently Sr. Product Manager for the Adobe Engagement Platform has taken the role of Group Product Manager for the Flash tools business. Jen is one of the smartest and most talented people that I know (I’ve learned a lot from her) so I couldn’t be more excited to take on this important role. I’m sad to lose her from the Platfrom Business Unit (Apollo, Flash Player and Adobe Reader) that I now live in, but I know she’s going to be even more effective at leading the Flash business. I also know that this will translate to great releases of Flash in the future (beyond CS3).

Also joining the ranks of Flash product management is one of my closest friends, Richard Galvan, who is now the Technical Product Manager for Flash. There is not a person who is better-suited for this role. Richard is incredibly bright, friendly, outgoing, knows Flash like the back of his hand, and is an ideal spokesperson for the product out in the community. He will be presenting two sessions on Flash the upcoming Dx3 conference, one of them focused on Flash video – which happens to be his expertise.

Richard promises to keep up with his new blog, so bookmark it now. :)

It’s also worth mentioning that former Flash designer/developer relations manager Justin Everett-Church has moved over to the Platform group joining Emmy Huang, now Group Product Manager for Flash Player, as the Sr. Product Manager for Flash Player.

The pieces are all falling into place! This is exciting news.

Virgin airlines is trying to get US Department of Transportation approval to get their new “Virgin America” airline off the ground (heh). I’m very interested in this – but before I explain why, let me provide some background…

As a product manager I do a LOT of flying. I’ve flown over 750,000 miles in my seven years with Macromedia/Adobe. Living in San Francisco, I choose to fly United Airlines everywhere because I can fly to almost any major city in the world non-stop. And to enjoy the limited perks afforded by United Airlines, I need to fly over 100,000 miles on their airline (or a Star Alliance partner) per year. So basically, to make United tolerable I have to fly them as much as possible – a situation that gets harder and harder every year.

United has simply lost sight of what’s most important: the customer. The more and more I fly, the worse things get. I often feel as though United staffers think I should consider flying on their airline a privilege. It’s as though I should be thankful when I get treated like a customer. “Please be nice to me today! I swear I’ll be a good passenger. I’ll even try to pay more for my over-priced ticket next time.”

The examples I could give are endless. A few weeks ago I flew from New York’s La Guardia airport to Washington Dulles. I arrived at the United gate only to hear an announcement that my flight would be delayed by an hour. About 45 mins later, they announced a delay of two more hours. That’s fine – weather, air traffic delays, etc, – they happen. However, it was getting to the point where I needed to re-evaluate my travel options because I needed to get to DC. So like half of my fellow passengers, I went looking for a ticket agent to help me. There were none – anywhere. So we all stood around, giving each other that “what the hell?” look. Thirty minutes went by with three United gates, all filled with confused passengers, and not a single United employee in sight. Finally, an agent comes stomping through the crowd and sits down behind one of the gates, focusing directly on her computer. She never once makes eye contact with a single person. She just sits there, typing away while more and more people inch closer, just staring at her awaiting some kind of recognition that we’re all paying humans – a simple “We’re having some difficulties, folks. I’ll help you in just a few moments” would have sufficed. But nothing. It was as if we were annoying pests that might go away if she just pretended that we weren’t there.

I could go on, but I won’t. Instead, I will point out that while the big, fat, inefficient behemoth of a mega-corp continues to just not get it, the nimble, innovative, customer-comes-first, newcomers are looking to expose their biggest weaknesses. JetBlue airlines started this trend: low prices, more comfortable seats, TVs in every seat, etc. But now Virgin America seems to be intending to take things to a whole new level. And this customer is very interested.

In the video below, Virgin America’s CEO gives a tour of their new planes. Modern, comfortable seating with extra leg room, standard power in every single seat on the plane (United has a few planes with power in business and first class only), USB (not sure what that’s for), ETHERNET and WiFi (!!! does this mean broadband in flight?), and my favorite: a touch screen multimedia entertainment system with satellite TV, on-demand movies, a library of over 3,000 songs with the ability to create your own playlist, video games, intra-seat social networking via chat and multiplayer games, digital shopping catalog, and an in-flight electronic ordering system for food and drinks. Awesome… The only thing that would make it better would be a friendly gate agent who doesn’t disappear, provides service with a smile, and treats me as if they’re happy to have my business.

And they’re going to donate 25% of their profits to help fight global warming.

Enjoy the tour:

This is very cool. Innovative creative agency Big Spaceship’s “Minister of Technology”, Joshua Hirsch, is giving a workshop on Rich Media Content in San Francisco on February 24 – 25.

I’ve known Josh for a few years now and I know that he’s one of the best Flash developers out there. Plus, he has real world experience with leading the development effort of a large team working for very big name clients – so he can offer some insights from real-world situations. If you’re looking to hone your Flash development skills, or just learn more about architecting rich media websites, you’ll want to check this one out. Admission is US$500.

Register here.

This workshop will focus on what goes on under the hood of rich media experience websites and games deployed with Adobe Flash. We will begin with general concepts such as overall code architecture and file structure for a large scale, high functionality project and discuss the process and workflow between the various teams at Big Spaceship. The session will then move into specifics which will be largely determined by the interests and questions of the attendees, but should remain more focused on the development side of things.

The content of the session will mainly focus on Flash 8 and ActionScript 2, but attention will be given throughout to features and differences that will appear in ActionScript 3.

Topics may include:

* Object oriented architecture and best practices in ActionScript 2
* Optimization for performance
* Optimization of preloading sequences
* Rapid Prototyping
* Animating with code
* Preparing for ActionScript 3

Location: 785 Market, 2nd Floor (one block from the Powell Street BART Station) San Francisco, CA 94103

…and you don’t bother testing your site on the Mac? Are you freakin’ kidding me?

While watching today’s Super Bowl pregame show I noticed that Salesgenie.com was sponsoring the show – and running commercials at every break. I can only imagine how much money this must have cost them. It has to be in the millions of dollars.

So I decide to go check it out – on my Mac…

On the Mac I see this on their homepage:

I figured this had to be a CSS rendering issue to I fired up Parallels and opened the same page in IE7 in Windows XP. This is what the same page looked like:

Note to all companies who think it’s a good idea to spend millions on Super Bowl ads/sponsorships to send potential customers to your website: TEST YOUR FREAKIN SITE IN MORE THAN IE WINDOWS! Sorry, but it’s just irresponsible.

While I’m ranting, why do the Super Bowl pregame and halftime performances have to suck so bad? Just put a high school/college marching band out on the field with some frisbee-catching dogs and call it a day. I don’t want to watch Gloria Estefan and some other unnamed performer dancing around in colorful costumes. I don’t want to see Justin Timberlake and Janet Jackson groping each other. I don’t want to see Aerosmith doing a duet with Britney freakin Spears! Ugh…

Chafic Kazoun, a good friend of mine and a brilliant developer, has been working on a new book about Flex 2 from O’Reilly with another great developer, Joey Lott. O’Reilly has just posted some of the “rough cuts” from the book (which isn’t done yet). If you want to learn more about Programming Flex 2, go check it out here.

At about 5pm on Tuesday I got a phone call from someone on my team. “Mike, Kevin is really sick and he wants you to do the demo tomorrow morning!”

And the fun began…

If you’re not familiar with it, the DEMO conference is the premier launch venue for new products and technologies. Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, had been invited to come show Apollo at the conference. We were to give a 6 minute presentation on what it is and what it can do. It’s a pretty big deal so, of course, we practiced with Kevin for the last couple of weeks getting everything set up perfectly. The team (mostly Christian Cantrell) worked with eBay and EffectiveUI to get the eBay desktop application well-prepared for the demo that Kevin wanted to give.

I was just coming down to the conference to help out with the tech setup and answering questions at the booth.

So here’s how everything ended up. I’ve got to say, it was so cool to be giving a demo at DEMO!

http://www.demo.com/demonstrators/demo2007/91259.php