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.

Go check it out here >>

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.

Read the full article here >>

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.

Check it out here >>

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!

Happy New Year! I feel totally refreshed and ready to start platform evangelizing again. If you’ve sent me any important emails over the last two months you might want to send again because my inbox is very full.

We have a lot of exciting events, releases and announcements coming up so keep an eye on adobe.com, MXNA, and the Adobe blogs I’ve listed in the sidebar.

Also, I’m going to be spending a lot of time producing video content over the next few weeks so let me know what you’d like to see more about. Interviews, demos, you name it.

It’s been over three years since I earned my six-week sabbatical from Macromedia and I finally decided to take it (with a little vacation time added on). So if you’re trying to get a hold of me for any Adobe-related stuff you won’t hear back until January 7 at the earliest. In the mean time you can contact Ben Forta (bforta -at- adobe -dot- com) for anything that you need.

Also, I had to disable comments until I figure out why I’m getting insane amounts of comment spam. If you really need to get a hold of me for NON-ADOBE stuff you can email me at my personal address: madowney -at- gmail -dot- com. If you ask me anything about Adobe I will probably not respond.

See you in January!

I was just browsing Christian Cantrell’s new site, TipBin, and found this great ad for ebay.com from Google AdWords.

So if any of you are in the market for some dog poop, ebay has a huge selection - right now!

This year’s Adobe MAX Conference is shaping up to be above and beyond the best MAX conference yet. I am so excited about this year’s session line-up. Adobe Evangelist Ted Patrick has been leading the planning for this year’s conference and has re-jiggered the session plan to be even more interesting than any of our previous conferences.

Connect. Discover. Inspire.
Join us for MAX 2007 North America, a unique opportunity to connect with the Adobe community for an educational and inspirational experience that can’t be found anywhere else.

We’re bringing together the most creative and influential minds in the community, from designers and developers to executives and partners, that will shape the future of our industry. Please join us.

If you’re a web designer or developer, creative professional, Flash guru, Flex developer, or ColdFusion code jockey, make sure you make your way out to Chicago for this conference.

EARLY BIRD REGISTRATION ENDS THIS FRIDAY, AUGUST 10! REGISTER NOW!

I’ve had a lot of requests to post the slides from my keynote at our AIR Camp events during the on AIR Bus Tour. I went ahead and posted them here in PDF form. Let me know if you have any questions.

Download here

Update: In the comments Sam reminded me that Sun’s JavaFX is a player in the RIA space. I meant to include Sun it but forgot. I’ve updated the post below.

Almost every day I’m reminded that very few people understand that Microsoft’s Silverlight plugin competes directly with the Flash Player, not Adobe AIR - or the fact that Silverlight is no where near the same thing as Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF). So I thought I’d try to add some high-level clarity on which technologies compete with which technologies. I’ll start with the programming languages.

Primary Languages
Adobe: ActionScript 3.0, MXML (Adobe AIR also supports JavaScript and HTML)
Microsoft: C#, XAML (you can also use other languages in conjunction with their Dynamic Language Runtime ‘DLR’)
Sun: Java
Ajax: JavaScript, HTML, CSS, XML

Frameworks, Libraries, and APIs
Adobe: Flex framework
Microsoft: .NET
Sun: J2EE, JavaFX
Ajax: Too many to name here. Prototype, Dojo, JQuery, YUI, are among the most popular.

Browser-based Rich Client Runtime (plugin)
Adobe: Flash Player
Microsoft: Silverlight (formerly codenamed WPF/e)
Sun: Java Runtime Environment (JRE)
*Google: Google Gears (a browser plugin that allows browser-based web apps to run offline, whis is something kind of in the middle between Flash Player and Adobe AIR)

Desktop Runtime (note: Microsoft’s WPF isn’t exactly a “desktop runtime” but that’s the only generic way I can describe it. It’s more of an integral component of Windows)
Adobe: Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR)
Microsoft: Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF)
Sun: Java Runtime Environment (JRE)

Development Environment
Adobe: Flex Builder (Eclipse-based)
Microsoft: Visual Studio
Sun: Eclipse, NetBeans, JBuilder, etc. (not Sun products)
Ajax: Text editors, Eclipse, Aptana (Eclipse plugin), Dreamweaver

You can argue that some of these things compete indirectly but I’m comparing these based on capabilities and what they’re used for. I hope this helps clarify things for some of you.