Microsoft picks Flash Player for Vista campaign site
As reported by fellow evangelists Ben Forta and Ted Patrick, Microsoft picked the Adobe Flash Player for their new Vista campaign. First of all… I absolutely love the campaign! The idea was to invite a bunch of people to test a new version of the Windows operating system codenamed “Mojave”. Before they actually got to test the new OS, they were asked what they thought of Windows Vista. Obviously, they all said they didn’t like it for various reasons. After they tested the “new” OS, they were asked for their opinions. They all liked it, saying it was fast, looked great and was very handy. Then they were told they actually tested Windows Vista… and all their reactions were recorded.
A selection of all these videos are now the main feature of a new campaign site aimed to try and convince people to give Vista a try. One thing I really find strange, is that Microsoft continuously picks the Flash Player to deliver these highly visible campaign sites. These high-traffic sites would be a great vehicle to get Silverlight adoption up but obviously then the visitor would have to install the plug-in first to actually see the campaign. Then your best bet would be to pick a technology that everyone has… like Flash… And with 98.5% of all internet users running the Flash player, there really is no other alternative.
Go and check out the campaign site. It looks like they’ve even used Papervision 3D for this one. I really think it looks great.
Learn Flex in a week (or less) for free
Aaah… Summer holidays… The perfect time to learn something new. Well… For most people anyway. My apologies to those people who don’t have a holiday planned in the summer (like me) but it may be a bit quieter in the office/on the job and that still makes it the perfect time to learn about a new technology.
How about learning Flex in a week for free? We’ve just published a complete set of training videos with the accompanying exercises for you to test your newly learned skills. The training not only covers all the basics but also more advanced topics like creating your own Flex components with custom events and validating and working with data. Go check it out on the Adobe Flex Devnet.
Personalized Flash video
In my freelancing years, I had the pleasure of doing a couple of personalized Flash video projects. This is probably one of the most effective ways of capturing an audience. Shoot a piece of video and personalize it with either the recipient’s name or the sender’s name. This is one of the many reasons why I love Flash so much. Before Flash video, doing something like this was totally unthinkable. And it’s really not that hard to do. You add a cue-point to the frame you want to add interaction to and when one of those cue-points gets fired, you just add the appropriate action.
This new viral (by Paltalk) is one of the more creative personalized Flash video projects that I’ve seen.
Obama? McCain? How about a Jespers in the White House? Click on the video to view it or watch it on News3Online.com.
MAX 2008 is just around the corner
Believe me… Time really flies and before you know it, MAX 2008 is just around the corner. I am particularly excited about this year’s MAX conference and I’m pretty sure you’re all filled with anticipation to see what this year’s announcements are going to be and which sneak peaks we are going to show. I know the MAX-EU-team is still in the process of finalizing the program for Milan but that should go online pretty soon. However, looking at the sessions for San Francisco should give you a pretty good idea on the sessions in Milan.
I can already tell you that I’ll be doing both a session on “Creative design for Flex applications” which will talk about workflows between Creative Suite and Thermo and I’ll be teaming up with NJ for a 90-minute hands-on lab on the same topic. I’m also pretty excited to be able to do this session and lab both in San Francisco and Milan.
We’ve just opened registrations for MAX Milan… So if you want to take advantage of the early bird discount (€120 discount), you might as well book your ticket right now.
Easy data synchronization for AIR with LiveCycle Data Services
I’m sure most of you know by now that AIR has offline capabilities. You can easily create a local SQLite database or even cache external files locally. While it’s not that hard to do, you have to write that functionality yourself… unless you use LiveCycle Data Services. The recently released LiveCycle Data Services 2.6 automatically creates an offline cache for AIR and the Flash Player. For AIR it automatically creates a SQLite database, for Flash it stores data in Local Shared Objects.
One of the things I always hear about LCDS is that it is expensive but not many people know you can also use it for free (yes… even for commercial applications)! You can download a free one-cpu version which is ideal for smaller-scale production applications and proof-of-concept projects. Get the free version right here.
O’Reilly’s InsideRIA just posted a tutorial by John C. Bland II that not only shows you how to install LCDS but also how to get the data synchronization working in your AIR application. I’m sure you’ll be pleasantly surprised to see how easy this is with LCDS.
One of the posts in my “draft” folder also talks about LCDS… This is just a reminder to myself that I should really finish that article soon :D
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