Ready for June! SOTR, FlashCamp Warsaw, UG Dublin, Tel Aviv, Cannes Lions, FATL
From a travel perspective, June is going to be a little bit nuts… Just a little bit ;-) But with so many really cool events, June is also going to be lots of fun! I hope to see you at one of these events!
Scotch On The Road – June 1st > 5th – London, Manchester, Edinburgh, UK
ColdFusion is alive and kicking and if you think otherwise, I would advise you to come to SOTR! In my session I’m going to build a fully working app starting from an Illustrator file with Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion! There are still some tickets left, so I hope to see you there!
Flash Camp Warsaw – June 9th – Warsaw, Poland
Flash Camps are probably the best way to keep up to date with the Flash Platform. I remember having a great time in Warsaw last year on the On Air Train Tour so I’m really looking forward going back to Poland.
Adobe User Group Dublin – June 11th – Dublin, Ireland
I love visiting user groups and it’s going to be my first time in Dublin. I’ll be talking about Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 and even a little bit of ColdFusion 9.
Adobe Event – June 15th – Tel Aviv, Israel
I think this is the first Adobe event in Israel. I’ll be talking about Flash Player, AIR, Flash for mobile, Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder.
Cannes Lions – June 21th > 25th – Cannes, France
Steve Ballmer, Kofi Annan, Barack Obama’s campaign manager David Plouffe, Google’s Eric Schmidt and me… That’s an impressive speaker list ;-) I’m actually doing an inspirational workshop together with Paul Burnett. Both of us will also be around to help out at the Young Lions competition.
Flash At The Lake – June 26th > 27th – Zurich, Switzerland
The speaker list for this very first edition of Flash At The Lake is very impressive. Tickets are still available!
“Flash apps are bloated, HTML/JavaScript apps are not”
This seems to be one of the most common concerns/comments people have against Flash applications. So I did a quick little test to see exactly how big or bloated some popular sites/RIAs actually are… The test shows that HTML/JavaScript apps can be equally as “bloated” as Flash based apps. Sure… You can build apps that are as small as a couple of kilobytes with HTML/JavaScript but you can do the same with Flash based apps.
HTML/JAVASCRIPT BASED APPS
Google Mail: 2.433MB
Mobile Me: 2.546MB
Facebook: 2.62MB
FLASH BASED APPS
SumoPaint: 1.105MB
Hobnox AudioTool: 2.358MB (but you did load more than a halve music studio)
VW Used Car Locater: 1.578MB
Adobe versus the ‘Open Web’
Lately, I’ve read and heard a lot of conversations about how “HTML 5 is going to kill Flash” and how Adobe is bad for “breaking the open web” with the “proprietary” Flash Player.
So… Let’s think about this for a second. People have been talking about HTML 5 for quite some time now and it seems that it will be just that for still quite some time more. The release for HTML 5 is scheduled for 2012. Sure… Internet Explorer 8 already has some HTML 5 features enabled but the full blown “Flash killer” is not going to be available until 2012… and even that is an optimistic schedule. If I look at what HTML 5 is going to bring to the table, it seems that its features can be compared to a smaller feature set of Flash Player 7. That version of the Flash Player was released in September 2003… So those features have been available for at least 6 years now. Sure, HTML 5 will still evolve but so will the Flash Player. Every 12 months or so, a new version of the Flash Player is released bringing new features to the web. People have been installing updates faster and faster and within just a few months developers can use those new features in their sites/applications. So by the time HTML 5 gets to critical mass, the Flash Player will be at version 12 or 13 with even more functionality and exciting features that will not be available in standard browsers.
So why is Flash evil? The “skip intro” era is already far behind us and it’s not just about advertising. These days developers are also using the power of the Flash Platform for full blown online/offline applications. Just have a look at Picnik, Sumo Paint or Hobnox. Even organizations like NATO for instance use the Flash Platform in ways that you would not be able to do with HTML 5.
Flash has also greatly improved the video experience on the web. Remember the old days where you had to choose between Windows Media Player, Real Player and Quicktime? And when you made your selection, you still had to pick your connection speed. And when you finally got through all your selections, chances were you still didn’t have the right codec and you still wouldn’t see the video. With Flash, ‘play video’ actually means ‘play video’ and today over 85% of all the video on the web is viewed using Flash Player. YouTube, CNN, Vimeo, NY Times, Flickr, Last.fm, Facebook and many many more all use Flash.
Now don’t get me wrong. I am not saying the Open Web is a bad thing. I welcome all forms of innovation but Open Web supporters also need to open their eyes and see that Adobe is not as bad as they think.
So why don’t we open source the Flash Player? Well… First of all… I’m not sure what good that would do? That said, Adobe doesn’t own the rights to every single bit in the Flash Player. We don’t own the rights for the video and graphics codecs for example. It also seems that not many people know that we opened up the specs for the SWF and FLV file formats as part of the Open Screen Project. We also published the specs for AMF (the binary format for exchanging data used by the Flash Player) and announced that we’ll also publish the specs for RTMP. We also have a bunch of Open Source projects within Adobe. The Flex SDK being one of them. On top of having our own Open Source projects we also support and contribute to existing Open Source projects like WebKit, the Mozilla Foundation and Eclipse.
I know… Adobe pays my paycheck but I honestly think that we are trying our very best to be a good web citizen. However, I also think we don’t get much credit for it. Hopefully this blog post can change your mind a little bit. Feel free to comment.
UPDATE: Ryan Stewart just posted a list of HTML 5 features and when similar features were introduced in the Flash Player.
Weekly blend – May 23, 2009
- By the Time You’re Done With This Post, 20 Hours of Video Will be Uploaded to YouTube
- That’s just amazing… - What We Know About The Apple Tablet So Far
- Sounds interesting - Business Card Design: Better Than A Plain Ol’ Business Card
- Really cool and creative business cards - Joost Boldly Goes Where Hulu Wouldn’t
- AIR app for Joost
Starship Enterprise runs on the Flash Platform
“Space… The final frontier.”
Have you ever wondered how all those cool graphics and animations on TV-shows and in movies are built? Well… I was pleasantly surprised to hear that they actually use Flash to create those.
Lee Brimelow just published an interview with OOOii, a visual effects company based in Hollywood who actually created all the visuals used on the new Star Trek movie. By the way, if you haven’t seen the new Star Trek movie, I can really recommend it. The effects are great and the movie is action packed. Aaaaaand… to top it off: The Starship Enterprise runs on the Flash Platform! ;-)
Flash on!
Update May 28th: Updated with the link to the full interview
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