Video: Schematic shows multi-touch wall. Runs on Flash. Built with Flex.
Microsoft has (rightfully) gotten a lot of attention with their Surface multi-touch table. Schematic has now raised the bar. In Cannes at the Cannes Lions festival, they were showing a 3.5m (12ft) x 1.5m (5ft) multi-touch/multi-user intelligent wall which puts the Surface to shame.
The massive display gives attendees instant access to the complete festival program, 3D maps of the event and surrounding area, and information on local restaurants and bars. The Touchwall also helps delegates schedule meetings with each other and trade contact information via email. The presentation layer is built with the Flex 4 framework and runs on Flash Player 10.
I interviewed John Barton, Senior Solutions Architect at Schematic and asked him about the wall’s features, how it was built and where they are taking this next.
Wouldn’t it be cool if we could get something like this at MAX?
Adobe and HTC Bring Flash Platform to Android
There’s been a lot of buzz about Flash on mobile devices the last couple of days and today HTC announces the release of the first Flash enabled Android phone. This HTC Hero delivers a more complete Web browsing experience and provides access to a broad variety of Flash technology based content available on the Web today. Users can browse and discover a broad set of Web content and applications not supported by mobile phones in the past. People can also view YouTube videos using Flash technology, and enable full screen viewing mode by simply double tapping the screen.
The HTC Hero delivers powerful, compatible video playback performance using Flash technology, and interactive content enabled by ActionScript 2.0. Users can enjoy and navigate through Web videos using intuitive video controls. With progressive streaming of large MP3 audio files from a Web server and the local file storage, the HTC Hero provides a seamless audio experience. Support for Sorenson and On2 VP6 codecs enables higher quality video and playback of existing Web content.
This is also a very important step towards full Web browsing with Flash Player 10 on mobile phones in the future.
Check out a demo of the HTC Hero on http://adobe.com/go/htchero. I can’t wait to get my hands on one!
Read more on Mark Doherty’s blog.
Flash on!
Adobe MAX logo in The Matrix?
Ok… ok… I know… This is a “little bit” geeky. Especially because I was able to spot this on a computer screen in the background and it only appears for a couple of frames. But seriously… Is that the MAX logo I see in The Matrix?
Ok… It probably isn’t, but it’s pretty darn close if you ask me!
Now that we are the topic of MAX, I’m actually very excited about this years edition. If you look at the schedule, you should get a pretty good idea of what’s coming at MAX. I’m scheduled to do some exciting sessions… But more on that later.
If you haven’t registered for MAX yet, you may want to do so before August 31st. If you register before August 31st, you get a $200 discount! Also, if you’re in Europe and you’re thinking about going to MAX in Los Angeles, you may want to book your flights now. I’ve seen return tickets to L.A. from mainland Europe for around €400. Sleeping in L.A. can also be as cheap as $75 a night or you can also just grab a sleeping bag and sleep on Santa Monica Beach ;-)
Nokia releases Flash Lite components
I can’t believe I missed that but a few weeks ago Nokia released a free set of Flash Lite components on Forum Nokia.
The set consists of a button component, contacts list component, list component, media data component, popup component and scrollbar component. They’re all very easy to use and also customizable.
Kudos to Nokia for releasing these! Flash on!
Google adds external resource indexing for Flash sites/apps
Exciting news resonated through the Twittersphere today as Google announced that they’ve now added the ability to index external resources for Flash sites and applications.
When your Flash based site or application loads content from another file (text, HTML, XML, script, another SWF, …) Google can now also index that external content.
While Ichabod – the headless Flash Player that Google uses to enable this – offers even more functionality than what Google offers today, this is obviously really exciting news. If you want to learn more about Ichabod, definitely check out Jim Corbet’s session from Max 2008.
Read more about Google’s implementation on Google’s Webmaster Central.
Flash on!
Update: According to Google’s blog, it seems that this is now limited to AS1 and AS2. I’m trying to find out more about that. Will keep you posted.
Update: Google confirmed that they also index AS3 based content. They also updated their blog post.
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