Europe needs to come together

Posted by on Apr 29, 2011 in Rants | 7 comments

I was just reading a news article about the (already ridiculous) ban of liquids on board aircrafts. Today that ban is five years old and the European Commission is now relaxing that ban. Say you fly from San Francisco to Belgium. If you’re like me and fly Star Alliance chances are that you fly to either Frankfurt or Munich first. With the current ban I could not buy any liquids in San Francisco because I would not be allowed to take it on the connecting flight to Belgium. By relaxing this ban this would now be possible.

That’s great, right? Well.. Yes… If it weren’t for the fact that some European countries have already decided to maintain the existing rules. If you have a connecting flight in France, the UK or yes… Belgium you won’t be allowed to take the liquids you bought abroad on board. If you fly to Germany or The Netherlands it won’t be a problem.

It saddens me that Europe can’t seem to agree on the simplest things and can’t seem to agree on one European wide set of rules.

Now let’s apply this to technology. Some of my US colleagues were actually surprised when they heard that Europe doesn’t have something like Netflix or Hulu. Heck… the majority of Europe doesn’t even have movie purchases/rentals on iTunes. Why is that? Simple… Because there is no one European copyright law. If someone like Netflix would like to start operations in Europe they’d have to negotiate copyrights in every single country. You already see this happening with Spotify for instance. Spotify is only available in 7 European countries. iTunes movies are only available in 2 or 3 countries. And we only have copyright laws to blame.

Europe needs to come together in order to not get left behind…

Update: And yes… (Thanks Cyril for reminding me) we’re not even talking about things like European roaming rates, VAT, etc…

Video: My favorite new features in Flash Builder 4.5

Posted by on Apr 11, 2011 in adobe, Flash Builder | 4 comments

Today is an exciting day. Adobe announced Creative Suite 5.5 and Flash Builder 4.5!

With Flash Builder 4.5 and the Flex 4.5 framework developers can easily develop and deploy mobile applications to more than 200 million smartphones and tablets by the end of 2011. But that’s not all Flash Builder 4.5 has to offer! In this video I’m showing my favorite new features in Flash Builder 4.5.

Click here for more information on Creative Suite 5.5.
Click here for more information on Flash Builder 4.5.

Flash Builder sneak peek: Mobile application development

Posted by on Apr 7, 2011 in devices, Flash Builder, mobile | 11 comments

I’m sure you all know that Flash Builder will enable you to build applications with Flex and/or ActionScript and then compile them for distribution on the Android Market. An upcoming version of Flash Builder will also enable the same workflow for iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS applications. You’ll even be able to package these different types of installers in one go.

Video interview: Robert Reinhardt on HTML5 video

Posted by on Apr 6, 2011 in html5, Interview, Video | 1 comment

Robert Reinhardt… He wrote The Book… The Bible… Of Flash that is. Robert is also a streaming video expert and has been working a lot with HTML5 video recently. I asked him about his experiences with HTML5 for video.

Flash Builder sneak peek: Designer/developer workflow

Posted by on Apr 5, 2011 in Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst | 4 comments

The Flash Builder team is working on some very cool stuff for an upcoming release of Flash Builder. In this video I’m showing you how an upcoming version of Flash Builder is making it easer to combine the work you do in Flash Catalyst with the code in Flash Builder.

More sneaks soon… So stay tuned ;-)