Adobe is on a roll! MAX, RTMP, Flash Player 10 for mobile, Acrobat.com and 200m AIR installs
Wow… Where do I start? First of all, you may have noticed that the activity on my blog has been rather low the last couple of weeks. June is a pretty hectic month and it’s not always easy to finish a blog post (I have several sitting in my draft folder now) while traveling.
This week, Adobe announced so much cool stuff that I have to catch up with all the news. So here we go…
MAX
Registrations for MAX are now open. Registrations for MAX are now open. Registrations for MAX are now open. Registrations for MAX are now open. This year, MAX offers more than 200 sessions and 100 hands-on labs. If you register before August 31st, you get $200 off the regular price of a full conference pass!
RTMP
As promised/announced back in January, Adobe now published the specs for RTMP. RTMP was designed for high-performance transmission of audio, video, and data between Adobe Flash Platform technologies. RTMP is now available as an open specification to create products and technology that enable delivery of video, audio, and data in the open AMF, SWF, FLV, and F4V formats compatible with Adobe Flash Player.
Flash Player 10 for smart phones
Just last night, Adobe’s CEO Shantanu Narayen announced that we will have a public beta for Flash Player 10 for smart phones at MAX. He also said that we will be initially targeting Android, Windows Mobile, Symbian and Palm webOS devices and that early builds have already been shipped to manufacturers.
Acrobat.com
Acrobat.com now becomes a full online office suite. Recently the team added Presentations to the offering and just this week Tables saw the light of day. Both apps can be found on http://labs.acrobat.com.
AIR
The AIR runtime is now installed on more than 200 million desktop computers worldwide. That’s 200 million in just 16 months. Obviously this is thanks to all the AIR developers out there that actually build applications using the technology. So big kudos to you!
Open Screen update: RTMP specification to be published soon
This is incredibly exciting news and something the community has been asking for since we published the specs for the SWF file format, FLV/F4V, AMF, and the Mobile Content Delivery Protocol. In the first half of this year, Adobe will publish the specification for RTMP (Real Time Messaging Protocol).
Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s CTO, said:
With the RTMP specification, developers and companies will be able to provide users with optimized audio, video and data streaming, no matter what kind of device the user is on or where the content is coming from. Our ongoing commitment to openness is accelerating adoption of the Flash Platform by developers and resulting in a new generation of Web applications, content and video experiences that run reliably across operating systems and devices.
The RTMP specification is expected to be posted on the Adobe Developer Connection (www.adobe.com/devnet/rtmp ) in the first half of 2009.
WebORB for .NET is now free
Last night, Midnightcoders announced that they are changing their business model and thereby make WebORB free for every platform they support. That includes their .NET solution. If you’ve never heard of WebORB, it’s more or less like Adobe’s own DataServices solution but specific to .NET back-ends (Midnightcoders also have versions for Java, PHP and Ruby).
WebORB enables seamless integration between .NET server applications and Flex/Flash applications. It allows you to use AMF or RTMP from your .NET server back end to your Flex front-end including more sophisticated communication like data push, remote shared objects and message broadcasting.
If you’re in to .NET development, this is good news since it now allows you to easily combine the power of Flex with the power of the back-end you’re used to with the ease of use AMF & RTMP communication offers. Go check it out.
Feel free to follow me on: 
