Today Adobe announced AIR 2.7 is out, but also that they will no longer be supporting AIR on Linux.
Given that it's also official that Adobe will not be supporting hardware acceleration in Flash Player on Linux any time soon this concerns me - and it should concern you too.
Keynote
Mike Jones, Adobe
Mike is an evangelists for games at Adobe. A shift of focus I think Adobe is still making. Mike shows there are a massive number of devices, and you can target these all with HTML5 but Flash has a unique opportunity to innovate on all of these platforms. Mike has a nice time line graph to back this up over the last 15 years.
Keynote
Mark Drew and Gert Franz of Railo
It's up to you to be proud of CFML, don't apologise for it ! Tweet it, blog it ! You cant convert .Net, PHP users, only tempt them.
But likewise, we should try other stuff and tell everyone the 10% you like about Scala or whatever. You might end up with them in ColdFusion (or Railo !). Incentivise your colleagues, especially the 9 to 5'ers.
Price and performance is not an issue any more for ColdFusion, been around for ages but updated every single year.
Gert also talked about some of the cool stuff in Railo.
Keynote (Adobe)
Terry Ryan
Terry started off by saying that 5 years ago, we built websites with 2 simple tiers. Now have a web application, and tablet, and mobile, and each in many versions.
The next article in my series on user experience design is now up on the corporate blog : What users really want
Sometimes I am amazed that two parts of a single company can't work together.
Today was a classic example - I needed to install Adobe's Flash CS5 authoring tool, and already had a debug Flash player installed in FireFox. I also use Flash Builder for debugging Flex in the standalone player.
Installing CS5 broke both these things ! Why CS5 felt the need to mess, without asking or apparently thinking, I have no idea.
The fixes were fairly easy, but shouldn't have been needed.
Recently I needed a proper Flex 4 version of the venerable Flex 4 LinkBar (a horizontal line of links), but all I could find was a posting of the beginning of the implementation. I also needed it to behave as a toggle so any one link could be selected.
Well, you can't blame me for trying (by opening the official bug). Despite being the 2nd most popular, and fastest growing, platform for web development, Adobe have finally told us what their plans for their Flash Builder on Linux are: termination.
The latest Flash Camp event was held in Manchester last week, and was a day-long series of talks designed to inspire Flash and RIA developers - a 'taster' as we were told during the brief warm up.
Right off the bat everyone who went got a bunch of awesome freebies, from Thermos mugs to Adobe Rubik cubes, full copies of the FDT ActionScript IDE and a free film from the blinkbox streaming site; fairly awesome for a free event.
Antony and Jerome are co-founders of Ribot - a design lab specialising in enjoyable small screen interfaces and experiences. They're not Flash specific.
Over the last 20 years they've seen the world move from analogue to digital, but much more recently gone human - there isn't a third party any more (like a mouse) between the the experience and the user.
They explained that mobile is very constrained (RAM and display size, network latency, etc.) but this gives you scope and focus- a challenge.