Flash Speaks Actionscript

At last year’s Max conference, a new Adobe technology called Adobe Wave was revealed that demonstrated how web content publishers could easily publish notification to their user’s desktops.  The Adobe Wave client is built on Adobe AIR allowing users to receive near real time notifications of new content, a new social interaction, or another notification that the publisher would like to let you know about.

Earlier this summer, this previewed technology was added to Adobe Labs for both users and publishers.  For those of you that have ever used Growl notifications for Mac OS X, the style of notifications is very similar.

The Potential of Adobe Wave

Personally, I feel that Adobe Wave has some legs and if widely adopted can provide a streamlined connection with the content publisher and user.  As web users, we are always looking for a way to stay on top of the web’s content.  Adobe Wave simply provides content publishers the right tool to do just that in almost real time.

Overall, I think this is an exciting technology and indicates that our needs of how we receive our content are evolving.  This is definitely something I will be keeping a close eye on.  Don’t forget to check out, the video overview for both publishers and consumers.  Also, for more information, visit Adobe Wave on Adobe Labs.

The day that many of us have been waiting for has arrived. Today, beta versions of both Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst are now available for download via Adobe Labs. The two new beta releases have been in closed beta for quite some, but as of today the doors are now opened.

A Little Bit About the Two

Flash Builder(formerly Flex Builder) 4 delivers a long list of new features, plus improvements to many existing features.There are three main themes to this release: developer productivity, designer-developer work-flow, and data-centric application development.

As for Flash Catalyst, this new tool looks to vastly improve designer/developer work-flow when dealing with the Flex Framework and development of RIAs.

Further Readings:

While the news of the beta releases of Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst is still young, I have compiled a list of resources that will help you get up to date topic. Enjoy!

• Overview of Flex 4(Gumbo)
• Top 10 Changes in Flex 4
• Beta versions of Flash Catalyst and Flex on Labs
• What’s new in Flash Builder 4 beta
• Learn to Use Flash Builder 4 and Flex 4 SDK

The new Adobe XMP Library for ActionScript is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Adobe Extensible Metadata Platform (XMP) is a labeling technology that allows you to embed data about a file, known as metadata, into the file itself. XMP is an open technology based on RDF and RDF/XML. With this new library you can read existing XMP metadata from Flash based file formats via the Adobe Flash Player.

Alchemy Toolkit Released!

Last week, Adobe announced the release of Alchemy Toolkit which allows users to compile C and C++ code into Web applications that run on Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR.  Essential allowing users to use their exisitng C code and present it in a way that is accessible to all users with the Flash Player plugin is a huge step for the Adobe Flash Platform.

Doom Meets the Adobe Flash Platform

With that said,  Michael Welsh from Newgrounds have been busy since Adobe released Alchemy to cook up a fully playable version of the epic classic, Doom.   The game will run directly in your browser and looks and feels like the real thing.  However, performance of it is somewhat dependent on the your computer’s performance, but who cares…it’s DOOM!

Additional Resources:

• Play Doom!
• More info on Alchemy
• Download the Alchemy Toolkit

Adobe Labs has just announced an update to the beta version of Adobe Air for Linux.  This beta update adds support for a ton of new AIR features along with fixing a some existing bugs.  See the release notes for more information regarding this beta runtime.

Additional Resources:

• Download Adobe AIR for Linux
• Give feedback on the forums
• See the full Release Notes

You’ve probably read all you can read on the new Adobe Dreamweaver features, but now see them in action. The channel, Inside the Dreamlabs on Adobe TV, has a series of six episodes in which break down and demonstrate the latest Dreamweaver CS4 features.

From the tighter integration of Dreamweaver with the CS suite to the addition of web widgets, Inside the Dreamlabs will definitely get you pumped up and persuade you to download the beta from Adobe labs.

Find out more about these demonstrations below or visit Inside the Dreamlabs on Adobe TV.

Dreamweaver CS4 Related Files
Dreamweaver’s new Related Files feature lets you work across the asset files in your projects and maintain a consistent visual preview throughout.

Dreamweaver CS4 Live Preview
Jorge and Paul demonstrate how Dreamweaver’s new Live View mode makes designing dynamic, JavaScript-powered interfaces easy, powerful, and accurate.

Dreamweaver CS4 Code Navigator
Dreamweaver’s new Code Navigator gives you lightening-fast access to the CSS rules that define any element of your page, wherever they’re defined.

Dreamweaver CS4 Dataset Wizard
Creating datasets in Spry has never been easier with the new Spry DataSet wizard even when using an existing HTML page as your data source.

Dreamweaver CS4 Web Widgets
Jorge and Paul demonstrate how easy it is to bind a Yahoo! UI calendar widget to a Spry dataset.

Dreamweaver CS4 JavaScript
Jorge and Paul explore the greatly expanded support for JavaScript recently added to Dreamweaver.

More Resources:

• Review: First Look: Dreamweaver CS4 beta
• Download the beta

Steven Heintz, Senior Product Manager for Adobe, goes into great deal on what exactly Adobe Thermo is all about. He also demonstrates the new,innovative application for us.

Like myself, I am sure there are alot of individuals out there looking to get an explanation of what is all the hype with Adobe Air. You can visit Abobe Labs to find out more on Adobe AIR, but I did come across an article by Blue Clock which breaks down many questions you might have about Adobe AIR. Some of the questions answered put into perspective are

• What exactly is Adobe Air?
• Is it a Web or a Desktop Application?
• Why does Adobe Air Matter?
• Who is using Abobe Air?

Read the full story

Looks like Adobe Flash video, FLV, is making it’s way up in the popularity votes. As a matter of fact, it is my preferred choice of web video deployment. However, unless you currently have access to Adobe Flash CS3 Professional , converting video into the popular format will be a bit of a hassle. There are many applications available that take on the role of converting video into the Flash format, however, not all of these applications conform to Adobe Technology standards. For this, I would highly recommend the FLVCheck tool and use this FLVCheck tool to check the FLV files before you let others see them.

The FLVCheck tool will inspect the FLV file and will only return information about the composition of the file. FLVCheck does not correct the FLV data if it is corrupted. If an error is found, you will need to re-encode the file to get the best quality.

This application is a nice complimentary to any third party FLV converting tool. You can find more info through Adobe Labs.

Download FLVCheck tool