Adode * Macromedia === Amazing

DIGG IT!     9 Comments Published Monday, April 18, 2005 at 4:19 AM .

This is great news in my book. It can only mean great things for rich media technologies and for the future of Flash ,Flex, FlashCom, JRun, and ColdFusion.&

Adobe is a 600% larger company by market cap standards.
Adobe has 1.47B in cash to Macromedia's 340.88M.

Adobe is not buying Macromedia to dismantle products, they are buying it for the future of rich media, Flash. Flash as a medium is going to get huge and now it stands to be better funded and nurtured from the combined resources of a much larger company. We will see great products emerge that utilize the Flash Player as a medium and provide a wider range of creative uses. Rich media just got allot richer.

In the public markets, Adobe and Macromedia are comparables. Each companies stock price is gauged on the other in relative terms. Analysts pick apart every press release and earnings statement of these two companies looking for something discern who is leading or if the market has changes.

5 Year comparision chart MACR and ADBE

This merger ends the public and private competition that these two companies have waged against one another. The two have sued each other with regularity over patent infringement and technology related issues. All of these distractions will disappear and allow the merged company to focus on rich media and communication.

The world wants rich media and putting 7 times more resources behind Flash seems like a very good start to me.

Flash is going to get huge. There is a very big wave coming, lets go for a ride!

Cheers,

Ted ;)

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MS Avalon - The Reality II

DIGG IT!     5 Comments Published Thursday, April 14, 2005 at 11:59 AM .

Here is an update to the MS Avalon post regarding size. Seems that I had incuded some developer libraries and SDK's in my count. These numbers have been checked in triplicate and confirmed:

6MB* for Avalon.msi
26Mb* for the .NET 2.0 runtime

32MB* total to run Avalon or XAML applications.

*Totals could rize or fall prior to final release

Cheers,

Ted ;)

PS: Thanks to Robert Penner for the comments, happy to correct.

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MS Avalon - The Reality

DIGG IT!     20 Comments Published Tuesday, April 12, 2005 at 8:24 AM .

I took a deep look at Avalon/XAML at FITC. I am going to be very blunt, Avalon is pure crap. It is very hardware dependent and requires over 250MB of software to run.&

Here is what you currently need to run Avalon and execute XAML:

1. .NET Runtime 2.0 - 41.7 MB
2. Avalon Libraries - 200MB (From MS team at FITC!!)
3. A high-end video card - "ATI Radeon 9600, nVidia GeForce 4, or better"

So if Avalon were a Player, it would be 241.7 MB in size. This is insane any way you look at it.

Obesity aside, I just do not see the value that this provides to the end user. In the FiTC demos, MS provided few solutions that any client I know would actually pay money for. One example showed "Video on a Sphere", I cannot think of a single application today that could make money or provide benefit making something like this.

Here is the value:

1. 250MB installation size
2. High hardware requirements
3. Little end user value
4. 100% Eye Candy

If you ask me, after seeing it in person and talking to MS engineers, this may be the largest single mistake in Microsoft history.

Ted ;)

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Wired and Ready for Flash In The Can

DIGG IT!     1 Comments Published Friday, April 08, 2005 at 10:41 AM .

No sooner had I walked through the door of the Westin, that I ran into Mike Chambers, Mike Downey, and Colin Moock. Flash In The Can (FITC) is going to be a great conference.&

Westin was kind enough to give me a static IP address in my room and my WIFI router is working great. If you are coming to FITC, make sure to find me and say hello. I am looking forward to networking for the full 3 days at FITC.

Cheers,

Ted ;)

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NeoSwiff Public

DIGG IT!     1 Comments Published Thursday, April 07, 2005 at 1:05 AM .

I have been working with NeoSwiff for the past few months and the product is amazing. The compiler, classes, and debugger are rock solid. The bytecode that NeoSwiff emits is highly optimized and produces swf files that are very fast. It would take you days of working with Flasm to achieve the same results NeoSwiff provides in a single compile. Better still, if you report an issue it is fixed in the next build.

http://www.globfx.com/products/neoswiff

I can't say I am good at C#, but it only took a few days to get up to speed with NeoSwiff as the compiler and debugger are solid and provide meaningful errors. Even in this early release, the product is worth a look. Considering the progress that NeoSwiff has made lately, this product is one to watch closely.

Kudos to the team at NeoSwiff. Great work!

Here is an example from Keith Peters using NeoSwiff C#:

I spent 2 hours looking through the C# source for this SWF, it is amazing. Nice work Keith!

Ted ;)

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Navicat Review - MYSQL Administration

DIGG IT!     1 Comments Published Tuesday, April 05, 2005 at 3:43 AM .

I am not much of a DB guy but after working with Navicat and MYSQL, I feel like a BDA. What a great piece of software for working with MYSQL.&

I licensed my demo of Navicat this morning and even during the trial it made a big impact on my database capabilities. If you asked me a month ago to create an index for a table, I would have just said no. With Navicat you are one form away from adding an index or modifying a table.

http://www.navicat.com/index.html

I think the best feature is the scheduled Backup. Just point it at a DB and it creates a back-up of all aspects of your database (data too). Best of all you can restore your back-up to any MYSQL server making it really easy to use Navicat back-ups as a versioning tool.

The query tools allow you to design queries visually or by SQL directly. In most cases I would let the visual tools do 90%, then tweek the SQL myself. The visual tools do an excellent job of staying in sync with SQL, even very complex queries remain editable in the visual tools.

The toolkit is great for testing a DB design. You can design everything within MYSQL and then export to SQL scripts allowing for cross DB porting. Navicat also supports View and Stored Procedures that come with MYSQL 5.

Give it a try if you work with MYSQL, you will be surprised at your productivity gains. Plus at $95 a license on WIN/OSX/Linux it is hard to go wrong.

My 2 cents,

Ted ;)

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