Ted Patrick > { Events & Community } > Adobe Systems

I spoke with Emmy Huang, product manager for Adobe Flash Player this morning. She pulled up the Flash Player Dashboard and gave me the exact Player 9 installs as of midnight 07/29/2007, 2,355,270,000 successful installs. I have recalibrated the counter since the counter was off by 15 million installs.

The install stats come from Akamai and are rounded to the million. The player install numbers are not part of any formal published statistics by Adobe. They are very real, but we do not have 3rd party verification other than with Akamai and Adobe.

DOWNLOAD FP9Counter ASProject Source

I will check in with Emmy from time to time and update the counter monthly to make sure it is accurate. The trending for the installation rate is that it is slowly increasing over time, thus the counter will always tend to be lower than the actual download numbers.

This scale of installations really drive home the fact that download size still really matters. The smaller the player, the faster the runtime is deployed. Considering that the Adobe Flash Player is the most distributed piece of software in the history of software (and the universe for that matter), keeping it small and efficient is very important.

Small is beautiful! Go Flash Player Go!

Cheers,

Ted :)

Today I updated the Flex directory and the listing has crossed 150 Consulting Firms providing solutions using Adobe Flex worldwide. Every time I post about the directory I see a flood of new listing and a huge spike in traffic. The exit traffic from the site has been growing steadily. All this from an XML document!

Flex Directory

To celebrate, I will add a large Flex logo. :)



More to come!

Cheers,

Ted :)

There is a new version of Director in development, Director 11. We are bringing in several engineers to present on Director 11 3 times at MAX 2007 in Chicago and we are adding a BOF for Director.



So yes there will be sessions on Director 11 at MAX.
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

Cheers,

Ted

Papervision3D's entry into the toolset of Flash/Flex developers has been nothing short of impressive. The toolset continues to gain momentium and adoption in bringing a true 3D renderer into Flash Player 9 using ActionScript 3. John Grden has been pushing Papervision3d farther than most and recently has been working on a NEW project using Papervision3D in the Star Wars genre.



John thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

May the Force Be With You!

Ted :)

I put together this Flash Player 9 Counter together using AS3 ActionScript Project in Flex2 that estimates the number of Flash Player 9 installations. I wanted to post the methodology and the source to be as open and transparent as possible. It was fun diving in and writing this widget in AS3 using ASProject. The output SWF file is 1360 Bytes.

Methodology:

1. Establish a rate for Flash Player 9 installations per millisecond.
2. Determine milliseconds since Flash Player 9 was released.
3. Update the value every 500 milliseconds

I will calibrate this counter this week against the exact dates and values but I am currently estimating that 2.32B Installs occurred the day of FlexCamp but it was most likely earlier. I will get this clear in a later post.

DOWNLOAD FP9Counter ASProject Source

Sure am glad 2.3+B Players can run this application.

Cheers,

Ted :)

This statistic was posted at FlexCamp last night. This is the reason to target Flash Player 9, reach. I have a hard time wrapping my head around 2,320,000,000 but at 8,000,000 players installed per day it seems to be adding up.

Makes me wonder how many PC's are out there.

Cheers,

Ted :)

The stage is set, the Flex mugs and kegs are ready, along with 400 free copies of Flex Builder. Yup, today is FlexCamp in San Francisco, too bad we are SOLD OUT! I will be teaching Flex 101 starting at 4PM today and will be covering the basics of Flex and answering questions. Ideally anyone at Flex 101 will walk away with a good perspective on how to think about Flex development and know all the core elements. Believe it or not but Flex is pretty easy to learn but with all things new, it takes time.



I look forward to seeing you at FlexCamp!

Regards,

Ted :)

It is great to see one of the best Flex applications, Picnik.com, reviewed by Walt Mossberg. It is even better that his focus is on the user experience and the application value, not the technology used. It is a great read and a sure sign of things to come for Flex technologies.

Now, It's a Picnik To Edit Your Phots Using a Web Program by Walt Mossberg



I blogged Picnik.com when it launched back in Feb. and since the team has come a very long way with the application. It is still dead simple to edit an image.

Congrats to the Picnik.com team. You all rock!

Cheers,

Ted :)

I am please to announce that Mitch Grasso will be joining us at Adobe MAX 2007 Chicago in the "Inspire" sessions. Mitch Grasso has been working on a new service called SlideRocket, focused on creating and viewing presentations online and offline. Mitch provided me with a presentation for you to look at showing the new Papervision 3D slide transitions. Here is the sneak peek of SlideRocket.

Sneak Peek of 3D Slide Transitions in SlideRocket




Best to think of it as Keynote or PowerPoint for the web. It is a serious RIA built using Flex and the backend was written using ASP.NET/SOAP/MSSQL.




Mitch started using Flex in April of last year and has taken Flex to a new level with SlideRocket. Having used this application, it is a serious contender for the presentation market in that it is easy to use, easy to share, nothing to install, and it doesn't clog your email with large presentation files.




I cannot wait until Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, or Om Malik get a hold of a SlideRocket account, this application will go big. I have been bugging Mitch to finish so I can switch to presenting with Sliderocket for all my presentations and I think we will see a public beta coming very soon.

NOTE: Inspire Session to be posted ASAP to session/speaker list!

Mitch thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted :)

If you are working with Flex, you might want to check out the SearchCoders Dashboard AIR application. It provides lightening fast searches from the FlexCoders mailing lists and adds a ton of value to finding information on Flex development. The secret behind this app is the use of LiveCycle Data Services ES combined with Lucene for search results.

Download LiveCycle Data Services ES



I ran into Tom Bray at the on AIR bus tour in LA where he showcased SearchCoders. He then mentioned in passing that they app was using paging in LiveCycle Data Services (was Flex Data Services). If you do a custom search and scroll very fast you will see the dataset page on the fly. It is a very very good use of Data Services and really highlights the value of optimized data exchange.





This highlights one of the problems with LiveCycle Data Services as a product in that much of this value is hidden. When you get into very data intensive applications, there is a world of value in using LiveCycle Data Services. It would be almost impossible to get this level of performance and scalability from other backends. The data exchange here is passing pages of data as AMF3 Binary directly into the fill operation of an ArrayCollection. Technically the ArrayCollection is used normally but the internals are tied to the Paging API within LCDS (LiveCycle Data Services). On the server side, the SearchCoders team created a searchable index of posts with Lucene and query it using Java.

Price: SearchCoders used the FREE LiveCycle Data Services Express edition. SearchCoders didn't pay a dime to add this high performance data exchange into their application.

Kudos to Tom Bray and Robert Cadena on this great app. Having worked on "Search" solutions for FlexCoders in the past, this looks to be spot on.

Cheers,

Ted :)

Next Friday, August 3, the 2007 Adobe MAX Awards will close submissions! If you have made something great, it is time to enter! I have been working on the MAX Keynote and we are looking to integrate MAX Award finalists into the MAX General Session keynotes and throughout the sessions at MAX. Given the award rules, the August 3 deadline is final, do not miss entering this year!

MAX Awards Categories:

• Advertising and Branding
• Communication and Collaboration
• Enterprise
• Mobile and Devices
• Public Sector
• Rich Internet Applications
• Video

MAX Awards Nomination Form

Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted :)

There are few (interactive/designer/developer/photographer)'s like Erik Natzke. His creativity with Flash CS3 and Photoshop CS3 is really amazing. I am please to announce that Erik Natzke will be joining us at Adobe MAX 2007 Chicago in the "Inspire" sessions.

As soon as you try to define Erik's work he breaks out of the definition. Rather than talking about Erik, it is much easier to showcase images of his recent work. These images give you a glimpse of what Erik does but there is no substitute for seeing his session, it will be standing room only.







Erik thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted :)

We are now broadcasting live from The Angelica Theater in Dallas. While sitting in the theater, I fixed about 10 bugs and have posted version 1.02 of AIRChat.



DOWNLOAD AIRCHAT 1.02

DOWNLOAD the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR --> Required for AIRChat)

See you in Dallas!

Ted :)

In posting an .AIR file to my site last night, several people complained about the lack of a MIME type. I just added the mime type support for .AIR files to my apache server via .htaccess.

Here is how it works:

Take a look at this sample htaccess file (note it has no "." before it). Simply save this file as ".htaccess" into any directory on an Apache server and that path will have .AIR MIME type support.

Here is the line that matters most:

AddType application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip air

When Apache hits an .AIR file, this will add a header automatically to the request. This will also cause the file to be processed into the AIR runtime installer when run locally given AIR's ability to integrate into MIME.

Cheers,

Ted :)

I have been working on a chat client for the on AIR Bus tour. I wrote the client using Flex 3 and the server using Python Twisted with Amazon EC2. The AIRChat client is available to download here and gives you a chance to chat with the on AIR Bus crew while watching the video feed.



DOWNLOAD AIRCHAT 1.01

DOWNLOAD the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR --> Required for AIRChat)

This was my first app using the HTML Control and I found it to be a very pleasant experience. Blending HTML and AS3/Flex is really great and presents many opportunities extending the reach of RIA. I used the HTML control for the Chat window and wrote elements via AS3 to the component.

The server I wrote in Python Twisted and it is running now on Amazon EC2 cluster on a Linux server image. I wanted to post the server code so you can see how all this works. The server runs on Port 80 serving both HTTP and XMLSocket servers on the same port. Regarding scalability Twisted uses an Asynchonous Event model so programming the servers is really simple and easy to understand. Here is the server code:

AirChat.py --> Contains the protocol and server logic
AirService.py --> Runs AirChat as a Daemon on any server

To run these you will need Python and Twisted Python installed.

See you in AIRChat!

Cheers,

Ted :)

On July 23 the MAX 2007 pricing will go up. Register this week for MAX 2007 in Chicago!

MAX 2007 Chicago Registration

Don't miss the early bird registration for MAX!

Ted :)

Finding Flex developers is getting very difficult as demand is far greater than supply. This has induced a rise in rates and salaries for Flex developers. In many cases, Flex developers are seeing salaries and rates some 30-40% higher than last year. Personally I only see the problem getting worse and demand continuing to outstrip supply even as we grow like mad. If you know Flex today, you are in a great spot, the market is white hot, party on! So what are projects and employers to do? Where can a team/company find Flex developers?

DON'T LOOK FOR FLEX DEVELOPERS!!!

LOOK FOR COMPONENT AND APPLICATION DEVELOPERS!!!



Looking for developers seasoned in Flex is hard and there is a limited supply. You will get frustrated looking for them and you will most likely have limited success. Learning Flex is quite easy for application developers and the development model was designed to fit developers coming from Java, C#, C++, VB, PowerBuilder, Delphi or any component/class based development paradigm. I highly recommend recruiting developers seasoned in application development and training them in Flex for the project at hand. This might seem like a strange tactic but 2 of the most successful Flex projects were built from teams with no prior Flex or Flash development experience. A good application developer who understands component development, object oriented development, and who has written desktop software are an ideal fit for Flex. The key is that they already know all the patterns and skills that are needed to understand Flex. These are also the skills that are very hard to teach and can only be learned on real projects.

Look at Buzzword by Virtual Ubiquity. This team had ZERO Flex experience, ZERO, when they decided to build a document editor in the web and chose to deploy to Flash Player and selected Flex for development. At the time Flex 2 was at Beta 2 and they wrote a prototype and proved that they development model would scale to produce a full document editor on par with desktop software. The team has over 100 years combined development experience building document editors. This team is wildly proficient in C and C++ for real desktop development. This team adopted Flex and has literally taken the development model farther than any team yet. They were application developers with deep knowledge of object oriented development and learned AS3 and Flex easily.

Look at Yahoo Web Messenger. This team had ZERO Flex experience, ZERO, when they decided to build an instant messenger in the web. I met the team while teaching at Yahoo earlier this year and they had 5+ developers on the project with no prior experience with Flex or AS3. The key was the team were all experienced application developers. By my estimate that team went from scratch to release in 6 months implementing the native Yahoo Messenger protocol in AS3 using flash.net.Socket.

Look at many of the top Flex developers and several key evangelists for Flex, they all have come from a component development background. What is even stranger is that many were once upon at time PowerBuilder developers. It is this component based legacy that is a strength in learning/adapting to the Flex development paradigm. If you look closely at Farata Systems and Cynergy Systems you will see several of the leading PowerBuilder developers who migrated to Java and then onto Flex.

Here are 5 skills/experience to look for:

1. Component Development
2. Desktop Application Development
3. OOP Skills - Classes, Interfaces, Composition, Inheritance
4. Languages - Java, C, C++, C#, PowerBuilder, Delphi, VB
5. Compiler skills are a must! (Flex/AS3 are not interpreted, they are compiled)

I am sure we will see a day when there are millions of Flex developers but given the market shortage today, we need to recruit them from other development markets. The best way to do that is to port developers with application skills and experience and teach them Flex. There are 5-10 Million developers out there that qualify and many are already employed in larger organizations. In many companies, there may already be the makings of a great Flex team in house.

There will come a day when recruiting Flex will be easier, but today, focus on finding good application/component developers for your Flex project and train them. I wish it were easier and that Flex developers grew on trees but we are not there yet.

Go Flex!

My 2 cents,

Ted :)

I have 250 discount codes for Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago. Find me on the on AIR Bus Tour at any of the AIRCamp events and I will give you a discount code for MAX.






Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

Cheers,

Ted :)

The Flex team is hosting a Flex Camp event at 601 Townsend on July 27th starting at 5PM. I am hosting a Flex 101 session before starting at 4PM and seating is very limited. In 90 minutes I will be covering Flex from a new developer perspective. I will answer a ton of questions about Flex and how it works and get everyone in attendance started learning Flex the right way.





I love teaching and have been spending time teaching all day sessions at some of the larger companies in Silicon Valley. I cover lots of topics and I will be refining this into 90 minutes for the Flex Camp on July 27th.

Who: Developers who are interested in meeting the Flex engineering team, other Flex developers, or curious to learn about Flex.

What: Free, one night event with presentations by Adobe as well as Barcamp style meetups throughout the night.

When: Friday, July 27th, starting at 5:00 PM. Ted Patrick will be doing a Flex 101 session starting at 4:00 PM.

Where: Adobe San Francisco Office, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco, CA.

Why?: Learn more about Flex and what’s new in Flex 3.

How: Register for free and sign up to present here.

See you at FlexCamp!

Ted :)

Lately Aral has been "Rediscovering Fun" in writing software for Flash Player. Aral can be found working on SWX his data exchange format for that leverages the SWF file format. I am pleased to announce that Aral will be speaking at Adobe MAX 2007 in the "Inspire" sessions on "Rediscovering Fun".



OSFlash.org - All things Open Source + Flash Player


It is exciting to see Aral attending MAX after a long hiatus. His presence and session are sure to be a croud pleaser as he works with Flash on the Nintendo Wii and various mobile devices. I look forward to seeing Aral's session as it will make MAX a better conference and who knows, maybe you will "Rediscover Fun" too!

I am also fairly certain we will be seeing Aral in MAX Barcelona as well! :)

Aral thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted :)

Did you or your company create something great this year using Adobe tools? To make the 2007 MAX Awards great, we need you to apply! MAX awards drives lots of business and awareness to team that delivered these great experiences.

The annual MAX Awards recognizes the best of the best uses of Adobe software for creating engaging experiences. Applications are now being accepted. The top two finalists in each of seven categories will be invited to showcase their work at MAX 2007. Winners of this global awards program will be announced live at the MAX event in North America, and one finalist will be selected by attendees to receive the coveted People's Choice Award. Entrants are also eligible for Special Recognition Awards to be announced at MAX North America, MAX Japan, or MAX Europe.

MAX Awards Categories:

• Advertising and Branding
• Communication and Collaboration
• Enterprise
• Mobile and Devices
• Public Sector
• Rich Internet Applications
• Video

In 2005, LifeCoach, a service I worked on using Flex was a MAX Award Finalist. It was a real honor to be given finalist status and I know that many leads and and projects resulted to Cynergy Systems for their work on LifeCoach.

MAX Awards Nomination Form

Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted :)

In 2005, Jesse James Garrett coined the term AJAX and defined a new pattern for architecting web applications. With this post Jesse captured the essence of the AJAX movement and united the web around creating richer experiences for end users. I am please to announce that Jesse James Garrett and Adaptive Path will be joining us at Adobe MAX 2007 Chicago in the "Inspire" sessions.







Jesse James Garrett is President and a founding partner of Adaptive Path. He is author of The Elements of User Experience (New Riders), and is recognized as a pioneer in the field of information architecture. Jesse's clients include AT&T, Intel, Crayola, Hewlett-Packard, Motorola, and National Public Radio.

Jesse thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted :)

I am all set to board the on AIR bus at 5:30AM on Monday in San Francisco as we depart for Seattle. I have been looking forward to this tour for a while and on the eve, I am busy taking care of loose ends of work at 601 Townsend. The group aboard the on AIR Bus Tour for leg 1 is an amazing group of developers and I am personally honored to be on board. It is going to be a great trip!

I have been thinking deeply about what I will build on the bus and what I would explore and learn. I decided last week to focus on real-time data exchange using Python Twisted and AIR using Binary socket. Few know that I have a geeky passion for Python as a language and if ActionScript hadn't gotten in the way, I would never entered the Macromedia/Adobe community. So I will be posting some custom HTTP and Binary Socket servers that implement custom protocols and behavior. You can do amazing things with these and making scalable multi-user applications is cake. Add in Amazon EC2 and you can see where I am headed!

See you on the on AIR Bus Tour!

Cheers,

Ted :)

WOW, I am loving this one. Have you ever wanted a pixel perfect repeated background for any container? This class allows you to apply pixel backgrounds to any container using the Bitmap API in Flash Player. Way cool!

WSBackgroundPixelSkin by Jens Krause!

Example:



I will be using this in one of my AIR apps shipping on the bus!

Cheers,

Ted :)

Adobe has partnered with O'Reilly Ignite to bring 16 new sessions to MAX 2007 in Chicago. Two winners will be selected via SMS/Twitter voting from the 16 sessions to present in the MAX keynote. This is your opportunity to present at MAX 2007 in Chicago and better yet a chance to be in the MAX Keynotes!

MAX has always lacked community content. These sessions are designed to showcase projects that the community has made or how a project was created using Adobe tools and technologies.

Here are the details:



1. Sessions are 5 minutes in length.
2. Each session has 20 slides.
3. Slides auto-rotate every 15 second.
4. 2 winners will be selected by SMS voting to present their sessions in the 2 MAX Keynotes.
5. 16 sessions will be selected online by the community to present at Ignite Adobe MAX.

O'Reilly Ignite Session Sign-up Form

Sept. 30 5:00 PM - 7:00 PM at the Welcome Reception

MAX will start this year with sessions and content from the community and will include the best of these sessions in the MAX Keynote. I look forward to the submissions and the sessions. This is a great addition to MAX and like MAXUP last year, I am sure that the content will be amazing.

Special thanks to Tim, Steve, and Brady at O'Reilly for helping put this together!

Join us at MAX in Chicago and speak at MAX.

Cheers,

Ted :)

I am full speed ahead on IFBIN development and I needed a storage and server solution. I have wanted to tinker with Amazon EC2 for a while and tonight I got neck deep. I got a server all configured and running Linux/Apache/MySql; now I need to install ColdFusion 8! I am running IFBIN 2.0 on ColdFusion 8 on EC2/S3. Getting an AMI image built and customized was my first task.

Here is the result:

IFBIN 2.0 Server Image on Amazon EC2/S3

If you have not checked it out, Amazon EC2/S3 are really amazing services:

S3 - Simple Storage Service --> Think of it as a massive disk with unlimited scalability.

EC2 - Elastic Computing Cloud --> Think of this as a cluster where you can execute machines you create and customize. Load an OS image into S3 and run it on EC2.

EC2/S3 are creating some amazing new business opportunities. The cost of hardware and time to configure are no longer barriers to creating an online business. Scalability is 100% virtualized and has become a service in the cloud.

Seeing my first EC2 image working is really amazing to me. In 1 minute I could launch 20 servers without issue to handle any task all from my own custom images, that is insane.

Check out Amazon Web Services when you get a chance. It is amazing.

Cheers,

Ted :)

I am on the tour bus with Downey, Chambers, Stewart, and Dura and we are testing out the Bus API and all the connections. This bus is really awesome and should make the travel pretty nice. We start next week on Monday July 9 driving to Seattle.





Flickr Bus Feeds

This trip is going to be a blast.

See you on AIR!

ted :)

We are expanding the Birds Of a Feather (BOF) and Meet The Team (MTT) sessions at MAX. This year we have 12 50 minute sessions for Meet the Team and 24 50 minutes Birds of a Feather sessions. The best part is that the community is now in charge of BOF sessions!

How to HOST a BOF session at MAX:

1. Join the MAX 2007 BOF discussion list.

2. Post a BOF session for review to the list.
Like so:

Subject: BOF - Flex and Frameworks
Body: Lets get together and talk about all the various frameworks for use with Flex.

3. We will list all appropriate sessions for community voting. The most popular 24 BOF sessions will get rooms sized accordingly.

(NOTE: This is not the speaking opportunity at MAX 2007, that will occur later this week.)

Added Bonus:

1. Dedicated Beer and Pizza during BOF/MTT sessions.
2. Audio/Video in the larger rooms.

The BOF and Meet the Team sessions are my favorite part of MAX. This year we are letting BOF sessions be community run and add a Mashup/BarCamp feel to the event.

Clear your calendar for Monday night at MAX it is going to be a blast.

Adobe MAX 2007 Connect. Discover. Inspire.

More to come!

Ted :)