In a move that is bound to make software history (at least the part we care about), Adobe has announced that Flex will be completely open source by the end of the year, under a Mozilla Public License, including not only the Flex SDK (which will be publicly available in June), but all software assets such as compilers and debuggers.
I’m still catching up with the news, so head to Ted’s blog for more information.
Notes from Adobe’s keynote at FitC Toronto 2007
- Flash Player 9 statistics. As pointed out by Emmy Huang early this week, official Flash Player penetration for mature markets is at 83.4%, nine months after it’s release.
- Mike Downey showed Papervision3d samples to illustrate Flash 9 processing speed improvements.
- Key new features of Flash CS3: Photoshop and Illustrator documents import, timeline-based to actionscript-based animation conversion.
- Ted Patrick still loves the timeline.
- Flash/Flex integration kit: an extension for Flash CS3 that allows timeline-based animations to be exported as SWCs from Flash, and then imported into Flex, and controlled from within a Flex application.
- Kevin Towes demoed the new Flash Media Encoder, and a handful of Flash and Flex applications that take advantage of the new features of Flash Media Server 2.
- The keynote ended with a quick walk-through of a few Apollo applications, including the new Adobe Media Player, to be released with Apollo.
Yes, I’m done packing for FitC, and should be heading to the airport in a couple of hours. Haha! this is funny, while typing “hours” I got an automated call from Delta saying that the flight has been rescheduled for an hour later. Anyway, that means I’ll e arriving to Toronto at around 4:30pm. With the extra time, I will go through my checklist again,
I’m seriously considering making the switch, at least at work, in order to improve the workflow with my co-workers. I am a aware that a great number of flash developers work on Macs; however, being an all-time PC user, I am a little bit concerned about how the learning curve might affect my productivity. Any advice?
I guess the question is kind of complex, since Flash/Flex development involves many things other that the Flash IDE and Flex Builder. For example, I use Enterprise Architect on a daily basis and there’s no Mac version for that; I know that I could run that particular software with Parallels, but that means that I am not actually replacing my current OS, but just adding a new one in the process. That is not a bad thing, but I want to find what advantages do you think MacOS inherently provides to Flash dev types.
I’m looking to share a double room at the Hilton. I know is last minute, but the friend I was going with had to cancel because of work, but I am holding the reservation as it is probably too late to cancel that one and get a single room at the promotional price. So, if anybody is interested, please let me know ASAP.
Check it out! Adobe DevNet has been updated with lots of new content, and there’s something for almost all of the new CS3 products, including Flash CS3 integration and migration topics. It also sports a new little widget that has solved a little mystery.
I don’t keep an eye statistics, because I don’t expect them to change frequently. I do however check them once a month, just to see if there’s any interesting referers. Most of the time I find spammers, but I’ve got used to it and there’s not much I can do about; however, the last time I went through my stats, I found what appeared to be evidence of Adobe spamming (?!) my referrers list: the DevNet site appeared in my list of referrers, but I couldn’t find any links back to my site. I tried to figure out another explanation, but quickly forgot about the whole thing.
Today however, when checking out the DevNet site, I noticed that they have a RSS reader serving MXNA accross the whole site, which means those incoming links where actually there, while they were testing the tools, who knows at what hours of the day. Mystery solved 
Wow, this is bad… after reading that Microsoft was releasing a “cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web.” (which turned out to be just a re-packaginf of WPF/E), I wondered since when Microsoft cared about making anything cross-platform or cross-browser compatible.
So, still in disbelief, I just clicked away to the Silverlight homepage to see for myself. However, when I “clicked to watch the video”, nothing happened… of course! I use Firefox. It appears that for Microsoft, “cross-browser” means their browsers.
So sad Microsoft…
If anybody reading is still out, leave your name and email on the comments, and I’ll get you in 
I have only 5 invites to spare, which I got a couple of days ago. Joost is celebrating their newest built by giving invites to their beta testers, so there might be other willing to send an invite your way if I run out.
Cheers!
Update
There were only 5 invites. They are all gone now. I’ll let you know when/if I get more.