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June 29, 2006
Flash Player 9 for Intel Macs Beta Available Now!
I wrote yesterday that we were really close to having a Beta of Flash Player 9 for Intel Macs available, and the code Gods did not let me down! It's available right now, less than 24 hours after my original post. You can download it from http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/public_beta/. Check it out!Posted by Mark Anders at 11:38 AM | Comments (3)
June 28, 2006
Flash Player 9 for Intel Macs
Emmy Huang has a great post about Flash Player 9 that you should check out here. One of the key things she mentions is that a Beta version of Flash Player 9 for Intel Macs will be available in the next couple of days. Emmy's wording on this was a bit confusing, so I went to talk with her for clarification. The team is really close and hoping to get it out this week. However, things do come up and so we don't have an exact date, but it is really soon.Ironically, as I was driving to work this morning, I saw Paul Betlem, who is the head of Flash Player Engineering, walking up Townsend St, so I gave him a ride. We started talking about what's next for the player, and when he told me how close they are to Beta for the Intel Macs, I nearly did a back flip…except for the fact that I was driving and had my seatbelt on! The reason is that over the past couple of months, I have shifted over to a MacBook Pro for my main machine. It allows me to run both Windows and Mac and I love it. However, I was bummed that the only way I could run Flex 2 content was in Windows.
So, when I got to work, I got a link from Paul to the most recent build, installed it, and gave it a whirl. It rocks!!! Despite what Emmy says about it not being completely optimized, which is probably true, I'm really impressed with the performance. So if you're an Intel Mac user like me, it should be here really soon. I promise!
Posted by Mark Anders at 03:54 PM | Comments (2)
Check Out nj's Great Flex 2 Skinning Post
nj, who always writes his name in lowercase, is one of the key developers on the Flex Builder team and he's started a new blog at http://rictus.com/muchado/. His first post is about an excellent article he wrote on designing Flex 2 skins using Photoshop and Fireworks. In addition to being a really talented developer, nj was the product designer for Flex Builder, so he really helped to shape its overall look and feel.Now, if you're wondering if the "muchado" in the URL was an obscure reference to "Muchado Productions", the producers of "Extreme Offroad DVD's and Apparel", well I had the same thought. Though I haven't talked to nj about it, I've long suspected that he might be a big XRRA (Xtreme Rock Racing) fan. I'll keep you in the loop on what I find out!
Anyway, check out his blog frequently, because I'm sure he'll have some interesting things to say!
Posted by Mark Anders at 10:09 AM | Comments (1)
June 27, 2006
Introducing Flex.org
One of the things a number of us on the Flex team wanted to do was to create a unique Flex destination on the web. And so I'm please to say that with the release of Flex 2, we've also launched www.flex.org. You should think of it as a work in progress, but one that we hope will add real value to the Flex community over time. So please check it out!I personally am really excited about this. Back when I ran the ASP.NET team at Microsoft, we wanted to create a top level destination on the web for a technology that we were really proud of. And so we obtained at considerable cost the asp.net domain. That site was really important in getting the message out and so I hoped that we could do something similar for Flex. It is my sincere hope that flex.org will help Flex become widely successful by highlighting the growing community and resources available. The story of how we obtained such a cool domain name is this.
At the beginning of the year, I became somewhat obsessed with wanting Flex, a technology that I'm really passionate about, to have its own top level domain. I didn't want it to be just some stuff on the Adobe web site, but a real destination that people might naturally check out when they heard about Flex, especially the free Flex SDK. And so I started looking into domain names.
Of course, one of the things I quickly discovered is that obtaining a 4 letter domain name, especially one that is a cool, not made up word isn't easy. It seemed that all the flex domains were taken. However, as I pinged them, I found that flex.org was not an active web site. And when I did a whois, I found that though it had been first registered back in the mid-90's, it was due for expiration at the end of February.
As we got close to March, I checked back and found that the expiration date had been extended! I was really bummed. However, when I looked into it a bit further, I found that it had been assigned to a company called Snapnames and that they would auction it off on April 2nd. And so I put in an opening bid of something like $50.
The actual auction took place over 3 days, and from the start, I had the winning bid. So when day 3 rolled around, and I still had the winning bid at only $73, I was feeling pretty cocky. Of course, my bid stayed "winning" up to the point where there was about 60 minutes left and that's when the fun started. It was then that someone, after being completely inactive over the past 3 days, had the gall to start bidding against me. And I watched with horror as the price rose, first pass $100, then past $200, until it was almost $300! Luckily, as we came to within 60 seconds left in the bidding, my bid was still winning and still way under my maximum bid. So I was confident that flex.org would soon be mine! It was then that the unthinkable happened. Time moved backwards!
The first time it happened, I couldn't believe it. There I am, frantically refreshing my browser, watching the seconds tick down, when suddenly, there's 5 minutes left! What's going on? Is this some type of joke? Is it a scam? I was freaking out! And the price kept going up!
The second time it happened, I fired up another browser and went looking through the snapnames site to find out what could possibly be happening. It was then that I found a clause somewhere that said something to the effect that if bidding was still active within 2 minutes or so of the end, that time would be extended to make things "fair". To me, it seemed like saying "if we're in the finals of the World Cup with 10 seconds left and one team is ahead by a goal, but the other team still seems to l have some energy left, we'll add another 5 minutes to the clock." How can that possibly be fair? When time runs out, isn't someone supposed to win and the others lose?
Well, this went on and on for about 40 minutes and it was emotionally draining. Every few seconds, my "winning" bid, would increase while I pounded on the refresh button and my mind whirred. As we neared $1,000, I couldn't help but think about how much asp.net cost. And though I really can't say how much, it is probably safe to say that it was in the neighborhood of one to two orders of magnitude more than I could charge on my credit card! Luckily for me, as we neared $1,200, my rival started to show signs of fatigue, as the time between bids slowed. They finally gave up at $1,250. And so for $1,253, flex.org was mine, or rather Adobe's!
So please check it out and most importantly check out all of the resources it references. I hope you enjoy it!
Posted by Mark Anders at 10:54 PM | Comments (2)
Flex 2 Released!
The final release of all Flex 2 products and Flash Player 9 are available now. I'm really excited about it and think that you will be too! Here are the details:
Free Flex 2 SDK
As we have previously announced, the Flex 2 SDK is free. This includes all of the Flex libraries with full source code, documentation, command line compilers and debugger. With it, you can create and deploy applications without limitation.
Flex Builder 2, $499
Back when we first announced Flex Builder, we said that it would be available for "under $1000". I think most people assumed that this meant something like $999, so I hope that a price exactly midway between $1,000 and $0 will come as a pleasant surprise.
Flex Data Services Express Edition, Free
Flex Data Services is a server-based product that adds tremendous value to Flex when building rich, data centric applications. I think it's important to note that it not required for building Flex apps. Flex has great support for accessing XML based web services and so deploying a server is not required. However, FDS does provide a wealth of features and so we've created a tiered pricing model that will address the range of deployment needs.
The Express Edition is free, and gives you the ability to deploy a single applications that runs an unlimited number of users on a single, non clustered CPU. For multi-proc, clustered deployments there are two licenses available. The Departmental license is priced at $6,000/CPU and the Enterprise license is priced at $20,000/CPU.
Flex Charting Components, $299
This adds rich charting capabilities to Flex. It's available for $299 or you can buy a bundle of Flex Builder with the Charting components for $749.
Flash Player 9
Last but certainly not least is Flash Player 9. As always, it's available for free. This is a tremendous release of the Player that provides a solid foundation for application development. It will also provide performance improvements for existing ActionScript 2 based content, so download it today!
You can read the press release here. Enjoy!
Posted by Mark Anders at 08:32 PM