I wanted to announce the birth of my second child, this time a daughter - Delaney Ann Hall was born on April 27th at 6:38am. She weighed 8lbs 14oz and was 21.5 inches long. She is amazing and joins her big brother Owen, who will be two in just a few weeks on May 14th. We are all doing great, just very tired at the moment.
I have put together a special page with a bunch of links to photos on my wife Melissa's Flickr account, as well as a bunch of videos I uploaded to my Viddler account which can be found here:
i am still a bit exhausted from the week and meant to get this up sooner but just havent had the energy or the time. I'll put up some additional detail here soon as well.
Thanks to all my twitter friends and family who have written thanks and congratulations. If you haven't heard back from me yet, I will get back to you as soon as I can.
I am taking off the next couple weeks from work and new projects to spend with my new daughter and the rest of my family, so I wont be able to respond to emails and other inquiries as fast as I normally do, so please allow a little extra time for replies.
Adobe's RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The local Philadelphia Adobe User Groups are hosting a special joint, live event to share exciting new information on Adobe's platform tools and technologies for building RIAs. You'll see an exclusive user group video presentation by Adobe Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch, hear some important product news, plus get your hands on some exclusive shwag and other giveaways.
Be part of the fun and excitement and join the rest of the Adobe developer community by participating in this very special event.
Food, beverages and cool prizes will be available for all attendees. We have got some great goodies for this event, and some awesome raffle prizes.
Super special thanks to Alex Hillman of Independents Hall for hooking us up with the meeting space at the last minute! Shout-outs to Alex's partners at Indy Hall: Bart Mroz and Geoff DiMasi for their support and general coolness all around. ;)
DATE: Monday, February 25 TIME: 7PM - whenever LOCATION: Independents Hall
I just had to post this as I had been waiting and waiting to get a new desktop machine for some time. I've relied primarily on laptops for the last several years, but I've tried to cut back my travel time as much as possible to spend more time with my family. I've got another child due, (this time a girl!) in April, so I'll be home even more for the next few months. Given that and other reasons, I felt it was time to invest in a nicer desktop machine to boost my productivity. It was even clearer to me since I am doing a ton of video related work lately, and the fact that Apple still hasn't released a new MacBook Pro, plus I've already got a great brand new MacBook, and an older Powerbook for when I do need to travel, so the tower machine/Mac Pro was a no brainer decision. It just arrived Monday and I finished configuring it, installing apps and adding another 8GB of RAM today from OWC. It is by far the fastest, most solid computer I have ever owned, and I have quite a collection of them. It is one of the new Early 2008 Mac Pro towers. I ordered it the day they were announced, back in mid January, but it didn't ship till this week because I custom configured it with the dual Quad Core 3.2 GHz Xeon processors (8 cores total) and an Nvidia 8800GT graphics card along with a number of other options. I can say that it was totally worth the wait, this thing just flies. I've got four 1TB Seagate drives ready to get popped in next for some additional storage which should speed it up even more. Lets just say I am quite pleased with the purchase.
So other than some community events related to local Philly events and our User Group meetings, and now this entry, I haven't posted much at all since October of last year. I've just found myself utterly immersed in work, local community events and family time so the blog just hasn't been a priority. I have been using twitter quite a bit - http://twitter.com/rhall/ if you want to follow me. I'm very excited to post about some of the projects I have been working on, and I'll do so over the next few weeks as they all finish "baking".
One project I can mention briefly that is still in somewhat stealth mode, but is now popping up everywhere is Redlasso - http://www.redlasso.com/ I'll post more about it another time, just wanted to put up a link for now since its not open to the general public, but if you are interested in find out more, go to the site and sign up.
Join your compatriots in the Philly creative industry for an evening of socializing, networking and fun at Northern Liberties' hot spot - North Bowl Lounge n' Lanes. The cost? Once again, absolutely free with a donation to the Philadelphia Marine Corps Toys for Tots Campaign. In return you'll enjoy complimentary food, drink specials, camaraderie and prizes. Last year was a blast, so don't miss out on the Second Annual Creative Mega Social!
I wanted to point out that I am going to be there representing The Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group and Adobe, and will have over $5000 worth of goodies to be raffled away, including full boxed copies of the CS3 Web Suite, and Flex Build 2 with Charting Components, along with all the other raffle items the 7 other local Philadelphia based groups in attendance will be giving away.
So grab a toy or two to donate, come on out and put a smile on a childs face, all while having a great time and having a great chance at winning some cool prizes.
I arrived in Chicago saturday morning after a quick flight from Philadelphia to O'Hare Airport. I grabbed a train from the airport to downtown and then hoofed it a few blocks on over to the Chicago Hilton and have been having a great time so far. I went to the final stop of the AIR Bus Tour here in Chicago saturday evening and had a great time - great sessions and food - nothing beats a real Chicago style hot dog! I tossed some photos from the stop up on Flickr here. It was fun to get to meet new faces and hang out. I was so rushed and running around at the AIR Bus tour stop in Philly doing user group manager "things" that it was hard to even catch all the sessions. I definitely got to to see a bit more here in Chicago, which is quite a cool city. This is my first time here and the lake and surrounding parts of the city are pretty interesting - wish I had more time for sightseeing. I'll be sure to come back just to check it out at some point. Overall I'm pretty relaxed this year at MAX as I managed to squeak out a number of deadlines for clients just prior to departing. Also I am not speaking this year or doing any sessions or trying to bring crazy electronics with me through the airport security so its nice to be able to just take things in and attend all the great sessions and meetings that are taking place over the next few days. Managed to get in quite a few games of Halo 3 with Mike Chambers, Mike Downey and Ryan Stewart (who beat me severely in pretty much every game) last night and again tonight in their gargantuan hotel suite. The O'Reilly Ignite sessions going on during the reception this evening were pretty interesting and afterwards we had a great dinner for all the speakers and community leaders attending MAX and I got to sit down and eat and chat with Will Law and Phillip Kerman about some interesting Flash Media Server stuff. Actually David Zuckerman and a couple other folks from the Flex team were at our table, but I didn't really get to talk to them much - sorry David! To give some props to David he has worked on some really cool features of Flex 3 (re-factoring, shortcuts, editing features, etc).
I am really looking forward to the keynotes, bird of a feather sessions and sneak peeks. There is going to be some amazing stuff shown and announced over the next few days. If you thought the barrage of applications and info from the CS3 suite of apps, AIR, Flex, etc. has been fast and furious, well its still not slowing down - we are going to see some pretty-frigging-cool stuff very soon. :) It also been really fun getting to see and catch up with friends and acquaintances I have made over the years that I often don't get to see except at conferences - got to see Matt Voerman for the first time in almost 3 years! Looking forward to bumping into more folks and meeting new ones as well. I'm also eager to attend some of the partner sessions now that I am an official Adobe Solution Partner.
Also not to diminish the news or importance, but my wife and I are pleased to announce that we are expecting our second child! Owen our first child is 16 months old and he is amazing, and now he will have a little baby sister or brother in about 7 months this coming April. My wife Melissa and I are both very excited about having another child. I am not quite as nervous this time around having been through it once and I can't wait to meet our new baby in April. ;)
The winners of the Adobe AIR Derby Contest have been announced and are listed in an article posted to Adobe's latest revision of its Developer Connection site here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air_derby_winners.html. I was really excited to be asked to be one of the judges for the contest, along with Grant Skinner, Andre Charland and Chafic Kazoun - some really outstanding developers. It was quite an honor and privilege to help judge the entries. There were some pretty tough decisions in judging the entries but it was exciting to see all the amazingly cool stuff people are working on out there with AIR and get to play with each of the entries first hand. It was little intimidating to know that we were responsible for awarding such huge prizes Adobe put together: $100,000 in travel vouchers and the amazing dream developer systems, not to mention the squishy ball! I am hoping that in addition to the highlighted winners, that some of the other entries will get highlighted or showcased in some fashion down the road. If you are at Adobe MAX in Chicago this week, I think they will be talking more about the contest and winners in one of the keynotes and demoing the apps, but I'm not 100% sure - guess we will find out tomorrow morning. Which by the way if you are at MAX and recognize me, please stop me and say hi as I always enjoy getting to meet new people. Special thanks to Mike Chambers and Alisa Popolizio of Adobe for making the experience and process of judging the entries go so smoothly.
Flash Player 9 Update "MovieStar" Adds Support for H.264 Video and HE-AAC Audio CODECs!
According to an official press release from Adobe, blog entries from RIA Platform Evangelist Ryan Stewart, Flash Player Engineer Tinic Uro, Flash Player Product Manager Emmy Huang, blogger Richard McManus and others, later today Adobe will be posting an updated beta of Flash Player 9 on http://labs.adobe.com that adds support for several of the profiles of industry standard H.264 video and HE-AAC audio CODECs along with some other great enhancements! The final version is scheduled to ship later this fall. The new formats are also going to be supported in an upcoming release of Flash Media Server. Truly awesome news for Flash Platform developers, media developers, and producers. The options for video formats in Flash just exploded with a huge bang. Very good news for a variety of projects that revolve or rely on the Flash Platform.
Not only are the new CODECs and containers supported, but they build on the already announced hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced, full screen video playback that was introduced in the previous Flash 9 beta 3 on labs.adobe.com. Now you'll be able to view any H.264 encoded video including MP4 and MOV in full screen with hardware acceleration right in Flash.
One key item to note, is that you if you have a project that still needs to target ActionScript 2.0, you can still use these new features in your projects as the API's haven't changed, just the type of contents that are supported. As long as the visitor to your site or consumer of your content has the updated Flash 9 player installed (which you can very easily determine and upgrade for them via the Express Install API in Flash) then you are going to be able to deliver a great experience. I'm assuming that looking at the properties of the System.capabilities object might also return additional info about H.264, etc. similar to the way it returns info about MP3 capabilities. you could potentially use that or simply evaluate the player version, and you'll be able to intelligently determine what formats the player currently consuming your content is capable of loading and displaying.
As always, Tinic Uro has a ton of great details and insight into the nitty-gritty of the new enhancements and features, including the exact profiles of H.264 that are supported, and other pertinent details. As is typical of his posts, not only does he delve into the new features, and why/how certain decisions were made on the new fetures, but also some side effects of implementation. In particular one item he makes note of is that when implementing portions of the AAC audio codec, they needed to resample everything up to 44.1khz, so he was also able to fix the long-standning issue with certain sampling rates of mp3's resulting in accelerated playback or the "chipmunk effect". As he mentions, this has been around for years and is finally fixed - thank you Tinic! I first ran into this years ago when pulling in dynamically generated mp3's - I'm glad thats finally fixed! There is far more info in Tinics post about the profiles and various items, metadata, etc. that make up the enhancements that have been announced.
I'm super excited about this release as I've been working on a number of video and Flash Media Server projects recently and each of them will potentially benefit from this new release and path that Adobe has put the Flash Player on.
Adobe AIR Update for Flash CS3 Up on labs.adobe.com
Prior to today there had been a handful of unofficial ways to create AIR apps directly from Flash CS3: Guy Watson had put together a nice JSFL solution, which Grant Skinner and his team then built upon. Now there is an official release from Adobe to add in support for creating, testing and packaging up AIR applications right from within Adobe Flash CS3 Professional. It actually adds two "commands" for working with AIR, including an "AIR 1.0" publishing profile. It makes the process dead simple. For those of you out there who haven't had much time, or have felt a bit intimidated by Flex or even just the Eclipse environment, you should definitely download this and start playing, it is too easy now not to build AIR applications.
For those of you who are totally in the dark about the event - please visit the following links and come on out on August 22nd (this Wednesday) at 6:30pm to the Franklin Institute for an awesome FREE event.
Topic: Adobe Integrated Runtime - AIR (Previously code-enamed "Apollo")
Description: AIR is a cross-platform runtime that allows web developers to leverage their existing web development skills (such as Flash, Flex, HTML and JavaScript/AJAX) to build and deploy web applications and content to the desktop. Currently in public beta, it has a rich set of features, with support for building both HTML, Javascript, Flex/Flash and Acrobat/PDF based applications.
FREE Food, beer, RedBull, cool prizes, give-aways and swag, software, and access to Adobe experts! Plus there will be some Xbox 360 and Nintendo Wiis setup for your gaming pleasures. ;)
There is still time to submit an entry for the Hot AIR competition! Get your code together by noon this Tuesday, the 21st at midnight and get a chance to win some rockin' prizes and demo your AIR app in front of the crowd.
This will also be a GREAT networking opportunity at a very cool venue - we have over 200+ local developers and interested parties registered to attend - come on out and make some new friends.
Bring your laptop and any code (html/flash/Flex) you want to get running as an AIR app and stop by the Q&A table for assistance from experts.
Event Date:
Wednesday, August 22
Event Time:
Doors open at 6:30pm
Event Location:
Fels Planetarium in the Franklin Institute Science Museum
222 North 20th Street
Philadelphia, PA 19103
lat 39.957846, lon -75.17247
Adobe AIR Bus Tour Coming to Philadelphia and More
I'm sitting in my hotel room in San Jose, CA for Adobe Community Summit week, watching all the RSS feeds, blog posts, twitters, etc. about a ton of exciting news coming from Adobe this evening, not even sure where to start, but here goes:
The Flash Player 9 Update 3 beta has some great new enhancements including an API for hardware accelerated fullscreen playback, multi-core support for improved rendering speed on machines with multiple CPU core's, enhancements to the On2 video decoder for better performance and quality and several other items, Tinic Uro has some more detailed info on this as well as Emmy Huang. Ted Patrick dishes the dirt on all things Flex, including info about Flex 3 Nightly builds and the public Flex 3 bugbase, there are new videos about Flex 3 and the AIR Bus Tour on http://video.onflex.org/, just too much cool stuff.
I'll post up some more links later tonight on this stuff, but right now I'm a little jetlagged from the trip out here today, and need to get some rest for the rest of the week.
Tomorrow also marks the kickoff of Apples WWDC conference - hoping to hear some official words on Flash support for the iPhone - the latest commercial clearly shows Flash content functioning in the iPhone Safari browser, but there havent been any official announcements yet from Apple or Adobe - no one wants to feel the wrath of Steve and spill the beans before he does, but it is looking like its pretty much a shoe-in that the iPhone will have a full featured Flash player when it ships.
You do not want to miss this meeting, thanks to Comcast Interactive Media, we are giving away 4 iPods, and courtesy of Adobe, a copy of one of the Adobe CS3 Premium Software bundles (your choice if you win), along with some other goodies! Comcast Interactive Media is also sponsoring the event and providing pizza/salad/sodas so you wont go hungry.
More importantly you do not want to miss our speaker for this event: Arpit Mathur: Lead Software Engineer for Comcast Interactive Media
Arpit will be discussing Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications, we might even be able to talk him into showing off his DiggGraphr, Digg Flash API contest entry which has made it into the top 10 Finalists: http://digg.com/contest
Speaker:
Arpit Mathur - Lead Software Engineer for Comcast Interactive Media
Topic:
Flex/Flash Large Scale Applications
Date/Time:
Thursday May 31st - 6:30pm-9:30pm
Location:
Comcast Interactive Media Headquarters in Center City
1500 Market Street - Philadelphia, PA 19102
Google Map: http://tinyurl.com/2o5v4w
Hope to see you there! If all goes according to plan, we will also be announcing some additional Flex resources for the Philadelphia and surrounding areas!
In all the excitement of the CS3 launch event yesterday (March 27th), there was a bit of info that I didn't see covered anywhere. From what I understand, all copies of the individual point products and the various bundle suites will include a special DVD. This DVD is the "Adobe Video Workshop". It's a pretty unique set of training and overview videos covering the gamut of CS3 products as presented by various members of the designer and developer community. There are also many member's of the Adobe staff that have contributed to the contents. I am pretty excited about this myself, as I was fortunate enough to be asked to contribute three videos to the project:
This was the first time I had worked on recording a product training video; it turned out to be a challenging and fun project to work on. The individuals I worked with at Lynda.com and Adobe were extremely helpful in getting things done and putting the polish on the final product. I just saw the final versions of the videos I did back in December for the first time today, and I'm really quite pleased with how they turned out. The editing that the Lynda.com staff did is just tremendous. I haven't seen the entire range of videos, but from what I understand the full version has a great interface and player mechanism to highlight the biographies and info about each of the video authors and allow you to navigate around through the various products and videos. I'm eagerly awaiting my copy to see it in its entirety. I'll see if its possible for me to post a small snippet of the intro from one of my videos here. Otherwise, make sure to check it out when you get your various CS3 products when they start shipping. All of the videos should end up online, when I know for sure, and where that may be, (or if Im just imagining things) I'll update this entry (updated - see below).
In the meantime, there are plenty of great videos online for CS3 products already at Lynda.com, including some fantastic videos about Apollo that Mike Chambers put together, and they are FREE! I also found out that there are several big CS3 packages coming soon from Lynda.com:
Dreamweaver CS3 Essential Training
Flash CS3 Essential Training
Illustrator CS3 Essential Training
InDesign CS3 Essential Training
Fireworks CS3 Essential Training
Photoshop CS3 One-on-One
From what I understand there are even more in the pipeline.
One other quick-tip for any aspiring video-training authors - do yourself a favor and pick up a USB noise-cancelling headset. I can't recommend highly enough the Plantronics .Audio 550 headset it drowns out all background noise including whirring hard drives and other ambient noise you might find around your computer.
It launched earlier today with over 200 videos. Tons of great content. You can find the three videos I contributed in the Device Central CS3 section or jump directly to them from the following links:
If you are considering purchasing any of the new Adobe CS3 products it should be really helpful. I highly recommend at least a quick look through the topics, products and new features the videos cover.
Adobe Apollo Alpha Available now from Adobe Labs - Get it while its Hot!
That's right, you can now get the first public Alpha release of Adobe Apollo. The runtime, SDK, developer downloads, showcase gallery, the whole shebang. It's available here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/
Once you've got the runtime installed check out some sample applications here: http://www.adobe.com/go/apollo_samples as well as several other now public applications making their way out through MXNA.
Also from Mike Chambers - he spent a couple of days down at the Lynda.com offices to put together a complete video overview / introduction to Apollo and the videos have just been posted. They are available for free from from Lynda.com here: http://movielibrary.lynda.com/html/modPage.asp?id=378 The videos cover everything you need to know to get started with Apollo development.
As an aside, I actually did some training videos for Adobe back in December/January through the fine folks at Lynda.com - I can't mention what exactly the videos are about until after the 27th of this month, so stay tuned for more info on that.
Patching the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Bluetooth Mobile Application
Last month I wrote an entry about the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Mobile Application that allows a great deal of control over your NXT kit via Bluetooth. It's a really great little application. I actually demonstrated it briefly at the local Make:Philly meeting last night as follow up to a previous presentation I had given on robotics, Flash and Legos. Well, there is one totally annoying aspect of the application that tarnishes an otherwise perfect implementation, which I noted in my previous entry. Whenever you launch the application, it has an animated intro screen that plays a really annoying 13 second long bit of techno-like audio. It wouldn't be that bad, but there is no way to skip it, or disable it, and its really loud. You have to endure it every time you launch the application. Totally annoying and poor usability. I never had any luck contacting the developers at Nearcell, who made the app for LEGO, and their website is not much help either. So, I decided I had to patch this on my own. Here is how I was able to patch the application so that you can shorten/change the intro or replace it entirely with one of your own liking.
Navigate to your phone model folder - in my case the Nokia 6680 folder and locate the .jar file for installing the application on your device. (I'm using it on a Nokia N70 without issues, so it should work on other Series 60 devices - your mileage may vary)
Create a very short MIDI (.midi) file here with an excellent online .midi file creator. The idea is that we want a very short quiet file. For comical demonstration effect on the effectiveness of this patch, I've decided to use the more apropos song Mr. Roboto by Styx
Rename your new or favorite .midi file to "jb.mid" and place it in the same folder as the NXTmobile.jar file.
Bring up a terminal session in OS X, or a command shell on Windows (Windows folks, you'll need some JAVA tools installed, specifically jar command line application - Mac OS X users you've already got it)
Issue this command from the terminal prompt: jar uf NXTmobile.jar jb.mid
What that has done is replaced the annoying, far-too-long intro sound in the .jar, with your own new .mid file.
Transfer the new .jar file to your device and install it, run the application, and enjoy the shorter startup time!
The intro animation will only play as long as the .midi files duration, so if you want it short, keep your replacement .midi file short. Here is a quick video I made through Viddler.com that demonstrates the new startup and sound.
if you were so inclined, you can also use the same method outlined above to replace the .png files in the intro animation or elsewhere within the applications UI. Also, if you have some file manipulation utilities installed on your device, you could try doing all the replacements right on the device itself, but the method above works well on supported devices. Happy hacking!
The Godfathers of Flash, Now Known As "Software As Art", Are Hiring!
Ever since Colin Moock pointed out a few months ago that in August of 2006 Jonathan Gay and Robert Tatsumi (the original team responsible for SmartSketch, which evolved into FutureSplash Animator which became Flash) had headed off with Gary Grossman (creator of ActionScript) and Peter Santangeli (former vice president of engineering at Macromedia) to create a new startup called Software As Art, I was instantly curious. Actually, the moment I heard about it, I was actually a bit shocked to hear they had all left given the integral roles they have played in the development and success of Flash over the years. However, that shock was quickly replaced with curiosity and excitement at their combined potential. I have been checking their little WordPress based site religiously every other week or so to see if I could get get a glimpse or hint as to what they might be up to with this new endeavor.
To quote from their site, "Our solutions will enable developers to realize the products of their creativity and imagination, in the home, office and beyond. Our vision is to build bridges between the Internet and the everyday world around us, in ways that make our lives more convenient and fun." For me that sounds pretty fabulous and inspiring, as the areas of my work that I find most interesting would really benefit from some toolset that would allow me to make my life more convenient and my work more interesting. The areas where the desktop PC and the real world meet and converge and entangle to provide a richer experience are the reasons I like to work on kiosks, exhibits, mobile devices and electronics designed to bridge the gap between humans and computers in compelling, fun, interesting ways. Needless to say I keep visiting their site looking for updates.
So you can imagine how much more curious and excited I am now by their most recent postings from just a few days ago on January 31st, that not only are they hiring, but that they have secured their first round of financing and will have more details/news about that soon. Some details of the job postings they have put up are what really have me super intrigued and excited now. The job opening for Product Manager/Busines Development specifically states, "Experience in the consumer electronics and hardware industries a plus." If that wasn't enough to put my brain into hyperdrive wondering what it could be, the first sentence of the most recent post for Software Engineer states, "Software as Art is looking for bright, energetic engineers to help build a new generation of consumer electronics." So now I am completely and utterly curious - what kind of consumer electronic device could these brains behind Flash be cooking up? What kind of device is going to fulfill this grand vision of "enabling developers to realize the products of their creativity and imagination, in the home, office and beyond" and "build bridges between the Internet and the everyday world around us, in ways that make our lives more convenient and fun." That certainly sounds like a tall order, but if there was ever a team out there capable of delivering on such a statement, I think these are the guys to do so.
I have been playing with a Chumby since this past October, thanks to Duane Maxwell and Steve Tomlin who hooked me up with one of their developer units back at MAX 2006 in October of 2006. Its a great little device that utilizes Flash for the interface and delivery of content/widgets. I think they are going to do really well, especially with their open/transparent business model around the software and hardware. I'm actually going to release to the community a few Flash based widgets I have built for the Chumby once I have them polished up a bit more. I am curious if Software As Art is going to be playing in this space as well. The popularity of "widgets" to deliver and visualize specific/granular types of information on the desktop appears to keep increasing over time. Widget style delivery of information is also moving away from the desktop into more consumer friendly and portable/connected devices like the Chumby, and Flash Lite capable handsets/devices. This is an interesting area and one I have been following for a while. I still remember all the anticipation around Konfabulator a few years ago when Arlo Rose and Perry Clarke brought beauty and functionality together with their "widgets", now OS X has them via Dashboard, Vista has them as "Gadgets", Yahoo bought Konfabulator, widgets are on standalone devices like the Chumby and emTrace's Widgetstation - could Software As Art be cooking up tools and devices for us developers to do some really innovative stuff in this area? Perhaps a whole new way to think about how we interact with internet, data and visualization and presentation of information? Could they be cooking up some kind of modular electronic "building block's" to interface home brewed software to data from the internet and bring it into the physical world?
I have no idea really - just speculation on my part, but I like to think that something really cool just might be under development, something that (even though I hate to use buzzwords/phrases) may even be considered a "disruptive technology". With everything trending towards "Digital Convergence" over the past few years, and even whole conferences geared around this theme (SxSW this year has panels and sessions on "Digital Convergence" as well as the upcoming OReilly Web 2.0 conference and others as well) these speculations just may ring true. I guess we will find out as things unfold. Best of luck to you guys, I can't wait for the unveiling.
Flex/Flash Player Based VoIP Application - GizmoCall
I just finished playing with very cool VoIP application that uses Flash/Flex to allow you make calls to any phone right from within your browser: GizmoCall. The app appears to be built on the Flex framework, requires Flash 9 for the interface and audio in and out. You dial, speak and talk right through the application. You get five minutes a day of free calls to any phone line, along with unlimited free calls to users Google Talk, Windows Live, Gizmo Project and any other SIP service. You can also of course register and buy credits for more time for outgoing calls that don't qualify as free. THey also provide control over your caller-ID (allowing for some mischievousness) I tried it out and called my brother in his cell phone and the quality was great. It was really quite impressive the quality on both ends. I was using a pretty decent noise cancelling headset, a Plantronics .Audio 550 DSP so that certainly helped.
The application is pretty slick in that it does require (at least on the Mac OS X side of things - haven't tried it on Windows yet) a small Preference Pane plugin that handles part of the communications with Flash and the connections. It appears that the Preference pane app becomes a local server on your machine listening on port 61280 by default, and in turn the Flex app uses the new binary socket capabilities to communicate to the local proxy of sorts and transfer data for calls between the local Flex/Flash app in your browser. I haven't investigated it too deep yet, but I am guessing that they are using the local server/proxy app as a sort of local FMS server to handle the audio coming from the microphone through Flash and back out. I'm going to have to do a little sniffing and see how its all working a bit more because its a really interesting approach they have taken. I have a fairly decent 16MB down/4MB up connection, but even so, there was no latency/lag at all in the calls I made this evening.
I've used IM for voice chats, Breeze/Acrobat, Skype and other VoIP solutions, but this one seems really interesting. I guess for me its because of the tie in with Flex/Flash and the innovative way in which they have utilized the technology to tie it all together. To me this seems like a perfect fit for an Apollo application down the road instead of a Flash/Flex and custom local app, just do it all in Apollo. Hopefully Apollo will be able to support some more advanced local OS integration to accomplish applications like this.
Adobe Releases Flash Media Encoder Beta Through Adobe Labs
Adobe has made available a great new application for delivering realtime audio and video through the Flash Media Server -the Flash Media Encoder and it is available now in beta form from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/fme/. It supports the On2 VP6 CODEC for high quality video streams of live audio/video events. Best of all its targeted to be free for those with valid FMS licenses.
I've been working on a lot of Flash Media Server applications recently, and undertaking a new big project next week and this application holds a great deal of potential for what I'll be doing.
Once again I find it really refreshing that Adobe is pushing out products through the labs site - its a great way to get a chance to see what is coming and plan around it. I feel that in particular sharing previews/betas of server based applications and solutions that require more commitment and architectural backend issues from Adobe's customers, is important to ensure buy in, adoption and critical feedback to make sure things are 100% solid when shipped. Kudos Adobe!
Apple iPhone Announced - Does Not Appear to Support Flash - Yet...
I'm watching notes from Steve Jobs Macworld keynote right now via Engadget's live coverage and the iPhone looks really amazing. He was just showing Safari and browsing the New York Times site right on the iPhone. That's when I noticed something that disappointed me a bit - it doesn't appear that the iPhone supports Flash content in the browser (at least not yet, and I could be wrong) but look at this image. I've highlighted the area in question. The image on the left shows a photo of Jobs browsing the New York Times in Safari on the iPhone. The one on the right is an image I just snapped of the New York Times site. In red I have circled the area where there are two Flash based widgets for MP3 and Video on the site and the area with a broken plugin image on the iPhone version....ughh! Well, nothing is official yet and Im sure support for Flash could be added in. Regardless, I'm ordering one the minute they are available. Looks like it won't be available until June.
UPDATE: 01/14/07
Wow lots of comments on this post! Jobs and Apple really know how to whip up the hype machine! David Pogue Mac Guy Extraordinaire and writer for the New York Times posted up his Ultimate iPhone FAQs List, Part 2. In it he relays the conversation that he and John Markoff had with Steve Jobs during some hands on time with the iPhone. From reading it, and a couple other recent quotes where Jobs seems to purport highly hypothetical situations and respond to questions with answers filled with FUD and seemingly uninformed responses. See for yourself in the FAQ David put together in regards to Flash/JAVA and YouTube, to quote from it:
Markoff: "What about all those plugins that live within Safari now, like Flash or like Java or like JavaScript?"
Jobs: "Well, JavaScript's built into the Phone. Sure."
Markoff: "And what are you thinking about Flash and Java?"
Jobs: "Java's not worth building in. Nobody uses Java anymore. It's this big heavyweight ball and chain."
Markoff: "Flash?"
Jobs: "Well, you might see that."
Markoff: "What about YouTube-"
Jobs: "Yeah, YouTube-of course. But you don't need to have Flash for YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get them to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec."
Couple thoughts on that exchange:
Hey he said, "you might see that." That is somewhat encouraging.
Looks like he wants to push Quicktime onto YouTube - but I think thats just him touting his own tech versus others - I cant see how YouTube would have been as successful with Quicktime instead of Flash as much as I love both technologies.
In calendar year 2005, 8 out of every 10 handsets shipped contained a version of JAVA and there were over 1.2 billion handsets shipped running JAVA (J2ME/midp1/2) variations by June of 2006 Steve! That hardly qualifies as "Nobody uses JAVA anymore." And new ones ship every day. More interesting stats here on handset technologies.
I honestly think poor Mr. Jobs is finally starting to succumb to the power of his own Reality Distortion Field. I'm really not sure what to make of things with the way Jobs is answering some of the questions he has had to field recently. Guess we will just have to wait and see how things pan out.
After giving much thought about the iPhone for several days now after the hype has died down a bit and the effects of the Reality Distortion Field starting to wear off, I've come to a couple conclusions based on info that has come out: The price of switching to Cingular/ATT, the 2 year contract, sim-locked to carrier, supposedly closed-system (no third party apps/development), lack of 3G network, non-replaceable battery, and a host of other inadequacies I consider essential/must-haves when evaluating "smartphones" leaves me thinking iPhone 1.0 isn't such a great deal. Unless things change drastically, and by that I mean, it ends up being open in some fashion for supporting third party apps and Flash, I think I may actually wait for iPhone 2.0.
Overall I was a bit disappointed as well with Jobs and Macworld in that there were no new MacBook Pro's or Dual QuadCore Intel powered tower machines announced. I'm really in the market for a couple new machines that can run Mac OS X and Windows simultaneously and I can finally ditch a couple aging PC's I have lying around or repurpose them as DVR's. Guess I'll be waiting till the NAB convention in April when they typically make Pro level computer announcements. Guess this just ties in with the idea behind them dropping the word "computer" from Apple Computer inc, and just becoming Apple Inc. because of their broadening scope of consumer devices besides computers - it makes sense.
I was really curious and intent on buying an iTV now known as the Apple TV as I've got a 60" HD LCOS Sony with an amazing picture, but when it was announced that the AppleTV device only supports up to 720p, can't be used to record, is limited to a few CODECS and has a puny 40gig drive I was pretty much non-plussed. As nice as the Front Row-like interface is, I want something that goes all the way to 1080p, can record and has more CODEC support. I think I'll be waiting for the AppleTV 2.0 along with iPhone 2.0. I already have an XBOX 360 and Connect360 on my Macs connected over WiFI to be able to share all my photos, music and even videos (albeit they have to be encoded in WMV) on the big screen Sony. Comcast is going to be rolling out TiVo software for the Motorola HD box I have, and in July Comcast won't be allowed to force you to use their brand of settop boxes thanks to new legislation going into effect. Think a TiVo series 3 with dual cable-cards or a homebrew MythTV with multiple tuners is in my future unless Apple TV 2.0 can up the ante. We shall see....
Control your LEGO Mindstorms NXT with your Bluetooth Enabled Phone
Anyone who purchased a LEGO Mindstorms NXT Kit earlier this year may have been disappointed when they got it home and opened the box up. One of the advertised features right on the outside of the box was support for controlling it over Bluetooth from your mobile phone. Well in reality, it wasn't ready until very recently, and instead there was a note to keep checking a special page about Bluetooth information on the LEGO Mindstorms NXT site.
I got my kit back in late August, and this was also a disappointment to me, although to LEGO's credit, they did offer (and continue to updated) some great SDK's and other resources/kits to developers who wanted to go ahead and try to implement their own solutions. They have really embraced the community and other manufacturers allowing them to make extra sensors, language editors, etc. I have been doing experiments with the Mindstorms NXT kits integrating them with Flash and other electronics for a while now, and over the holidays I happened to check the status on the app, and lo and behold they finally pushed it out and
I wanted to announce the birth of my second child, this time a daughter - Delaney Ann Hall was born on April 27th at 6:38am. She weighed 8lbs 14oz and was 21.5 inches long. She is amazing and joins her big brother Owen, who will be two in just a few weeks on May 14th. We are all doing great, just very tired at the moment.
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I'm watching notes from Steve Jobs Macworld keynote right now via 