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Adobe Debuts New Flash Tools for Building and Tracking Social Apps

Posted by Farhan on September 27th, 2009 | No Comments »

Software maker Adobe has announced a new set of Flash Platform Services, a group of tools that give Flash developers an easier way to build, deploy and track their apps on the social web’s various application platforms.

Adrian Ludwig, group manager for the Flash Platform, tells Webmonkey the new Flash Platform Services will “help app developers building on Facebook and other social networks reach a larger audience.” Ludwig also promises that the new components will make it easier for developers to manage and track their apps — who’s installing them and using them, and how often, for example — thanks to a clean, simple stats-tracking package.

When social networks first started rolling out their application platforms, it seemed like anyone could release an app and the viral nature of the social network would take care of the rest. But those days are long gone. Now, releasing an app on Facebook, MySpace or other social platforms now is like tossing a needle into a haystack.

This is the conundrum Adobe is hoping to solve. Using Flash Platform Services, designers get tools to speed common development tasks and automatically create elements like “share this” buttons, e-mail links and mobile delivery options. All of the new Flash Platform Services are component-based tools, so adding them to your application is just a matter of drag-and-drop. The components themselves are ActionScript libraries, so it’s easy to customize them, though Ludwig tells Webmonkey that everything should “just work” right out of the box.

The components themselves are free, but Adobe has a few extra, enhanced capabilities available on a pay-per-use basis. See Adobe’s website for details.

Also part of the announcement is a new partnership with Gigya, the widget distribution service, which will give developers access to usage statistics pulled from Gigya and displayed in a nice looking AIR application that will available as a separate download.

While its not part of today’s announcement, in the future Adobe plans to release more Flash Platform Services including a package named “Social” which will give developers a way to build write-once, run anywhere apps that work on all the major social networks.

So far Adobe has not set a time line for the Social Service, but the distribution and statics services are available for download today. If you’d like more details on how the new components work head over to Adobe download center.

Filed under Google, Microsoft, Mozilla, Programming, SEO

Turn Your Vector Art Into Canvas-based Animations With Opacity

Posted by Farhan on September 27th, 2009 | No Comments »

The latest version of Opacity, a vector graphics editor for Mac OS X, is able to export animations to code that can be pasted into web pages and played back in any browser that supports HTML5.

We’ve written quite a bit about HTML5 and the power of its proposed <canvas> tag. While the spec isn’t quite finished, the Canvas element in HTML5 promises to eventually give web developers a way to display complex 3-D graphic animations in the browser without plug-ins. Right now, the dominant technologies for doing so are proprietary players like Flash and Silverlight.

There is, however, a trade-off. Canvas-based animations must be written in pure code, and most easy-to-use graphics creation applications like Adobe Flash can’t export the browser-ready animation code, which is complex. Such a limitation is going to put off some of the most talented graphic designers and animators, many of whom are not trained programmers.

That’s why we were excited to hear that Opacity’s new capability to save animated vector shapes and their paths as browser-native code.

Opacity is a bit like Adobe Illustrator, but considerably simpler and easier to use. And with its new export feature, Opacity has a clear leg up on Illustrator when it comes to supporting the next generation of web graphics.

To use the new source code feature in Opacity, simply design your vector-based graphic or animation sequence and, once you’re happy with it, head to the Inspector menu where you can use what Opacity refers to as “Factories” to export your image in various formats. To get Canvas-based source code, chose Source Code for the format and Canvas (JavaScript) as the language.

The resulting JavaScript code looks almost exactly like the examples we’ve shown you in the past (if you don’t own a license for Opacity, which costs between $40 and $90, your image will be watermarked).

We should note that there are other tools around that can do similar things with just an image file — such as Alistair MacDonald’s Burst engine, which can take SVG animations and convert them to JavaScript objects that are rendered inside of a <canvas> tag.

Opacity is a Mac OS X application and costs $90 — not cheap, but cheaper than than Adobe Illustrator. There’s also a lighter version known as Opacity Express, which still has the code export option, but lacks some other features and retails for $40

Filed under Microsoft, Programming

HTML5 Drag-and-Drop API Is no Panacea for Developers

Posted by Farhan on September 14th, 2009 | No Comments »

We’ve all seen it happen: a less web savvy friend wants to upload an image so they grab it from the desktop and drag it over to their web browser where… nothing happens. It’s good for a chuckle every now and then, but really, isn’t that exactly how you should upload a file to the web? After all, it works everywhere else on your PC.

Developers have been pining for drag-and-drop support in webapps pretty much since the first servers came online. But now, with HTML5 nearly here, true drag and drop support is about to become a reality.

Yes, there are JavaScript libraries that allow you to create drag-and-drop interfaces within the browser, but that’s not what we’re talking about. Rather, HTML5 offers the holy grail — drag a file from your desktop straight to a browser window and it will magically upload.

Of course, for developers, nothing is every that easy. The drag-and-drop portion of the HTML5 spec is very new, incomplete and at the moment, really only works in a very limited form in Firefox 3.5 and Safari nightly builds.

But that doesn’t mean people are starting to experiment with it. Leslie Orchard of Mozilla recently posted a very nice tutorial that will walk you through the basics of the HTML5 drag-and-drop API and help you create a little demo app (another nice working demo can be found over at The CSS Ninja).

Orchard concludes that the “first-class drag and drop events in HTML5 and Firefox make supporting this form of UI interaction simple, concise, and powerful.” However, web developer Francisco Tolmasky has a decidedly different take.

Tolmasky recently posted about his experiences implementing a drag-and-drop interface for his slide presentation web app, 280 North (think Keynote in the browser). Tolmasky found that not only are there a number of browser bugs and implementation shortcomings, but the spec itself is flawed in many ways. For example, as Tolmasky discovered, there is no reliable way to determine whether a user wants to drag an object, or simply select several by dragging to highlight them.

Another problem, and one that’s more prominent in the other side of the drag-and-drop experience (i.e. dragging out of or within the browser) is the complexity involved in figuring out where the user plans to drop the selected item and how that effects what the webapp should do with the item:

Take 280 Slides for example: When a user drags the slides out of slides navigator, he may be planning to drop it to any number of locations. If he is dragging it from one instance of 280 Slides to another, then we want to provide a serialized version of these slides so that they can be added to the other presentation. If however, he drags these slides into a program like Photoshop, then we would want to provide image data. If he were to drag them to his desktop, then perhaps we could provide a PDF version. He could even drag them to his text editor and expect the text contents of his slides to be pasted.

Desktop APIs provide hooks to delay the “what do I do with this object” problem until you actually drop the object somewhere, which saves a ton of processing overhead. But the HTML5 spec currently doesn’t have any such delays. And, in the case of dragging a large number of objects, this shortcoming can result in significant lag times.

Filed under Microsoft, Web Design | Tags: Clients, Firefox 3.5, HTML 5, JavaScript, Mozilla Firefox, Mozilla Foundation, WWW

Breaking Down the Worst User Experience Myths

Posted by Farhan on September 2nd, 2009 | No Comments »

The design gurus over at Think Vitamin have a great list of the Top Ten of User Experience Myths. Two in particular leaped out at us: the myth that more user preferences is always a good thing, and the myth that design solutions have to be original.
Read the rest of this entry »

Filed under Microsoft, Programming, Windows

Mozilla to EC: Microsoft Getting Off Too Easy

Posted by Farhan on August 19th, 2009 | No Comments »

August 19, 2009
By Stuart J. Johnston: More stories by this author:

As a settlement looms in Microsoft’s tête-à-tête with the European Commission (EC) over bundling Internet Explorer (IE) with Windows, one of the software giant’s arch rivals has weighed in with a calculated blogging campaign.

Mitchell Baker, chair of the Mozilla Foundation, and Harvey Anderson, the foundation’s general counsel, both blogged this week that Microsoft’s proposed settlement — which gained some positive reviews from EC staffers last month — still comes up short.

“The overall point that may get lost is that — even if everything in the currently proposed settlement is implemented in the most positive way — IE will still have a unique and uniquely privileged position on Windows installations,” Baker said in a blog entry this week.

Microsoft last month acquiesced to providing a ‘ballot screen’ with Windows 7 (as well as Vista and XP) that presents itself to the user the first time the system starts up on PCs sold in the European Union (EU).

Users would be able to choose from a selection of browsers to set as the default, including IE, Mozilla’s Firefox, Apple’s Safari and probably Norwegian-browser Opera as well. Opera began the case with a complaint about Microsoft’s bundling of Windows and IE filed in late 2007.

That’s not enough for Baker and Anderson.

Baker cited the IE icon, which remains on the Windows desktop even if a different browser is the default, as well as IE’s prime location on the Windows Taskbar.

“Nothing we’ve seen suggests these items will change when a person chooses to make a different browser his or her default,” Baker continued. She also said that, while Mozilla was not in favor of blocking delivery of IE fixes via automatic updates, she wants to be sure that IE does not set itself as the default browser when installing IE8.

Microsoft promised last week to change that behavior in IE8.
IE still the default?

Meanwhile, Anderson said he was blogging to call out “deficiencies” in Microsoft’s proposal.

“When IE is not the default, any launch of IE, user intended/initiated or not, may prompt the user to restore IE as his default browser,” Anderson said in a Tuesday blog post. He also said that Microsoft should not be allowed to fire up IE from within an application — even Microsoft apps like the Office suite — whenever a browser function is needed.

“If Microsoft applications need to launch a browser, they should only launch the user’s default browser,” Anderson added.

“The European Commission is reviewing the proposals we submitted July 24, and it’s important that public feedback be part of that process. While we may not align on every specific point, we welcome Mozilla’s input and find their perspectives constructive. We look forward to the next steps in the Commission’s review,” Microsoft spokesperson Kevin Kutz, said in an e-mail.

The Mozilla blog posts appear to be timed to impact settlement talks going on between Microsoft and the EC — the EU’s executive branch.

While much of the EC is on August break, negotiations continue, and activity is likely to pick up as soon as September arrives. A source who is aware of the negotiations, hinted a settlement announcement may be forthcoming soon after the EC reconvenes.

Filed under Microsoft

Update: Exchange 2010 RC download glitch fixed

Posted by Farhan on August 19th, 2009 | No Comments »

Microsoft Corp.’s unveiling today of the release candidate for its upcoming Exchange Server 2010 was hit by technical problems that prevented IT professionals from downloading the software, but the problem was corrected later in the day.

Microsoft’s Exchange team put up a blog early today touting the availability of the RC as well as some strong-sounding momentum figures for Exchange.

Unlike other Microsoft software releases, where user demand appears to have outstripped supply, causing servers to fail, the Exchange RC, as of early afternoon Eastern time, simply appeared to be missing from the Microsoft Download Center Web site.

By late afternoon Eastern time, the problem had been fixed and a Microsoft spokeswoman said the Exchange 2010 RC was available for download from the blog post and from the Microsoft Download Center. No explanation was give for the technical problem.

New features in the RC include support for 64-bit versions of Windows Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 R2, and the ability for the 2010 version to “coexist” with earlier 2007 (Service Pack 2) and 2003 versions of Exchange.

The final release is expected by year’s end.

Microsoft said that its market-leading corporate e-mail server software is a nearly $2 billion-a-year business; that’s enough to place Exchange in the top 10 of all software companies in the world, if it were a stand-alone business, according to the software maker.

The beta of Exchange 2010 has been tested by more than 10 million people worldwide, Microsoft said, making it the largest beta ever for a Microsoft server application.

Facing new competition from lower-cost cloud-based competitors such as Google Apps, as well as a reinvigorated push from old rival Lotus Notes, Microsoft has said that Exchange 2010 will be faster and more scalable than prior versions in multiple ways.

Microsoft introduced its own hosted version, called Exchange Online, late last year. It said today that a million people are using it, up from 500,000 in November 2008.