::Adobe Family Blog::

Saturday, December 22, 2007

Foundation Flash CS3 for Designers

How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3

Chris Georgenes, "How to Cheat in Flash CS3: The art of design and animation in Adobe Flash CS3"
Focal Press | ISBN 0240520580 | August 6, 2007 | 280 Pages | PDF | 40MB

Download from RapidShare

Download from Depositfiles

Download from Easy-Share

Professional Adobe Flex 2 Ebook (Free)

Programming Flex 2 Ebook (Free)

myFeedz

myFeedz is a web application that finds what is important from the sea of information on the Internet and shows you what you need to read. It learns from your reading habits, and helps you keep up with your interests, by offering personalized content.

myFeedz is designed to:

Help you keep track with the latest news and trends on the Internet.
Offer you articles relevant to your interests.
Reduce the information overload.

With myFeedz, you can:

Browse articles by topics (tags), sorted by relevance or by date.
Find out the popular stories of the moment.
Read, rate and tag articles.
Save articles for later reading.
Search new topics and articles.
Export RSS feeds for your topics of interest.

myFeedz is not:

An online RSS reader, although news are tracked via RSS feeds.
A search engine, although you can search articles by specific tags.
A bookmarking service, although you can submit feeds of your favorite websites or save articles for later reading.

myFeedz is being released free of charge as a technology preview to give you the chance to take it for a test spin. You need to sign up for an account, in order to be able to use it to its full potential (your Adobe Labs ID will not work).

BlazeDS

Welcome to the BlazeDS beta release on Adobe Labs. BlazeDS is the server-based Java remoting and web messaging technology that enables developers to easily connect to back-end distributed data and push data in real-time to Adobe® Flex™ and Adobe AIR™ applications for more responsive rich Internet application (RIA) experiences.

The evolution to more engaging RIAs has created the need for better data connectivity options. Remoting simplifies the reuse of existing server logic automatically marshalling calls between the Flash client and the Java methods on the server. In addition, the use of a AMF binary data transfer format increases performance, allowing applications to load data up to 10 times faster than with text-based formats such as XML or SOAP.

Previously available only as part of Adobe LiveCycle® Data Services ES, Adobe is announcing its plans to contribute the proven BlazeDS technologies to the community under the LGPL v3. BlazeDS gives the rapidly growing Adobe developer community free access to the powerful remoting and messaging technologies developed by Adobe.

Concurrent with this prerelease of BlazeDS, Adobe is publishing the AMF binary data protocol specification, on which the BlazeDS remoting implementation is based, and is committed to partnering with the community to make this protocol available for every major server platform. The source code will be available for download early 2008. Please read the FAQ for further details on BlazeDS and Adobe’s open source plans.

Flash Player 9 Update

Update: Release versions of Flash Player 9 Update for Windows, Macintosh, and Linux are now available from the Flash Player Download Center on Adobe.com. The Flash Player 9 Update for Solaris is now available. Get it now.

Adobe® Flash® Player is the high-performance, lightweight, highly expressive client runtime that delivers powerful and consistent user experiences across major operating systems, browsers, mobile phones, and devices.

Adobe Labs features prerelease versions of the Flash Player 9 Update software for Solaris platforms. The prerelease is an opportunity for developers and consumers to test and provide early feedback to Adobe on new features, enhancements, and compatibility with previously authored content.

This update, codenamed “Moviestar,” includes new features, enhancements and bug fixes for Solaris versions of Flash Player 9, including:

Support for H.264 video and HE-AAC audio codecs.
Multi-core support for vector rendering.
Full screen mode with hardware scaling (currently not available on Sparc).
Flash Player cache for common platform components, such as the Flex framework.

See the release notes for more information regarding this prerelease technology.

Please help us ensure that this release will be of the highest quality by installing and using this player. To learn more about the features of Flash Player 9, read Introducing Flash Player 9 within the Developer Center. You can learn more about the features and enhancements of the Flash Player 9 Update beta in the Product Details section below, and the FAQ on the wiki.

Adobe Media Player prerelease 2

Adobe® Media Player lets you watch your favorite shows, anytime, anywhere—while enabling new ways for content businesses to create, deliver, and monetize high-quality content and advertising through a customizable cross-platform player that supports both downloaded and streamed media.

Adobe is driving a fusion of TV and the Internet with Adobe Media Player, Flash® Media Server, content protection technologies, and a broad and powerful ecosystem of partners providing key solutions from content creation through delivery and monetization.

Adobe Media Player gives the user complete control and flexibility to view what they want, when they want—online and offline.

Catalog—Discover new shows and video podcasts to add to your Favorite Shows.
My Favorites—Automatically download new episodes of your favorite shows and video podcasts.
New Episodes—Quickly manage and play a list of new episodes from your favorite shows and video podcasts.
Personal Videos—Gather and manage your personal collection of Flash videos.
FLV on your Desktop—Stream, download, manage, and play rich media content. Double click on any FLV file to play it in Adobe Media Player.

Download Adobe AIR beta 3

From BPM to ERP, Adobe LiveCycle bridges apps across the board

Flash and PDF combine with J2EE server to streamline IT development and reduce support costs

By Mike Heck
November 1, 2007

In this detailed product review by InfoWorld Test Center, contributing editor Mike Heck uses Adobe® LiveCycle® Workbench ES software to build two applications:

A mortgage application similar to what financial institutions might use to initiate and manage loans
A Form Guide to help users step through an application process with an intuitive, Adobe Flash® based interface

"Both tests resulted in applications that were easy to deploy and administer with intuitive user interfaces. Moreover, there were no development pain points as I created forms and then inserted the business logic to secure and route them, output to PDF and Flash, and performed related tasks, including e-mail notifications."

He also tests LiveCycle Workspace ES, the rich Internet application (RIA) that serves as a portal for users to interact with forms and processes.

To learn more about the outcome of these tests and how LiveCycle ES performed, download the full review.

Wednesday, December 19, 2007

Adobe celebrates 25 Years of Innovation

25th Anniversary

Adobe’s commitment to revolutionizing how the world engages with ideas and information is as strong today as it was when the company was founded in 1982. Over the years, Adobe has helped to re-define industries with revolutionary technologies and products, such as:

PostScript and PDF for the print industry
Dreamweaver and Flash for the web
Premiere and After Effects for film and TV
LiveCycle and Flex for the enterprise
Adobe AIR for extending rich Internet applications to the desktop, and award-winning software applications like Photoshop and Acrobat that span all industries, serving customers of every size.

Monday, December 17, 2007

A Lot More Flash (And AIR) Phones Coming Soon From Ribbit

an entire development platform for building Flash phones on December 13. Ribbit’s development platform is already in private beta and allows programmers to build Web phones that can make, receive, and record calls, send voice messages, and manage contacts. Ribbit runs the back-end VOIP service, and it supports applications built on both Adobe Flex and AIR

Adobe Hires Co-Inventor of Image Resizer Technology

Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit

The Adobe Image Foundation (AIF) Toolkit preview release includes a high-performance graphics programming language that Adobe is developing for image processing, codenamed Hydra, and an application to create, compile and preview Hydra filters and effects. The toolkit contains a specification for the Hydra language, several sample filters, and sample images provided by AIF team members. The AIF technology delivers a common image and video processing infrastructure which provides automatic runtime optimization on heterogeneous hardware. It currently ships in After Effects CS3 and will be used in other Adobe products in the future. The next release of Flash Player, codenamed Astro, will leverage Hydra to enable developers to create custom filters, effects and blend modes.

Hydra is a programming language used to implement image processing algorithms in a hardware-independent manner. Some benefits of Hydra include:

Familiar syntax that is based on GLSL, which is C-based
Allows the same filter to run efficiently on different GPU and CPU architectures, including multi-core and multiprocessor systems in a future update
Abstracts out the complexity of executing on heterogeneous hardware
Supports 3rd party creation and sharing of filters and effects
Delivers excellent image processing performance in Adobe products

For more details, please see the Hydra language specification that is included as part of the AIF Toolkit.

If you would like to see the AIF presentation from the 2007 Adobe Max Conference, it is available for download as PDF from here

Video Card Support

The following table lists the video cards supported by the AIF Toolkit.

Note: This version of the AIF Toolkit only supports filter execution on the GPU. However, support for software-based rendering is expected in a future update.

Manufacturer	Series	Model Numbers
NVIDIA	QuadroFX Series	FX 5500 SDI, FX 4500 SDI, FX 5600, FX 5500, FX 4600, FX 4500 X2, FX 4500, FX 4400 (discontinued, replaced by the FX 4500), FX 4000 SDI, FX 3500, FX 3450, FX 1700, FX 1500, FX GO 1400, FX 1400, FX 1300, FX 570, FX 560, FX 550, FX 540, FX 370, FX 350
	8 Series	GeForce 8800 GTS/GTX/Ultra, GeForce 8600M GT, GeForce 8500 GT
	7 Series	GeForce 7950 GT/GS, GeForce 7900, GeForce 7800, GeForce 7600, GeForce 7300, GeForce 7200 GS, GeForce 7100
	6 Series	6800 Ultra, 6800 GT, 6800 GS, 6800, 6800 XT, 6600, 6500, 6200, 6200 TurboCache, 6200 LE, 6100, 6150
AMD/ATI	Radeon HD2000 Series	HD2900, HD2600, HD2400
	Radeon X1000 Series	X1950, X1900, X1800, X1650, X1600, X1300, "All In Wonder" X1900 (X1900 GPU), "All In Wonder" 2006 PCI Express cards (Based on X1300 GPU)
	FireGL	Avivo PCI Express, V8650, V8600, V7600, V5600, V3600, V3300, V3400, V5200, V7200, V7300, V7350

Note: The AIF Toolkit does not run on MacBook systems. MacBooks use the Intel integrated graphics subsystem which does not provide sufficient OpenGL support in hardware. This AIF Toolkit release will run on MacBook Pro systems, though.

A tutorial describing how to write a simple Hydra filter is available as HTML or PDF.

Download the Setup EXE file
Download the Setup ZIP file.

NoteTag

NoteTag is a proof-of-concept by a new project at Adobe currently code-named Kiwi. The Kiwi Project is an exploration of Read/Write RSS and Web 2.0 components for Adobe Flex and the Adobe Engagement Platform.

NoteTag is a sample Flex 2 application that allows users to capture notes during meetings and assign tasks within those notes to individuals. Underneath the hood, NoteTag stores notes as blog entries, formats tasks using a microformat, and uses tags to link tasks (from notes) to people. NoteTag uses a preliminary set of Kiwi Project component libraries, including an AtomProtocol library, a simple TagServerProtocol library, and an extended RSSRW library that supports setting data in an RSS feed.

NoteTag is a proof-of-concept release. As such, the NoteTag source and the Kiwi Project component libraries (described below) are of experimental quality; we have released them as-is under the Adobe Labs license. NoteTag also includes the Cairngorm Framework from Adobe Consulting as a compiled SWC compatible with Flex 2. Cairngorm has its own license which is included in the Cairngorm folder inside the NoteTag ZIP file. We want to share our direction and listen to your feedback so that we can continue to incorporate it into our Read/Write RSS and web 2.0 Flex development strategy and planning.

See The Demo

Kiwi Connections Library

The Connections Library defines some utility classes for managing connections to web services, and is used by the AtomProtocol and TagServerProtocol libraries.

Docs
Zip (docs, source, and SWC)

Kiwi AtomProtocol Library

The AtomProtocol Library includes an AtomProtocol interface, and two AtomProtocol classes, one for Blogger (Atom Publishing Protocol 0.3) and one for Typepad (Atom Publishing Protocol 0.4).

Docs
Zip (docs, source, and SWC)

Kiwi TagServerProtocol Library

The TagServerProtocol Library includes an TagServerProtocol interface, and a TagServerProtocol class that connects to the del.icio.us API.

Docs
Zip (docs, source, and SWC)

Kiwi Feeds Library

The Feeds Library extends the original RSS and Atom libraries on the ActionScript 3 Labs page to include methods for setting data in the RSS feeds.

Docs
Zip (docs, source, and SWC)

Adobe™ Flash™ Ajax Video

The Adobe™ Flash™ Ajax Video (FAVideo) component is a small, open source Flash component that you can use to provide video playback within an Ajax application. It exposes all of the formatting and video playback controls necessary to build a video player customized entirely using HTML and Javascript.

One line instantiation makes it trivial to integrate video playback within an HTML and Javascript interface.
Simple APIs provide the ability to manipulate video size, position, and scaling prior to or during video playback.
Video playback parameters such as playback, video seek, cue points, and audio control allow sophisticated programmatic integration with Ajax applications.

See The documentation.