As already posted, I have been over in San Francisco this weekend. The purpose of my trip? Well.. partly sightseeing but mainly for Adobe’s ApolloCamp event - an evening dedicated to Apollo, Adobe’s new desktop application platform. Here is a roundup of some of the secrets gleaned at the event!

For over 10 years now, Flash has become a ubiquitous standard on the web, installed on an estimated 750 million PC’s. It is cross-platform, and cross-browser. More recently, it has made the jump to being cross-device, with the release of Flash Lite. But what if I want to take Flash outside the browser? With access to the local filesystem and windowing API’s?

There have been several attempts at this, the most notable probably being Zinc, but most have their quirks and detractors - making it difficult to really take a complex Flash based application and deploy it to the desktop. Thats where Apollo comes in, providing a cross platform runtime for desktop applications which can either be Flash-based or HTML/JavaScript based.Currently supported platforms are Windows and Mac OS X, with Linux support being promised for the 1.0 release which is due towards the end of 2007.

Interestingly, it also appears that Adobe are interested in supporting mobile devices as Apollo moves toward 2.0, although developers shouldn’t expect this to happen until later in 2008.

So, what kind of things can Apollo do? At the event we saw lots of demo’s which were quite cool, including:* Fine Tune* Dashboard Widgets* Widgets (in General)* Twitter* E-Mail Client* BuzzWord (Word Processing)More tidbits as I continue my experimentation with Apollo….

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Today has been a fairly frustrating day, mainly because most of it has been spent following up on why some of our customers have been experiencing problems with our pages not loading properly. It turns out that these customers have one thing in common - they have all recently updated to Windows Vista… so what is going on?! It appears that updating to Vista has the potential to upset users using the Flash player. Here is what I’ve discovered so far:

• Windows Vista does not ship with any version of the Flash Player, so if you buy it in the stores and perform a clean install then you will need to grab the Flash player from Adobe and install it separately.
• Many OEM’s have refused to accept this, and are shipping hardware with both Vista and Flash pre-installed. As far as developers are concerned, there is no way of knowing which version of the player is being loaded, but its probably safe to assume it is a version 9 release.
• If you upgrade an existing install of Windows, you may break your Flash Player and have to reinstall. Last week Adobe released an updated version of the player, listing Windows Vista support in the feature list. If you have this version installed when you perform the update (9.0.28), then you should be fine. If you have an earlier version of Flash Player 9, then Flash web pages should still work, though you are obviously missing the Vista compatibility updates, whatever they may be. If you have an earlier version of the player, such as Flash Player 8, then the upgrade to Vista will somehow corrupt your player install. You will need to reinstall and the corrupted player will still register as installed to web pages using Flash (though it may not work).

I’ll post more updates as I get them, but at the moment its looking a bit messy!I am curious as to why Microsoft chose to ship Vista without Flash, or at least without ensuring that upgrading to the new OS doesn’t have any ill effects on browser plug-ins. I’m sure the conspiracy theorists will point to Microsoft wanting to damage the ubiquity of the Flash player ready for the roll-out of Redmond’s long rumored Flash-killer, but that doesn’t really make sense given that the said Flash-killer is still some time away. If anything this can be seen as a good thing, user experience implications aside, as it is driving updates to Flash 9 - enabling developers to really start kicking with ActionScript 3! (more…)

Its been almost two years since Ajax exploded onto the web, with more and more sites adopting it for pretty much everything. In my view, one of the defining things about 2006 has been the maturity of Ajax as a web technology. Frameworks such as Dojo and Prototype have came a long way, facilitating JavaScript development and offering out-of-the can functionality. We have also seen many hosted applications such as Yahoo Mail and .Mac using Ajax to enhance the user experience available, and we are getting to the stage where this kind of functionality is also cropping up in other web applications, from e-commerce to social networks.If 2005 was the time when geeks were going wild with the technology, 2006 has been the year where developers have sat down and thought “How can I best use this to create a better website?”, and this has really helped Ajax to break into the mainstream.To compliment this, we have seen some great strides in the tools available to the developer, in particular, browser extensions such as Firebug which really are a godsend when it comes to testing and debugging applications.Of course its not all good, we are seeing one bad side effect of this Ajax explosion - page bloat. Using the Prototype library adds about 50kb to the page weight, Dojo can add as much as 300kb (especially as very few people seem use the include system). Obviously, if you are building a JavaScript heavy application then this is justifiably, but I do see a lot of sites which use frameworks specifically for a single piece of functionality, such as the $ function or a single visual effect. In these cases, we need a way of stripping down our JavaScript libraries based upon the functionality we, the page authors, require.Thankfully, for 2007 it looks as though there is a solution for this, in the form of JS Linker. A Java application which analyzes your code and removes JavaScript functions which are not used. Although its currently in its early stages, this one is worth keeping an eye on.Another such tool to watch is Flash Aid, which uses Flash in order to solve a big challenge faced by Ajax developers - using JavaScript alone, there is no way of knowing if someone is using a screen reader, and thus you cannot offer screen reader specific content/functionality to boost the accessibility of your site. Flash Aid, developed by Jeremy Keith and Aral Balkan, is a small piece of Flash which sits invisibly on your page. It allows JavaScript to check if a screen reader is present, using the built-in API’s within Flash.So, 2005 had lots of developers getting excited, 2006 put a bit more structure around this and presented us with some new challenges (many of which we discover have been faced by the Flash community for years - we can look there for inspiration and potential solutions) and plenty of opportunities for innovation. Here’s to a happy 2007 for the Ajax community! (more…)