At the same time, around 11am, Adobe enthousiasts could follow the webcast of the CS4 launch. The replay of this launch is available on Adobe TV.



Directly after our session, we jumped in the car to drive to Gent, Belgium. In the evening we presented another session at the Belgium Adobe User Group meeting for over 150 attendees!! The night ended with a nice barbeque and champaign and Belgium beer.

The next morning, Ton, Paul and I headed for the Belgium office for another press briefing, now for the Belgium press.

I am very excited about this release of CS4. I’d like to all invite you to the CS4 launch tour that Adobe Benelux will be organizing from November 3rd to November 7th. Stay tuned!

If you can’t wait for the tour, you can find short video’s on Adobe TV!

Today, the last day of July, Sun finally released the JavaFX Preview SDK. The full version of the SDK will be released in fall of this year.

Sun states: “JavaFX is the rich client platform for creating RIAs with immersive media and content across all the screens of your life (PC, mobile, TV and other consumer devices). The JavaFX Preview SDK provides web scripters and Java developers with the foundation to quickly and easily build high-impact, immersive RIAs that combine 2D and 3D graphics, high fidelity audio and video and animation, all while leveraging the power and functionality of the existing Java Platform.”

Clearly Sun wants to join the RIA game. I’ve been a believer in desktop Java since the 90’s even when Sun went over to server-side Java, abandoning the origin of Java. After the re-gained attention, the effort has been put back on client-side Java. But, the competition in this area is very strong. Adobe is way ahead with the Flashplayer based offerings (Flash and Flex) and also Microsoft is trying to get their piece of the RIA-pie with Silverlight. I think that JavaFX will be have to deal with the smallest slice of the pie.

Sun is working on plugins for the Adobe designer tools: Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator. These plugins would allow designers to hand-off their material to a developer in a JavaFX ready format. This work is being done within “Project Nile” and is now part of the preview SDK. Some early demos of this project have been shown at JavaOne 2008 (check out the keynote videos of the afternoon keynote). The plugins will function on both Windows and Mac.

Do you want to learn more about developing with JavaFX, check out the weblog of James Weaver.

Amazon uses the power of the Flash Player 9 technology and it’s capability to stream H.264 content. This combination makes it easy to deliver high quality video combined on a large variety of platforms.

Bill Carr, Amazon’s VP for digitial media states in the NYT: “For the first time, this is drop dead simple. Our goal is to create an immersive experience where people can’t help but get caught up in how exciting it is to simply watch a movie right from Amazon.com with a click of the button.”

PC World already had a look at the new service.


Waiting for connection on 'localhost:49603'
Fast Debugger (ruby-debug-ide 0.2.0) listens on localhost:49603


After about 15 seconds I got the error-message:

An internal error occured during: "Starting Server".

In my logfile it showed the message

org.rubypeople.rdt.internal.debug.core.DebuggerNotFoundException:
Could not connect to debugger on port 49603


After some googling around, I found this post, describing problems with “localhost” on “Mac OS X 10.5.3″ (I am running 10.5.4)

I modified the file
/Library/Ruby/Gems/1.8/gems/ruby-debug-ide-0.2.0/lib/ruby-debug.rb
in the method “start_control”:
host ||= '127.0.0.1'

This made the debugger run fine:

Waiting for connection on '127.0.0.1:49728'
Fast Debugger (ruby-debug-ide 0.2.0) listens on 127.0.0.1:49728
Starting command read loop


Uit onderzoek van Ernst & Young is naar voren gekomen dat een kwart van de Nederlandse bedrijven een gebrekkige website heeft en niet profiteert van de eigen online bestedingen. In een tijd waarin de concurrentie hevig is en de technische mogelijkheden legio zijn, dien je je als bedrijf met je website juist te onderscheiden. Niet alleen om de aandacht te trekken, maar met name om de binding met je (potentiële) klanten te versterken. Een hoge mate van interactie en een aantrekkelijke gebruikerservaring worden steeds belangrijker. Bezoekers naar je site trekken is één, maar nog wezenlijker is de aandacht voor je bedrijf en merk vast te houden. Hoe? Enerzijds door de site actueel te houden uiteraard, maar wellicht nog belangrijker: zorg ervoor dat een website een zo aantrekkelijk mogelijke ervaring biedt voor de gebruiker. Win de loyaliteit van je klanten door ze via internet onderdeel te maken van je bedrijf. Bied ze de kans feedback te geven op je producten, voorzie hen van leuke interactieve tools en geef hen altijd en overal de gewenste informatie, waardoor de continue aandacht voor je merk behouden blijft. Waneer je eenmaal tot de attentiewereld van je klant hebt weten door te dringen, is het zaak hier gebruik van te maken. Door de trouwe bezoeker te voorzien van tools en uitingen die je bedrijf promoten en versterken, kun je – onder meer via sociale netwerken – als bedrijf je naamsbekendheid op relatief eenvoudige wijze verder verbreiden.

Een voorbeeld van wat ik een goede site vind: die van Foster’s. Informatief, maar tegelijkertijd is dit bedrijf steeds bezig met het toevoegen van nieuwe elementen.

“Google has already begun to roll out Adobe Flash Player technology incorporated into its search engine. With Adobe’s help, Google can now better read the content on sites that use Adobe Flash technology….” Google has posted an FAQ about this topic.

Read more about it in the Adobe press release.

.

The full press release can be found on the BBC website.

The amount of content each individual user can (or wants) to consume will increase in the (near) future. In the past, the web consisted of text and images; in the past years, YouTube and other video sharing sides have exploded and publishing video on the web hasn’t been as easy as it is now (and will even be easier in future). The demand for higher quality adds a new dimension to the amount of data to be consumed. “High Definition” is the keyword you can find in every TV / Camera store and “High Definition” is what consumers want to see.

Currently the OnDemand and Live streams on the web are seldom in true HD, but this will change very rapidly. How are the IP networks of providers going to react? I think limiting access (either through bandwidth caps or limited amount of connections) is a bad thing.

An alternative way of distribution would be to use the “peer to peer” model. Joost is currently using. But Joost is also running into discussions with various providers; The “Asymmetric” approach limits bandwidth of the upstream connection. There are cases where providers block or throttle these kind of connections.

In the discussion around the various articles IPv6 Multicast and DVB-T are mentioned as alternatives to video distribution on the web. I think video on the web can add much more iinteractivity, for example in Flash you can add overlays, interact with other content and make video truely interactive. This is really the power of video combined with the power of the web.

In my opinion the demand of video (numbers of video and bitrate of video) on the web will hugely increase. Providers really need to catch up here and think of new ideas to bridge this gap.

P.S. This discussion is not only taking place in the Netherlands. The BBC is working on it’s OnDemand player (the iPlayer) and the amount of traffic is also causing discussions (article with statistics) in the UK.

Now you can with SwitchBoard.

“SwitchBoard brings together the power of the automation in the Creative Suite applications with the potential for third parties to extend the creative process with new applications produced using AIR. The result is an extensible, powerful, cross-platform environment that can quickly adapt to today’s rapidly changing creative workflows. “