webqem blog

webqem‘s ColdFusion and Flex trainer – Andrew Muller (sitting second from left), has made a guest appearance on the first episode of Adobe Refresh TV. In the episode, Andrew, and the panel, discussed the recently released public beta’s of Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder 4 and ColdFusion 9. And talked about the impact of these tools on the designer-developer workflow and discuss the improved Flex Framework and ColdFusion 9 languages. They also showcased local sites and applications built for the Australian market.

You can watch the recording here. Adobe Refresh TV will be screening on a regular basis covering news, reviews & tutorials.

The thought of being able to hold a Connect Pro meeting in the palm of your hand is hard to believe. Well not anymore, as Adobe has unveiled its plans to release a new flash based application for mobile devices. In a recent post on the webqem blog, it was revealed that this kind of application would not be far away as the new Flash CS5 will enables developers to export their applications from Flash to the iPhone – but we didn’t expect it to be this close!

It not just the iPhone that will be benefit from this: Google Android, Palm WebOS, Microsoft Windows Mobile, Nokia’s Symbian OS, and RIM with their Blackberry OS, will also be able to run a connect meeting from their phones.

For more information, visit the Connect Pro User Group, where there is also is a really good tutorial and a cool interactive demo.

Good news from the Adobe MAX conference – Adobe is now closer than ever to running Flash on the Apple iPhone. At Adobe MAX, the company’s worldwide developer conference, Adobe announced that the new Flash Professional CS5 software will enable developers the ability to create applications for the iPhone and iPod Touch. The new functionality opens iPhone development to millions of designers and developers who currently use Adobe’s popular Flash authoring tools. Adobe already has some examples of Flash applications available on the Adobe Labs site.

Flash is an integral part of many webqem projects, so we are very excited to hear this news. However, we are still holding out to witness a Connect Meeting on our iPhones – we hear that Adobe is not far off, so let us wait in anticipation!

We have some great eSeminars in October for beginner designers. Software that will be covered during these eSeminars include: Dreamweaver, Flash and Illustrator. We encourage you to register for these free eSeminars, even if your skill level is beyond a beginner, it is always useful to get back to basics. Check out the topics that will be covered.

October eSeminars Design for Beginners topics:

• Getting started with CSS 1st Oct

• How to create tabbed menus and AJAX controls in Dreamweaver 8th Oct

• Flash for Beginners 22nd Oct

• Getting started with Illustrator 29th Oct

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As developers at webqem we are encouraged to stay abreast of new and upcoming technologies. In May 2009 at Google I/O, their annual developer conference, Google announced Google Wave.

Google Wave is in its early days and it will be some months before it is available to the general public, however Google knows that in order to drive adoption of Wave once it is released it will need the support of third-party developers. With this in mind, Google have built a set of APIs in order allow Wave to be extended.

To help introduce Australian developers to the APIs, Google held a Wave API Developer Day at the Sydney Google office on 19 June 2009, which I attended. The day involved learning about the available APIs and then working with them to build something cool to show off at the end of the day. There was last minute “audience favourite” voting added, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my demo, the Napkin Gadget was voted the favourite!

The Napkin Gadget is an implementation of the idea of a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. With the Napkin Gadget you can do quick freeform sketches in a Wave. The Napkin Gadget is an Adobe Flash based Gadget, implemented using Flex – the only example of a Flash Gadget on the night!

The Gadget has been open sourced at Google Code, and as part of the informal “prize” it is currently the Featured Sample on the Google Wave API Samples Gallery.

An example of the Napkin Gadget embedded in a wave

MLB.com, Major League Baseball’s online unit and one of the web’s most succcessful subscription services, is dropping Silverlight and switching to competitor Adobe Flash for the 2009 baseball season.

This is considered a major blow for Microsoft, whose Silverlight was used by NBC to stream Olympics content in 2008. MLB had previously been one of the most high profile Silverlight customers.

MLB.com streams live every Major League spring training, regular season and postseason game, via subscription, with over 1.5 million total subscribers since its debut on Opening Day 2003. Since that time, fans have accessed more than 1.8 billion streams of live and on-demand multimedia offerings on MLB.com, representing nearly 200 million hours of participation.

Adobe’s Flash Player is by far the largest video platform, installed on more than 98 percent of web-connected devices, while Silverlight is installed on about 25 percent.
The MLB two-year deal will see Adobe powering the MLB.tv live streaming service as well as its highlight and library video clips. MLB and Adobe will also work on rich Internet applications, providing content and features outside of the Web browser.

“Flash provides a TV-like experience. You turn it on and it works,” said Bob Bowman, president and CEO of MLB Advanced Media. “We want it to be flexible so we can add features…and it’s got to be scalable. We are the largest server of live entertainment in the country. Whether we are serving 20,000 for one game or 250,000 for another game, it’s got to be scalable over periods of time like nothing else.”

CCTVCOM is the internet portal of the largest professional television broadcasting media organisation in China. CCTVCOM was the official internet/mobile broadcaster for the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games, enabling millions of sports fans in mainland China and Macau to vividly experience Olympic videos built on Adobe Flash and Flex technology.

CCTV needed a solution that supported a large-scale, highly flexible, robust balancing network of high concurrent streaming media. Partnering with Adobe allowed them to deliver a compelling consistent Web 2.0 user experience, such as a 3D TV wall and seamless integration of viewing with live chat functions. The architecture involved a multi-city node origin/edge distribution mechanism.

During the games there were over 832 million visits, with over 46.6 million on-demand video playbacks delivered via Flash Media Server technology, with the maximum concurrent users of live chat room reaching 90,000 and over 10,000 video clips, including whole matches, highlights, extra new and interviews.

Read more about CCTV and FMS

webqem is committed to standards and accessibility when developing websites.

As part of that commitment, Rob and Chris attended the WIPA (Web Industry Professionals Association) Accessibility 2.0 Seminar in Sydney on 12 November, to discover the latest news about accessibility.

The seminar covered three main areas:

1. Moving from WCAG 1.0 to WCAG 2.0
2. Preparing accessible Flash
3. Preparing accessible PDFs

WCAG stands for Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, which a recommendations from W3C, the World Wide Web Consortium, for making web content accessible to people with disabilities. This covers physical, cognitive and technical disabilities.

The WCAG 1.0 Recommendations, have been in effect since May 1999 and needed revision to address changes in technology and future flexibility. WCAG 2.0 is in “Proposed Recommendation” status, and considered highly likely to be approved as a “Recommendation” by the end of the year.
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Google announced on 30 June at WebmasterCentral that they had been developing a new algorithm for indexing textual content in Flash files, integrating the new Adobe SWF technology and are now rolling it out. This includes Flash buttons, menus and full-Flash websites, and URLS contained in Flash content. It does not include images containing text, or FLV files, such as YouTube videos.  (more…)

Last week saw the release of the latest update to the Flash Player. Previously code named “Moviestar” Flash Player 9 Update 3 now supports the H.265 video standard – the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray and HD-DVD high definition video players.

This version also includes hardware acceleration for better performance on multi-core machines.

A HD gallery has been launched to help demonstrate the capabilities of the new version of the player, it’s well worth checking out at http://www.adobe.com/products/hdvideo/hdgallery/