Over at UXB, Shane Morris is trying to convince us there’s really no competition between Flash and Silverlight (along with no competition between the Expression toolset and similar Adobe products). I’ve had a couple of short conversations with Shane recently about where and how Expression and WPF are going to impact the incumbent toolsets – Flash, Flex, Dreamweaver and other Adobe design tools (not to mention Eclipse) and I’m not convinced by his arguments that they can all play nice together.

Shane’s a super-smart guy – incredibly likeable and with few peers in the user experience space – but it’s his job as a Microsoft representative to ensure that as many people are introduced to the new Microsoft tools in as non-challenging, friendly way as possible. With the Age of User Experience sessions running at the moment, a major part of his job is to introduce Australian developers to Expression and WPF.

Sadly for Shane and his bosses, his arguments seem redundant in the face of Sean Corfield’s most recent post.

As a former senior Adobe staffer and ColdFusion guru, Sean holds major league sway in the Adobe tool using developer community. Given the pretty awful experience he’s just had trying to get Silverlight to work on his Mac, this group is going to be even less likely than ever to look at Expression and WPF.

To confirm Sean’s findings, I tried to repeat his experience on my MacBook Pro. I followed the instructions and did exactly what the Microsoft site told me to do. Apparent success in installation. But, as with Sean’s experience, no seamless redirection back to the Silverlight home page. You have to try to intuit what Microsoft expect you to do, given you’ve moved past the installation instructions…

Now, here’s the doozy – my experience was worse than Sean’s! Every time I try to go to the Silverlight home page to check out this cutting edge new technology, Firefox crashes without warning, and I can’t even check out how cutting edge and “check that out” Silverlight is… UPDATE – I can now view the sample apps without Firefox crashing.  That said, like Sean, I see no video in the top of the page.  Also, and this is opinion so take it with a grain of salt, the demos show me nothing Flash hasn’t done in spades for years.

For Shane’s sake, I really hope Microsoft get their act together and make this both seamless and error-free, because at the moment, getting Silverlight happening on OS X is:

• counterintuitive;
• error-prone;
• an unmitigated usability disaster.

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I’ve been looking a little bit around Adobe Labs the past couple of days as I await the availability of Creative Suite 3.  I’ll definitely be buying Design Premium or Web Premium, as I use several of the tools (despite the fact that the cost terrifies me).  In doing so, and looking more closely at several of the products on Labs, I’ve gotten pretty excited about the social networking aspects Adobe are putting into several of these upcoming products.  In particular, I’m impressed with:

• knowhow, which incorporates social bookmarking from del.icio.us (see the knowhow account here) with task/tool-based contextual help.  This is incredibly smart!  There’s no sensible way any software vendor can keep up with all the tricks and tips the user community comes up with as they use their tools, and keep that knowledge a part of the tool itself.  knowhow looks to be a huge step in this direction and I’m really looking forward to using it.  Not least because my Photoshop and Illustrator skills suck at best.  I really hope Adobe add knowhow to Lightroom – it’s one of my favorite Adobe tools (see Michael’s rave about it, which pretty much matches my experience);
• JamJar, which I’ve only looked at briefly, but looks to offer a lot of promise in the collaborative workspace realm.  And all with a really good-looking Flex-driven interface.  I think there are a few IA/usability issues to overcome, as the base, empty interface isn’t exactly intuitive about what the user ought to be doing, but it’s preview technology, so plenty of room yet (if Adobe want someone to help out with IA/UX stuff, I’m always available);
• myFeedz, that also needs time for me to get my head around, but looks really promising.  Currently, I’ve thrown my Google Reader OPML at it, so it will be interesting to see what falls out as I use it over the next few days.

That Adobe are choosing to incorporate these Web 2.0/semantic/contextual/community-based features into their mainstream products is very exciting.  Macromedia always got the community aspect of its user base and the value they could leverage from interacting with that base.  After the Adobe takeover, that seemed to go adrift for a little while, but it’s been back on track recently.  Now the next step has been taken, with that community and collaborative value being directly incorporated into desktop tools.

It will be interesting to see where Adobe can take us from here.  They’re definitely on the right track.

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My wife, Alli, has a number of PDF ebooks she purchased from the Center for Creative Leadership. These ebooks come with built in DRM for anti-printing. They also seem tied somehow to an Adobe Reader version earlier than Adobe Reader 8. When she had Reader 7 installed, they worked fine. She recently upgraded to Reader 8

Last night, she tried to read the books for some research she’s doing. Adobe Reader 8 refused to open them and opened Labs in Firefox, pointing her at Adobe Digital Editions. Downloading and installing that also didn’t work.

She now has a bunch of DRM-laden ebooks that are of critical importance to her research but which are unusable due to some form of strangeness in the DRM between Adobe Reader 7 and 8. I can tell you, she was singularly underwhelmed. No wonder people generally hate DRM.

So, for any of the Adobe folks that occasionally happen by here, can you tell me how we might fix this? I’d really appreciate it, and Alli would be pretty happy too, I imagine.

Image © unleashedlive. Used under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 2.0 license.

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Over at Application Generation, Forta Blog and at An Architect’s View, there’s yet another iteration of the “long term viability of ColdFusion” discussions going on. Peter Bell, Ben Forta and Sean Corfield are all smart cookies, and more than adequately eloquent on the subject matter. That said, here’s my $0.02.

• Adobe spent a lot of money acquiring Macromedia and the goodwill that went with its developer community. Macromedia before did the same thing when they acquired Allaire. Dumping CF, or any other of the “Macromedia” apps is probably too expensive a proposition to be seriously considered.
• The “ColdFusion will go Open Source” idea is speculative at best and more likely simply spurious. There’s no buzz about it, except amongst those with potential alternate agendas.
• Despite the fact that CF has never had adequate, or even decent marketing it has a significant installed user base that want to keep it.
• Adobe continue to do the ColdFusion name a great disservice by failing to make it a major, viable alternative to Java, .NET, RoR, PHP or insertflavorofthemonthplatformhere.
• The net entry cost for ColdFusion is under US$5000 for hardware and software. That’s cheap. Even cheaper if you outsource your hosting – HostMySite will do the job for you for less than $US20/month. Developer licenses are free, so development cost is effectively nil plus developer time.

I’m preaching to the choir here, as CF users, we all know how good it is and how easy to develop with it is as a platform.

Read the articles linked above for deeper insight. Then, put pressure on Adobe to make ColdFusion a serious viable alternative to the big players. Then, and only then, will ColdFusion’s future be assured.

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Everybody, BIG breath in! Oooooooh!

Get it. Now. Do cool stuff.

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Adobe labs has made the beta of Adobe Digital Editions available.

This looks to be a promising product, having yet another lash at the ebook space. To my mind, ebooks have been cruelled by a number of factors over the several years different vendors have been trying to get in on this idea:

• the inconvenience of reading on screen (I still have to deliberately choose not to print before reading)
• the non-tactile nature of ebooks (people like the feel of a book in their hands)
• multi-platform compatibility (desktop/notebook/handheld and their various OSes)

I don’t think Adobe has these completely solved yet:

• the tactile nature and convenience of books remains
• Linux and OS X versions are yet to come
• Digital Editions is cross-platform, being based on Flash and Flex (and a sweet example of this technology is certainly is)

While I have a great deal of respect for everyone I know at Adobe (they are all very smart folks), I don’t think Bill McCoy, General Manager of the ePublishing Business Unit at Adobe, has it quite right when he says ebook reading is reaching a tipping point (hey, I’ve just read the book) quite yet. That said, I’d be glad to talk with Bill and get his view directly; I’m open to being convinced.

JD has some coverage also.

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UPDATE – Tink has a post on his blog about pinching the relevant bits from the Windows install and moving them to a Mac. Hopefully this will work on Beta 2…

No doubt many of you will have seen that Flex 2.0 Beta 2 has been released at Adobe Labs. This is exciting stuff and I really want to try it out, but like several others, my dev platform of choice is OS X. As such, several of the most critical components of the whole platform aren’t yet available to us, namely Flex Builder, Flex Data Services and ColdFusion/Flex Connectivity.

C’mon Adobe, I know you people are super smart and fully capable of having these tools available for OS X. Heck, I’m happy to help test a pre-alpha if you’ve got one (just email me)!

You know there’s demand. If recent US and European conferences were anything like wedDU, demand is demonstrably strong.

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I’m using the latest milestone release of the Eclipse IDE, and when I tried to install Flex 2 Beta 1 in plugin mode, the install to Eclipse fails, as it expects an Eclipse 3.1 build and the components that go with it. Judging by the error messages in the log, it seems it won’t install on an Eclipse 3.2 build.

Does anyone know of a way to install the Flex 2 Beta Eclipse components to bypass the checks? Is there an Eclipse components only to be obtained somewhere?

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There are likely to be about a gazillion others blogging the same info, however…

You may all wish to have a look at this small, self-running presentation where Adobe President and COO, Shantanu Narayen presents Adobe’s commitment to the former Macromedia product line (most relevantly for me, especially ColdFusion and Flex) and talks about the upcoming integration of CF, Flex and the LiveCycle (Adobe forms) product line, among a large number of other commitments.

For me at work, this bodes very well for our current platforms and skill set, as well as opening opportunities for use of the LiveCycle product line which Glen and I are currently investigating.

This is exactly what I was talking about just a month ago. Yay Adobe.

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As developers who use the (formerly) Macromedia toolset, we’re used to having almost more information than we can take being on tap. The official information source that is the Developer Exchanges have always been a massively useful place to go for hints, tips and news about our favorite products.

As far as I can see, Adobe’s equivalent, which appears to be made up of the free Resource Center and the very not free, at US$1495/year, Developer Resources isn’t nearly so forthcoming with the usefulness.

I’m on a project now where I could really use some access to deep information on the Adobe Intelligent Document Platform and the LiveCycle product range – and not just whitepaper-type stuff, mind you – real, deep technical material with tutorials, howtos and the like. Presently, I just can’t find it, and I’m clutching at straws more than a little. Pretty soon, I’ll be getting heat from the pointy-haired bosses to make a decision I won’t have enough material to make…

Adobe are going to need to make a significant shift in their mindset and be much more forthcoming with large volumes of useful technical material for their developer base.

David Yang, a Flash guy, has it right.

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