Adobe has put an alpha pre-release of AIR for Linux up in hopes, it says, of getting feedback from the community, not to mention winning adherents. It's English-only. The company also joined the Linux Foundation to encourage the growth of RIA technologies on Linux, it said. The company says Linux developers can use HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy to desktops across operating systems.

These days RIA tools are created mainly to two groups of people: Web Developers and UI Designers. The second group is represented by creative people who can design screens but are not programmers. Big guys are trying to come with tools that would bring together these two groups of people who currently live in different planets. But there is another group of people that need these tools.

These are the notes from Adobe Education Designer and Developer Conference that Adobe put together for people who are teaching Adobe software at various universities around the country.

OK, car manufactures go Flex. Will they lose or gain customers because of that? Car manufacturers want to have fancy consumer sites. It's a world of RIA, and having interactive Web sites should bring more people to car dealerships. But poorly performing Web site can turn into lost revenues.

Action Message Format (AMF) is a protocol that is used to serialize the data coming into Flash Player or going out to other programming environments that need to communicate with Flash Player. Say, if you create in Java an instance of the class MyOrder, this instance can be converted into a string of bytes, sent over the wire to Flash Player and then recreated there as an instance of the ActionScript object. The rules of how to do this are defined by a communication protocol, such as AMF.

I ran into an interesting blog written by a Flash programmer who feels that Adobe's promotion of Flex puts him and other Flash programmers at a disadvantage. And he knows how to resist!

Adobe will release Flex 3 around February of 2008. It has a number of improvements and new features, in particular it'll bring Flash designers and Flex developers together. Creative Suite 3 will have an easy way to incorporate Flex content right into the timeline of Flash IDE. Containers created in Flash will be able to have content developed in Flex. Earlier this year I saw a presentation of Silverstream from Microsoft. I was impressed by the ease of developing fancy GUI applications by a Web designer who did not know programming. He?d just create fancy graphics (using the timeline) and effects adding the place holders for the code to be written by Sillverlight developers. Now Flash designers will also easily incorporate Flex code in their creations.

Adobe has published statistics on the penetration of Flash Player 9 as of June 2007. The numbers look pretty good - over 90 percent of the users in mature markets have it already installed. 90% is not a 100% and not even 98% that Flash Player 8 already enjoys. Since the penetration speed looks pretty similar for the version 8 and 9 of the player, it?s safe to assume that Flash Player 9 will reach its 98% mark in the Summer of 2008.

'The Java backlash,' writes Bruce Eckel, 'has been building up steam, and we're starting to see some fundamental shifts because of it.' Java has been around for 10 years yet applets are not the primary way that we interact with the web. Applets are not ubiquitous, and everyone got excited about AJAX instead.

Who's better looking? Flash Player or Sliverlight? As of today, 98% of the world computer users know what Flash Player is and only 2% or so know what's Silverlight. But this will change pretty soon. Both Flash Player and Silverlight can read any plain HTTP feed. Flex also offers faster binary protocols for communication with the server side applications written in Java and other languages, including a third party solution (offered by Midnight Coders) for integration with .Net. I am not sure if there are any such deals for fast communication between Silverlight and non .Net applications.

Geographic Information Systems (GIS) services today are going mainstream. Corporate executives and individuals at home are demanding access to many of the same GIS capabilities previously used only by engineers, geologists, and government officials.

My goals here are to integrate www.adobe.com/ products/flash/ Flash with www.adobe.com/produc ts/flex/ Flex, i.e. not just treat it as a design asset tool, but as a contributor to the functionality of the client; using Flash for enhancing the design, and helping reduce transition code which tends to be verbose in Flex.

Flash Player 9 enters pre-Alpha stage on Linux. Adobe marketing needs to work harder.

All objects in recent versions of ActionScript are defined by something called classes. Think of classes as blueprints that determine the unique combination of characteristics, actions, and reactions that comprises a particular object of a certain type. By 'object,' we are talking about the familiar things a Flash developer deals with every day: movie clips (the MovieClip class), text fields (the TextField class), buttons, sounds, math functions, components, you name it. They are all defined by classes.

While a large Flex application is loaded, the user may experience unpleasant delays, which can be used productively to logon to this application. Besides, it'll give the user perception that your application loads faster.

'I've always been jealous at the amount of tools available for other languages and have tried to re-create some of these same tools for ActionScript,' Darron Schall told WebDDJ's Jim Phelan, when asked why open source is important to the Flash Platform.

Aral Balkan of OSFlash.org answers a few brief questions about the amazing promise that the Flash Platform holds in the age of Web 2.0 and the role that Balkan sees for open-source Flash in that equation.

When you create a Flash Media Server 2 application, you typically place emphasis on optimizing the quality of the communications. That is certainly as it should be. Likewise, quality object-oriented programming (OOP) is another priority. One standard in OOP is design patterns-abstract concepts for solving recurring problems using designs that optimize OOP when you apply them appropriately. The seminal work in design patterns is Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm Ralph Johnson, and John Vlissides, affectionately known as 'The Gang of Four' or simply GoF.

In just a few years long-distance learning, or Electronic Learning (e-learning), has become a reality. The problem with distance and having to be in a certain place at a certain time has been eliminated with the use of the personal computer and the Web.

As the World Wide Web's landscape has evolved from the days of multimedia-void static HMTL pages, the need for a dynamic interactive medium for Web applications has become apparent. Adobe Flash, as many developers know, is the most widely distributed, capable technology for achieving this new Internet medium. But Flash developers can't achieve the features expected from modern Web applications with Flash alone - for Flash's resources to be put to proper use, Flash must team up with a server-side technology capable of functionality such as database access and file manipulation.

Macromedia Flash is everywhere. No seriously, it is everywhere. Not only is Flash used for online and offline movies, websites, games, and applications but it's also used for DVDs and broadcast television.

Many animators use Macromedia Flash for detailed vector-based animation. One of the strengths of Flash is its versatile workflow and production process. I have developed some custom techniques that can help you create and manage the various moving parts of a complex animated character. In this article I reveal some of my best-kept Flash secrets while taking a single character from pencil sketch to fully animated Flash cartoon.

Flash Video is rapidly changing the landscape of video on the web. Developers will need a new set of skills and knowledge relating to video editing, encoding, and delivery. This article introduces the video encoding process using the Flash 8 Video Encoder, a simple yet powerful tool for Flash developers.

Flash Media Server 2 offers a unique combination of traditional streaming media capabilities and a flexible development environment for creating and delivering media experiences to your audiences. These include traditional media like video on demand, live web-event broadcasts, and MP3 streaming, as well as rich media communication applications like video blogging, video messaging, and multimedia chat environments.

The problem has riddled developers since the birth of Macromedia Flash: What happens when a site visitor doesn't have the version of Macromedia Flash Player needed for my content, or doesn't have one at all? Many answers have appeared over the years. And so far, the work has not been the result of developers trying to reinvent the wheel. Instead, it's been the result of developers trying to invent a wheel that actually works.

Flash has been communicating with JavaScript for a long time through getURL and fscommand, but with Flash 8 it's easier than ever. With the ExternalInterface class, you cannot only call JavaScript functions, but also have JavaScript call Flash functions. And now that JavaScript is getting more and more publicity in the form of AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), the ability to seamlessly integrate your Flash content within your HTML content is essential.

As most of you know, Flash began as a tool for creating vector animations on the web. Flash Player was designed specifically as a lightweight animation viewer to display moving vector objects, which are, in their simplest form, mathematical equations that describe complex shapes made up of points, lines, curves, and fills.

By tweening shapes, you can create an effect similar to morphing, making one shape appear to change into another shape over time. Flash can also tween the location, size, color, and opacity of shapes.

Flash Basic 8 and Flash Professional 8 offer several ways to include animation and special effects in your document. For example, you can create tweened animations using the Timeline and Flash workspace, automated Timeline effects (by making selections in a dialog box), or ActionScript code.

Open source must in some way present itself as a bit of a dichotomy to Adobe, now that it has acquired Macromedia. It is generally accepted that open source solutions foster innovation and adoption. However, with an open file format and a free player, is it possible that some projects could eventually challenge Flash's own role by creating competing tools?

Perhaps you've heard of Flex, maybe you've even dabbled with Flash, or you have one or more Flash developers on your team. Nevertheless, you aren't sure how Flash and Flex fit together.

We live in a communications world. The number of software solutions that can provide communication between users grows every day. In the future it's likely that applications unable to provide this ability will be known as 'traditional applications,' shunned because of their lack of openness and communication ability. A simple example of this can be seen in the game industry.

Flash and Digital Rights Management is a topic not often discussed. In fact I tried to do a little research on the topic for this article and could turn up very little. I must start this article off by discussing why I wanted to get digital rights manament (or DRM as all the cool people call it) going for a project I recently worked on. Recently I self-published a book called Web Designers Success Guide. After being no-so thrilled with publishing with larger publishers (they tend to give you fat advance and you never see royalties due to 'hidden' clauses in the big old contract you sign) I decided to write and publish my own book using Lulu. The process is simple, you create your book in what ever program you want (I use InDesign CS2) and then upload it as a PDF. They print it on demand as people buy it. Lulu offers authors the ability to sell the book as a PDF and via dead tree (paper). I decided that selling the PDF would be bad since my target audience are very wired web designers and my PDF would end up making the old Peer-to-Peer book tour and I won't get paid!

Flash in its essence began as a tool for creating vector animations on the web. The Flash Player was designed specifically as a lightweight animation viewer to display those moving vector objects which are in their simplest form, mathematical equations that describe complex shapes made up of points, lines, curves and fills. However, nowadays developers and designers are using Flash to do a lot more than just animation, today we see Flash being used for everything from interactive banner ads to games and large applications with complex user interfaces. We are now pushing Flash to its limits and our frame rates are starting to suffer as we continue to develop content that is more application centric.

We probably all know by now how to play a progressive FLV without Flashcom:

If you are a visual programmer working in environments like Visual Basic, Delphi, REAL basic, or PowerBuilder, you may hesitate to take advantage of the benefits of Flash because of concerns about learning a new, unfamiliar environment. To show how easily you can transfer your existing knowledge to Flash MX Professional, in this article I will explain how you can create a simple web search application that queries the Google web API using SOAP web services:

Why is FreeHand not part of Studio 8? What do productivity tools Contribute 3 and FlashPaper 2 add? What about Flex? Why has the product name changed from Studio MX 2004? What are the new video features in Studio 8? How about the role of Flash Player 8? These, and sundry other questions on every imaginable aspect of the new Studio 8 release, are addressed here by four executives at Macromedia speaking exclusively to MX Developer's Journal.

Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX (popularly referred to as Flashcom) is becoming an increasingly popular platform for the efficient delivery of streaming video to large audiences. Many content delivery networks such as Speedera and Vitalstream have teamed up with Macromedia to offer their clients a platform to stream prerecorded videos easily and efficiently. However, the Flash Communication Server capabilities do by no means end there. The platform is also an ideal choice to deliver live-event broadcasts in real time across the globe - all through a familiar and very accessible Macromedia Flash front end.

About a year ago, I had a long chat with Mike Downey, the Flash Product Manager, regarding the launch of Flash MX Professional 2004. Mike was still stinging from much of the criticism related to the that launch, and the gist of the conversation was 'never again.' He was adamant that if Flash gets shipped, it will ship when it is ready and only then.

Flash is one of the great Internet technology stories. It began in 1995 at a small tech startup called FutureSplash, which developed a remarkably efficient solution for delivering rich animation over narrowband Internet connections. Macromedia acquired FutureSplash in 1997 and established Flash as the standard for creative and dynamic interactive web content.