The CSS Regions capabilities currently in Chrome are pretty rudimentary, but I’m also working with some nightly WebKit builds which definitely take the feature to the next level (they include CSS Object Model support which enables the scripting of CSS Regions — that’s when they get really interesting). I’ll have plenty more samples and prototypes in the near future.

This week is quite an exciting one: Adobe has officially released a pre-release version of Flash Player for Firefox with a sandbox. The concept of a sandbox, or protected mode, has been around for many years, but it is fair to say that Google Chrome’s sandbox has helped make this concept better known among end-users. Another product that has successfully implemented a sandbox is Adobe Reader X: We have yet to hear about a case where an exploit was able to break out of the sandbox.

The fact that the Reader sandbox held up so far is a good indicator that the Flash Player version could hold up for some time as well. Let’s keep our fingers crossed.

A sandbox is supposed to lock an application into a restricted space so that even if a vulnerability is found in the software, it cannot be exploited to do damage on the system. So if you were to visit a website that is hosting a malicious Flash file, it will not actually be able to break out of Flash Player’s sandbox and do damage to the system. Creating a sandbox is usually achieved by dropping the application to a low-integrity process. Being low-integrity, it can’t access the system in uncontrolled ways.

Peleus Uhley wrote some very interesting blog posts on sandboxing that go into a little more technical detail:

http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2012/02/flash-player-sandboxing-is-coming-to-firefox.html

http://blogs.adobe.com/asset/2010/12/the-year-of-the-sandbox-isnt-over-yet.html

I encourage everyone to give the pre-release a shot and try the sandbox out for yourself. If you run into any issues with Protected Mode for Flash Player, please feel free to leave your feedback in the pre-release forums.

If you are a security researcher and you have feedback that is valuable to our security minded folks at Adobe, please use one of our security notification methods.

On a lighter note, Team Adobe—consisting of Brad Arkin, Domingo Montanaro (general manager at iSIGHT Partners Brazil) and me—bagged the “Security Jeopardy” competition at the event on Friday evening. The winning answer only our team could come up with, ironically: “What is ‘zero knowledge.’”

Until the next conference!

Karthik

[Via Rob Cantor]

Gregg knows first hand the power of arts education to ignite a lifelong interest. “When I was in school, I struggled with my traditional art courses, because I have always lacked skill in things such as pencil drawing. Even today, my students tease me about what a terrible artist I am.

“But when I was in 6th grade, the school librarian taught an after school program on making stop motion Claymation using a Super 8 camera. This was brand new technology at the time, and I remember thinking it was pretty cool. It introduced me to a creative process that I could get excited about.

“Creating art using stop-motion animation is still an important process for me, it’s a major component of what I teach, and in fact I am working on setting up a full Claymation production studio at my school, which we hope to have up and running within the next three years.”

Gregg’s love of creative education not only shaped his own story, but is now fueling his passion for his own students and their future successes.

When asked how Adobe Youth Voices has impacted his students, Gregg shared that bringing current technology into the classroom provides students with a new way to express themselves while learning how to use new tools and resources that will benefit them both in and out of the classroom. Adobe Youth Voices gives students competitive skills that they can take to the marketplace in the future for a job in graphic design or video editing.

“In my 15 years of teaching,” says Gregg, “I have seen other programs and initiatives come and go, but the Adobe Youth Voices curriculum of ‘create with purpose’ is the foundation for my digital media classes and will continue to be so for the remainder of my career.”

What does Gregg love about his work with Adobe Youth Voices? Near the top of his list is the opportunity to see young people develop a passion for something, especially if it is something they didn’t even realize they enjoyed prior to his class. “My students are at-risk youth; they are good, kind-hearted kids who perhaps made the wrong decisions academically or in their extracurricular life, and who got off track. Now they are looking to reinvest in their education, and they are striving for greatness.”

Want to see first hand the work Gregg and his students have created? Check out this trailer of student work created in Gregg’s Adobe Youth Voices classroom!

Nested Overlays allow you to combine multiple overlays into one object. For instance, you can now include a buttons, videos or a Pan and Zoom Overlay in your slide show. This is very handy when trying to create an interactive slide show like you see on popular news sites: there’s a photo with some text under it and six dots along the bottom, and when you touch a dot or swipe across the image, it takes you to the image or video that’s in the slide show.

I have heard from customers that while this seems to work on the desktop Content Viewer, it often fails on the iPad. I was surprised, so I did some investigating and here’s what I learned.

When you build a slide show, you need to create a Multi-State Object, or MSO. This MSO is a container for all of the different slides you want to present, with each state in the MSO representing a slide. Inside of each state, you can include DPS overlays. In my example, I have three slides in my slide show, so I have three states in my MSO. On the second slide, I have a Pan and Zoom Overlay, because the text is too big to fit in the space I’ve allowed. When I preview on the desktop, this works as expected. When I preview on the iPad, however, it doesn’t work.

The solution is easy, and I came upon it after following some of my own advice. When I first began teaching about interactive features in InDesign CS5, I exhorted my students to “think like a developer!” This meant that they needed to start naming their design elements if they wanted to have a productive relationship with the Flash developer who would take their comps/projects and turn them into full-fledged apps. This reduced guesswork and established a workflow that fostered collaboration between the two. Until InDesign CS5, designers all worked in Photoshop and sent layered PSDs with layer comps and written instructions to the developers, who chopped them up and added interactivity. This Photoshop-centric is still prevalent today, and it is fraught with errors in communication. I promote the idea of using InDesign as an interactive comping tool, however, and make judicious use of the layers panel to name my design elements. The key here is how InDesign names objects when you don’t.

By default, InDesign names all of its objects with the name of the primitive surrounded by brackets, like <rectangle> or <graphic frame>. If you place a graphic, the name becomes <nameofthisgraphic.psd> or whatever the graphic’s file name is. If you type some text, the first few words of the text frame become the name of the object, plus those surrounding brackets. It turns out that these names look suspiciously like HTML tags, but as tags, they have no meaning. I think (and I expect to get either some dope slaps or back slaps for this) that the webkit part of the iPad Content Viewer gets confused when it sees these names in the nested overlays. If you change the name of the overlay from InDesign’s default to something without brackets, your overlay will work as you expect.

In my example, I drew a box and pasted my text into it in order to make the Pan and Zoom overlay. InDesign named the box <graphic frame>. We can see this in the Layers panel. One of the great features of the Layers Panel is that we can use it not only to reorder the objects within a layer, but we can also use it to change the names of the objects. When I change the name to More Than Professors and update my folio, my overlay works as expected. It is not necessary to adhere to a strict Action Script naming convention, which would have a name like moreThanProfessors. The Content Viewer doesn’t seem to be bothered by spaces in the name, but if you’re going to be working with a Flash developer, then you should consider talking with them about how they want objects to be named.

On the left, the result with InDesign's default name. On the right, the result with my custom name.

Changing times require changing workflows. For interactive design and DPS specifically, it is time for designers and developers to share best practices. While naming conventions have never been a concern of a print designer, they are critical for a developer. In InDesign, these two worlds collide, and the collaborative workflow I have been preaching for the last two years is now paying off.

We’ve put together a short video that does a great job of speaking to the considerations of IT by highlighting some of the benefits and capabilities, and featuring a few customers who are realizing success with the solution.

Keep an eye on this blog, and follow us on Twitter (@AdobeConnect) – we’ll continue to share stories, tips, news, and discuss a range of web-conferencing topics.