Andrew Shorten’s Adobe UK Blog

We had a great day at the Adobe UK developer event held in London earlier this month - it was good to see so many new developers interested in Adobe's platform and wanting to know more about Flex and LiveCycle. We've now posted all the presentations and resources from the day online for download. If you couldn't make it on the day then they should give you an idea of the content covered and hopefully we'll see you at a future event...

On that note, in recognition that there are other places in the UK other than London (!), we're hoping to organise some developer evenings in Birmingham, Manchester and Edinburgh over the next couple of months. These events will provide an opportunity to learn more about Flex and LiveCycle, for you to give us your feedback and to mix with other like-minded developers. We're still in the planning stages at the moment, but when I've got some confirmed dates/venues I'll post them here.

Posted by at 09:34 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

The Y Design Awards, part of the London Design Festival and sponsored by Adobe, were launched this year to recognise the UK's leading creative talent demonstrated through the use of digital technology. To co-incide with Flash's 10th birthday all of the entries this year were showcasing content, websites, applications or digital experiences built using Flash.

The award winners were announced on Monday night at a party in London - unfortunately I couldn't be there as I had a schedule clash and was in Munich, but I heard a good time was had by all :) Congratulations to all the award winners, and particular mention to Tim Wong and the team from Rufus Leonard who won the People's Choice Award for the best use of Flash in their work for the Imperial War Museum.

Full details will no doubt appear on the Y Design Awards website in due course, but in the meantime here is the list of winners and links to the winning entries. My personal favourite is the aveaword site for MINI - fill in the questionnaire on the site and send the video link to someone you know, very funny...

BEST GAME DESIGN: David Beckham Academy Touran Challenge, Tribal DDB London

BEST INTERACTIVE SITE: MINI aveaword, glue London

BEST APPLICATION: Discover Pirate Island on Google Earth, Digital Outlook

BEST ONLINE CAMPAIGN (by an agency with 5 employees or less): How does your garden grow?, TAMBA Internet

BEST ONLINE CAMPAIGN (by an agency with more than 5 employees): Royal Marines Recruitment , glue London

BEST NOT FOR PROFIT CAMPAIGN: Talk to FRANK, Profero

BEST VIRAL CAMPAIGN: Freekick Fusion, Inbox Digital

BEST VIDEO: Gangs of London, Mook

BEST TECHNICAL ACHIEVEMENT: Discover Pirate Island on Google Earth, Digital Outlook

PEOPLE CHOICE AWARD: Their Past Your Future, Rufus Leonard

Posted by at 12:59 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

I'm currently in Amsterdam on Adobe's stand at IBC - "one of the world's best events for everyone involved in the creation, management and delivery of content for the entertainment industry" - where we are promoting Adobe's broad range of video solutions, including After Effects, Premiere Pro, Audition and Encore DVD. I'm here with Chris Hock, group PM for Flash Media Server and FVSS, talking to customers about streaming Flash video content.

Adobe's tagline for the event is "Video. Here, there, everywhere" and for the first time at IBC the Adobe and Macromedia products are presented together on a single stand, with Flash video positioned centre stage as the best way to deliver rich, enagaging video experiences on the web.

What's this got to with Flex you might ask? Well, even though we are not showcasing Flex on the stand I have been pleasantly surprised by the number of people who have come over to specifically find out more about Flex and how they can leverage Flash video as part of a Flex-based user interface.

Flex is ofcourse a great choice for creating browser-based asset management systems, rich multimedia portals and collaborative video applications - indeed I've been showing a media portal demo application that I built using Flex and FMS here at the show (more about that demo in another post) - but the fact that the word about Flex is spreading to broadcasters and media/entertainment companies so quickly is great news.

For those customers yet to learn about Flex, the Flash Media Server pod is now also home to the "unofficial" Flex pod as well, with a great number of customers excited to see how rich media applications with Flex can be far more expressive and easier to build than they thought possible.

If you are planning on attending IBC either today or tomorrow please come by the Adobe stand in Hall 10 and say hello....

Posted by at 09:13 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)