Andrew Shorten’s Adobe UK Blog

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)

With the recent release of Flex 2 and the provision of the free Flex SDK, low-cost developer tooling and optional use of Flex Data Services for applications that require data synchronisation, collaboration/messaging, etc there are many developers and enterprises that are now considering Flex for the first time - in fact to many Flex is a "new" offering in the RIA marketplace.

From a developer perspective, seeing the potential in a new technology and the possibilities it offers can often be dampened when proposing it's use on a project the first question asked by a project manager, IT director or other developers/architects is "Who else is using this technology?" From an enterprise viewpoint there are always concerns with adopting new technologies, irrespective of the licensing costs (i.e. whether it is "free" or has "enterprise" pricing), with security, stability and the impact on the existing infrastructure top of the list.

The good news here is that whilst Flex 2 is a significant release, there are over 600 enterprise/corporate customers worldwide who have built and deployed strategic applications with Flex 1.0 and 1.5. There are case studies, references and customer examples at Adobe.com, but for UK developers considering Flex 2 for a forthcoming project, it might be useful to know about a couple of the high-profile organisations who have already deployed Flex applications in either the UK or Ireland, so that you can answer that "Who else is using Flex?" question if it comes up...

Halifax Bank of Scotland, the UK's largest mortgage and savings provider, uses Flex on the Intelligent Finance website to provide customers with a comprehensive offset mortgage calculator.

Nationwide, the UK's second largest savings provider, uses Flex to provide an interactive savings and investments navigator application, allowing customers to choose the most appropriate financial products.

O2 Ireland, part of the Telefónica group, has built a mobile phone comparison tool, using Flex, as part of their online shopping experience.

Tussauds Group, Europe's no 1 visitor attraction business, enlisted the help of Monochrome to build a single screen checkout experience for the Alton Towers theme park hotel.

Whilst the above are all public facing consumer applications, there are many more customers who deploy Flex-based line of business applications behind the firewall. One such customer that I can mention here is BSkyB, the satellite broadcaster - they have a number of Flex-based applications, including one that enables editors and producers to build, layout and schedule content that is to be pushed out to Sky's set-top boxes (i.e. the experience you get when you press the red button).

As we start to see some of the Flex 2 applications that are currently in development move into production I'll reference them here. If you're working on Flex 2 project and want to let us know about it drop me a note in the comments or to ashorten at adobe.com.

Posted by at 01:38 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)