Bob Donlon’s Adobe TV Blog

The New Adobe TV is On The Air

It's everything you asked for and more. But don't take my word for it, have a look at the brand new Adobe TV website here.

Or watch this for a rather dubious explanation:

Posted by bdonlon at 12:40 AM | Comments (0)

T-Minus 2 Months and Counting

If you’re involved in creating any type of product or service, listening to your customers is the most important thing you can do. They will tell you what they need. Oh man, did that ever sound cliché . . . but let me tell you something -- we’ve gotten tons of feedback over the past year from users of Adobe TV, via research where we bring users in and talk to them, and via the daily flow of messages we get from people who click on the “Send Feedback” link which appears on the bottom of the Adobe TV website (I personally read every single one of those e-mails, even those that arrive laden with expletives).

So what have we learned from all this listening? Well, what clearly works are the videos themselves - people love them. We’ve now got over 3,000 videos on Adobe TV (with new ones added daily) offering tutorials, tips & tricks, demos, and inspiration on an ever-increasing variety of Adobe tools & technologies. There’s no doubt that we delivered on the promise of “expert instruction and insight direct from the source” which is the most important component of the Adobe TV charter.

What isn’t working as well as we’d like is the Adobe TV website itself. When we launched in April ’08 with 210 videos, the site architecture we had in place did the job. But as the volume of videos grew, as we increased the number of shows & channels, and as we added new navigation options the site began to come apart at the seams.

Those of you who’ve used the Adobe TV website know what the pain points are. Believe me, they drive me nuts as well. I’ll be elaborating on this in upcoming posts.

Where does this leave us today? Well, there are times when a house can benefit from a remodel (such as the site redesign we launched back in September ’08). And then there are times when you just need to bite the bullet and knock the house down to build a new one.

This August we will be launching a completely re-architected, re-designed Adobe TV website, which is being built to address everything you & other Adobe TV users have told us you need to make Adobe TV a world-class online video experience for you. The current Adobe TV site will remain online until then, and we’ll continue to add new videos to it every day as we always have. We’ll also continue to refine and improve it where we can (in fact we released an update today which vastly improves the search functionality within the site).

In the coming days I’ll be giving you more insight on what has & hasn’t worked and why, and how the new version fixes what hasn’t worked and improves on what has. I’ll also be sharing some sneak previews and showing you how we’re putting it all together. You’ll be interested to read about this if you’re either A) an Adobe TV user and/or B) are in the business of online video yourself.

So, as the old TV cliché goes, “stay tuned . . . we’ll be right back.”

Posted by bdonlon at 4:04 PM | Comments (0)

Developers Go Camping

The recent Foo Camp held at O'Reilly's HQ in Sebastopol CA was your basic developer's get-together with one exception -- the attendees actually slept in tents. Talk about a "busman's holiday" . . .

It was a perfect event for Adobe Platform Evangelist Duane Nickull to cover in today's episode of Duane's World on Adobe TV -- the show that covers the developer scene from a decidedly heavy-metal angle.

One thing that Duane (pictured above) and I have in common is that we're both rock musicians turned technology geeks. I really dig his style of presenting -- and don't let all the credits at the end of the show fool you, Duane puts together 99% of the show completely by himself.

Posted by bdonlon at 1:17 PM | Comments (0)

The Creatives

Jake Wiens is the all-around-video-go-to-guy on the Adobe TV team. He shoots, he edits, he designs motion graphics, and he even creates the thumbnail images for all the videos on Adobe TV. Needless to say, we've been keeping him pretty darn busy.

Today, Jake takes a step into the spotlight in the debut of his new series The Creatives on Adobe TV.

That's Jake in the middle, holding the clapboard.

Because Jake is uniquely tapped in to the creative community here in San Francisco, he's able to bring you a behind-the-scenes look at a variety of talented people who use Adobe tools to help express their creative vision. Today's episode features Jon Julio, the creative force behind the Velo Skate brand.

I get to see the results of the use of such skates every now and again as Jake is himself an avid skater and has been known to show up at the office on Monday morning with a variety of bruises and bumps.

Posted by bdonlon at 3:41 PM | Comments (0)

Flash in a Frenzy

When John Schuman presented the idea for his Adobe TV series Flash in a Flash, I thought to myself "if only this show existed 5 years ago when I was trying to learn Flash authoring." It's a show for newcomers to Flash, and if you've ever wanted to learn the basics of this powerful authoring tool you've come to the right place.

John thought it would be great to have an animated character as the "virtual mascot" of the series, so we asked Kush to design one. For those of you that don't know who Kush is, he's (amongst many other things) the host of Ask The Adobe Ones, the production genius behind the Johnny Encore videos on Short and Suite, the designer of many of our program Icons -- basically the "renaissance man" of Adobe TV. He came up with the character Victor Vector, who you can see in every episode of Flash in a Flash.

Victor Vector on the Flash "Stage"

Like any great creative mind, Kush is loaded with ideas. So he initially presented 13 different character designs -- here are a few that didn't make the cut:

They are (clockwise, starting in the upper-left corner):

Flashy the Dramatic Prairie Dog
Flash the Flashgun
Blobby the Slime
Nikita the Flacheetah
F-Man
Bungie the Neurotic Rabbit

If it was my show I probably would've gone with "Blobby the Slime", but that's just me.

Posted by bdonlon at 2:45 PM | Comments (0)