Life as an Adobe SE

This morning the Adobe Developer Connection posted two articles to support the FMRMS launch:

Introducing Flash Media Rights Management Server (by Desiree Motamedi)
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/dmotamedi_fmrms.html

Exploring content protection options with Flash Media Rights Management Server (by Laurel Reitman)
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/fmrms_content_protection.html

Both are featured on the FMS Developer Center:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/

as well as the ADC home page:
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/

A new addition to the Flash Media Server family will be announced (and start shipping) today. The Flash Media Rights Management Server (or FMRMS - who doesn't love a new acronym to use at cocktail parties?) is a new content protection solution that helps safeguard video content created for Adobe Flash technology. With FMRMS, content producers can now deliver and protect their content, both online and offline - through the Adobe Media Player and applications that run on Adobe Air software.

With FMRMS in play, Adobe now offers copy protection for both online/streaming content, as well as downloaded/offline content. This is the first time that you're able to protect FLV files on desktops - so this is pretty huge!

The interesting thing is that FMRMS will enable new business models that go beyond the traditional download-to-own or download-to-rent models, but will also allow monetization of content through advertisement, online and offline!

Lots more information coming soon to Adobe.com, so stay tuned!

Here's the overview slide deck:

And the FAQ:

Today is the latest release of kuler, the Adobe web-hosted application for exploring, creating and sharing color themes.

New! Use color extraction to quickly and automatically generate a color theme from any uploaded photo or other image. Explore different moods, such as bright or muted, to see different colors, or drag the markers to select colors. The color extraction feature will engage with the creativity of the kuler community in new ways, while helping to expand the range of interesting themes on the site.

Other new features:

• Endless favorites: Now save as many themes as you like, and browse them in your Mykuler area
• Browse by Random (randomly selected) themes, in addition to Highest Rated, Newest, and Most Popular
  

Hot off the presses, the official Adobe technology platform ActionScript reference for RIA development is now available. The notebook-format document provides a complete ActionScript 3 API listing for Flash Player, Flex 3 and Adobe AIR.

You can read Mike Chambers' blog entry about it, or download the PDF here. It's distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License, so you are free to edit and redistribute the file.

I recently presented an online seminar on Photoshop CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3 integration/workflow late last month, and I got a lot of requests for the demo files and additional documentation. Now, to be honest, I didn't create the assets or the workflow script, so I wasn't sure what the official line was on sharing these things with seminar attendees.. well, as it turns out, there is a publicly available document on Adobe.com that provides step-by-step instructions plus the source files. Unfortunately, I wasn't able to find this document on the site myself, so I've just shared the PDF and source files here:

Link to Source Files

Enjoy!

The FMS team recently released a technical white paper which provides a great overview of the server technology/platform:

More news from kuler (kuler.adobe.com), an Adobe web-hosted application for exploring, creating and sharing color harmonies. A new version of kuler desktop is now available, to accompany the official release of AIR , the Adobe development platform to deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop. The Emerging Creative Technologies (ECT) team at Adobe is excited to support the AIR development platform and to extend the current kuler functionality of RSS feeds.

New features include (Feature Guide below:

• Browse color themes from the kuler website while offline (up to 100 themes cached per feed)
  
• Drag and drop themes onto your own desktop as transparent "tear offs," which can be scaled and viewed over any application
  
• Access themes from Mykuler (must be signed in)
  
• Download themes as ASE (Adobe Swatch Exchange) files directly from the kuler desktop (must be signed in)
  
• New RSS feed "Random"