Open at Adobe

Well, what have we thought up this time?

Welcome to the new Adobe Developer Connection.

The ADC is the next generation of the Adobe developer center. It's a portal for those who code web, desktop and mobile applications, interactive experiences as well as use our SDKs.  It includes technical articles, samples, code, as well as a way for developers to connect with each other. And it's a sign-up away. And it's free.

As a lead up to Adobe MAx 2007, this is an amazing place to continue and learn the all about Adobe technologies form Adobe  types, and from other developers. It's really your site, not ours.  And we really want to hear what you think!

There are some really cool benefits to getting into the ADC. Newsletters, the De veloper Desktop (a free download away), offers from O'Reilly books, access to code, and cookbooks. Did I mention free?

Anyway, my neighbor here in Adobe has a great introduction for you to read. And take the time to find me on the ADC IntroNetwork!

And if you're at Max in Chicago, look for me in the Community Pavilion or at the sessions on "the future of PDF and Standards".

Posted by Dave McAllister at 03:23 PM | Permalink

There are a couple of interesting blogs out today that are around Linux (on the Desktop) and Mac OSX.

It starts with this post on OSWeekly.com.

Matt Asay, in his blog, The Open Road, discusses choosing between Linux and Mac.

Dan Reisinger, in his blog, NewsBlog, mentions it in Linux and its identity crisis.

First, let me point  out that I have used a Mac ever since killing a Dell 5 times in an eleven month period.  Nothing to do with the operating system, but a whole series of interesting problems, like the system refusing to believe it was undocked, or the keyboard splitting in half. Needless to say, I was quite pleased to be able to move to the Mac, and with the Intel based ones, am quite capable of having the best of all worlds. (There is a lot to be said for virtual machines and desktop software, as I first stated back in 2001.)

Dan (who I don't know) offers that while Mac is maybe more friendly, Linux doesn't need to approach the friendliness market. Ouch. Without the widespread market adoption, there are a number of interesting software products that just won't make it on to the platform, nor will there be relevant adoption of the open source offering to drive said market. And yeah, there are work around's, but honestly, how many people want to install QEMU to run on KVM under Linux 2.6.20? But, as Dan puts it,maybe that shouldn't be the Linux market. Linux, to paraphrase, is all about the advanced user experience; leave that feel good stuff to the pablum providers like Microsoft and Apple.

Matt (who I do know) states that Apple may well be the best of both, under the hood tinkering and best of breed creativity  software.  (Now, if we could just do something about that dratted Office for the Mac product). I tinker on my Mac all the time, I keep a console window open on the dashboard just for that reason. I may not hack to the level of Linux (e.g. I wouldn't consider replacing the scheduler, to use another recent Linux crisis, but hen,my Mac is my production system.)

Honestly, though, what's the real fuss? Maybe they aren't the same thing, but then, shouldn't Linux reach for the larger desktop market?

Short answer... yes.

Skipping virtualization, there are still any number of software packages that make it impossible to shift my family over to pure Linux. And yes, before the hate mail comes in, I know there are alternatives. It's not me that is the headache, but the other, non-tech types (though they themselves are pretty darn technical).

So, while I can state that Linux is a great answer, it's not the only answer.  And I can state that its not only the ease of use that is missing, its the key applications.  and without a larger market share on the desktop, those applications have no need to support Linux.

So, yeah, I do want my Mac friendliness and functionality. My wife wants her Family Tree Maker, and my son wants his games.  And all of those are enabled by Linux reaching out to the broader "make it easy" market.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 12:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

International Talk like a Pirate day! Arr, Matey.  Where's me Parrot?

Posted by Dave McAllister at 03:41 PM | Permalink

open source,live chat,Q&A,Flex,Ajax,RIA,AIR

Tomorrow, Adobe is hosting a live chat session on topics relating to RIA. and I'm polishing up the claws (just kidding).

You know RIA, Rich Internet Applications?

We're going to be chatting and answering questions on topics around Adobe on AIR, Flex, AJAX, and even (ta-da!) open source by yours truely.  Well, I'm not going to answer the AIR, Flex, or Ajax stuff... we have really smart folks to do that.

But I'll be on hand to talk about openness at Adobe, and attempt to answer questions you might have. I won't claim to have all the answers, but just asking us questions could have an impact on wher Adobe goes in the open source world.

You'll be able to find the chat via a banner off the OSDN sites: Sourceforge and Slashdot.

or off Adobe at http://www.adobe.com/go/rialivechat.

The live Q&A session starts at a web browser near you at 4PM Eastern on September 18th, 2007 and runs till 6PM Eastern. So starting at 4AM Wednesday for China (Beijing), 5AM Wednesday for Japan (Tokyo), 10PM Tuesday for Germany (Berlin), 9PM for the UK (London), 6AM wednesday for Australia (Sydney), and so forth.

Anyway. I'm hoping to meet a bunch of you tomorrow and hear the questions you've got on RIA, AIR, Flex, Ajax, and especially on Open Source.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 08:00 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Ajax,Flex,Video,standards

Hopefully by now you know about Adobe and the open sourcing of Flex.

But do you know about Adobe and Ajax in both open source and in standards?

So, let me tell you.

First Adobe is a member of the Open Ajax Alliance, an an organization of leading vendors, open source projects, and companies using Ajax that are dedicated to the successful adoption of open and interoperable Ajax-based Web technologies.This is a very active, very committed and very, very open organization. Adobe is proud to be a member, and we take part in a number of different working groups and task forces.

In fact, we recently proposed a new task force, on searchability. Yeah, I know, you know how to search Ajax... right? Well, from the Task Force proposal:

While the impact of AJAX has been substantially expanded, the impact of the overall search ability of web sites may be adversely affected by the use of AJAX. Complex web sites built with content from an XML source are often essentially invisible to search engines. While suggestions for workarounds exist, no clear or sufficient methods exist within practices today.

We believe this is a significant lack within AJAX and would offer that OpenAjax is the appropriate venue to resolve this lack.

To accomplish this, we would propose the start of a task force to bring together the framework developers and the search engine companies to help identify which hooks are necessary and possible.  

The desired end goal would be that even in complex web sites which are built entirely using an AJAX framework with all of the data presented via asynchronous XML, there is still sufficient metadata/context available to search engines such that they can understand the content of the application AND provide deep linking into those applications.   The idea is to extend the AJAX frameworks so that they include the metadata necessary for search engines to understand the data that is flowing through an Ajax application as well as the context/state within an application that is associated with that data.

 The end product would be a set of best practice recommendation for frameworks that would be compatible with the major search engines or a set of recommendations to other working groups or task forces.

Now, as a standards wonk (and a cat), I'm not actually capable of groking this. But it seems that creating a dynamic web site based on my request (for catnip brownie recipes) might not be searchable, thus considering googling, it doesn't exist. I'm sure you have workarounds, but a standard way of making this searchable has to be good for the adoption of Ajax.

Continuing on the Ajax theme for a minute, are you aware that Adobe has things that can help you bridge technologies like Flash and Ajax? It's called the Flash-Ajax Video Component and is open source code.  Yep, open source. Free as in BSD license. FAVideo is a small, open source Flash component that you can use to provide video playback within an Ajax application. It exposes all of the formatting and video playback controls necessary to build a video player customized entirely using HTML and Javascript.

How about the Flex Ajax Bridge, part of the Flex SDK we open sourced under MPL? FABridge ) is a small, unobtrusive code library that you can insert into an Adobe® Flex™ application, a Flex component, or even an empty SWF file to expose it to scripting in the browser."

"To humbly borrow a page from the Ruby on Rails community, FABridge " is built with the “don’t repeat yourself” principle in mind. Rather than having to define new, simplified APIs to expose a graph of ActionScript objects to JavaScript, with FABridge you can make your ActionScript classes available to JavaScript without any additional coding. After you insert the library, essentially anything you can do with ActionScript, you can do with JavaScript."

Or Spry, a framework for Ajax. "The Spry framework for AJAX is a JavaScript library for web designers that provides functionality that allows designers to build pages that provide a richer experience for their users. It is designed to bring AJAX to the web design community who can benefit from AJAX, but are not well served other frameworks." It's also under the BSD license.

Anyway, I thought you'd like an insight into what Adobe is doing in openness around Ajax.

As always, comments (and cat treats) welcome.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:31 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

I'm quite sure Jay didn't realize he was drawing a political cartoon with The Mows but it's either that, or my mind is slightly skewed into reading between the lines. However, Jay again has managed to capture a unique view (yes, pun intended) on my worlds of open source and standards.

You often hear the phrase "Perception is Reality" used in marketing. A well-turned phrase, it indicates that what someone perceives about your product or service is (their) reality. And often, that reality is contagious, spreading rapidly to make others perceive a similar reality.

Companies often use this concept to distort reality, adding to their own ego-dollar (and real dollar) pile. You know, the ones that say "My car makes you more virile", My clothes make you look thinner", "My products make you better". We hear see and probably even taste this every day.

In open source implementation, self-delusion is not a good idea. Perception is perception and reality is reality. Yet time and again, we see a similar play in marketing of open source.  I always like the one: "Microsoft is a bad company, so buy me instead". (Not to say Microsoft isn't a bad company. .., but, just sayin').

Too often open source inside of large companies is "Perception is delusion".  I'm seen (and worked for) companies that see themselves as good citizens, while chaos reigns around them. A product is not good just because it's open source; a product is equally not bad just because it isn't open source. Experience the reality, if the product solves your problem, then it is good. And you should be  the ultimate arbiter of what solves your problem.

A few companies back, it was decreed that the company would use Exchange and Outlook, because it was the "only calendar system that works". Note the "Perception" here.  That perception was created by a failed attempt at other calendaring systems in 1997... yes, 10 years ago. Anybody got a different view? (I certainly do.)

A recent consultation started with the concept that "opening our product would reduce costs". Wrong again.  Open sourcing a closed product will always increase costs, in spite of the potential improved QA.

I do admit, when I first saw this comic (and yeah, I visit every day, it's my perceptional delusion), I immediately thought of the recent spin on OOXML and the failed ISO ballot. I leave it to the observer to do the logical proof, but let me point out that a press release is not (or should not be) a reality distortion generator, despite the existence proof of Steve Jobs at Apple. As for the press release, do the math.

While here at Adobe, we have delivered the PDF specification to ISO for standardization, we being very careful to avoid self deception. Note that we haven't managed to buy countries, stack ballots, or anything like that.  We are offering to have a conversation (remember that thing about openness, it's a conversation), check out the Inside PDF blog to find out more.

Perception is perception, reality is reality. In open source or open standards, the reality matters. Be it in Posh and Beckham (as Matt Asay points out) or in "The Mows", be sure you are not the one dis-floor-einted

comments welcome

Posted by Dave McAllister at 09:13 AM | Permalink

It's a nice simple lazy day. And I'm too darn comfortable to do  any actual heavy lifting.

So, I thought I'd point out a new blog from one of my Adobe colleagues, Jim King.

Jim is the PDF Architect for Adobe. He's also the principal technology lead for the effort to promote PDF as an ISO standard. He is articulate, has well thought out reasons and proposals, and is a nice guy. Well, given that he admits to coding a PDF document by hand, he's a nice guy <grin>.

Jim has started a blog to help keep you informed on the open efforts for ISO PDF. Note that I say "open" here. At Adobe, we recognize that buying your way into a standard is never a good thing, We'd rather have the best standard for the community needs, and Jim and his team have spent a lot of time working on what we submitted to ISO for consideration. We're already been told by experts outside of Adobe that this is the best PDF specification that has ever been produced.

Anyway, I want you to rush over and check out Jim's blog, Inside PDF right now. Now, or I'll shed on you.

And I'm going back to snoozing.

Posted by Dave McAllister at 01:11 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Open Standards

The OOXML vote (or as I'll refer to it here, MOOX, in honor of Mows) has failed.

And while the spins on it are both positive (The Microsoft PR), negative (Groklaw, et al), and fair (ConsortiumInfo.Org), it indicates two things to me.

First, A standard is a collection of consensual facts, not fantasies. And while it may be possible to buy consensus, sooner or later your fantasies get disrupted by real life. (or even Second Life).

This isn't to say that dual, or apparently competing standards are bad.  It is to say that well crafted, thought-out and accepted standards are important.  Standards live for (virtually) ever.  The process of changing them is hard, slow and sometimes painful.  And starting with a flawed standard is bad.  Really bad. In fact, it's better to have no standard than a bad one.

Now, I admit to not having read the 6K pages of the standard, so I can't directly comment. But I've seen enough comments, heard enough feedback, and talked to other standards wizards to get the drift. This was a presentable first draft of a specification... but failed the tempering (as in toughening metal, not as in "losing one's"). It  didn't have a sustainable edge, it couldn't flex to meet the demands of use, and it certainly didn't create a stronger implementation.

Second (and the Mows spins this well).

Even if you aren't doing anything, you can still be bit.  And in some senses, it looks like the MOOX standard got bit in by it's own hype. (And exactly what were you thinking?)

Standards are an important part of openness. Openness is all about the conversation. Mind reading is not a principal component of creating a standard, even though it sometimes appears that way. Good intentions are not enough to drive bad practices.

A standard can appear from an existing technology (or implementations). Implementations can appear from a standard specification. But, note the plural in implementations. And any  standard driven by  implementations needs to be baked well in the real world, with multiple people and companies using and depending on the technology. When enough people earn their living from a shared technology, it can be considered a consensus, at least of interest.

So, for MOOX, the next steps are hopefully to move into conversation. I expect that the conversation in Geneva will be loud, long and actually, probably pretty interesting.

And as for me, I still don't read minds... just ask my wife!

Posted by Dave McAllister at 04:03 AM | Permalink