Adobe Flash is getting more and more popular as the platform to develop multi-touch applications on.

Check out a post at http://www.multitouch.nl/?p=216 regarding a Summit that will be organized between Natural User Interface and Adobe in 2009 with the main focus on development of multi-touch solutions on Adobe’s Flash platform.

In case you haven’t seen my post on our NUI Group community website regarding that event, please have a look here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3582/

This video was made as a proof of concept of Flash applications running on the tracker of NUI Suite Snowflake.

A release candidate of Adobe Flash Player 10, code named "Astro" is now available for download on Adobe Labs. Once you download it make sure to visit this page and try the new 3d engine, it's AMAZING!

The Cairngorm project, lightweight micro-architecture for rich Internet applications built in Flex or AIR, is now hosted on the Adobe Open Source website. Milestone builds, documentation, and the latest source code are available for all to use. Cairngorm is now evolving towards a project that will invite community leaders and enterprise adopters to partner with Adobe Consulting in the ongoing development of Cairngorm.

The ASDoc API reference for Flex Gumbo, the next version of Adobe Flex, is now available at http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/gumbo/langref/. Adobe will be updating this reference approximately every other week.

Please use the Adobe Forums to comment on the API reference.

The next version of Flex, code name Gumbo, is now in active development. It is has 3 primary themes:

• Design in Mind: provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer.
• Developer Productivity: improve compiler performance and add productivity enhancements to language features like data binding
• Framework Evolution: take advantage of new Flash Player capabilities and add features required by common use-cases

Next steps

1. Watch a presentation on the Gumbo plan (~14 mins)
2. See Ely Greenfield discuss designer/developer improvements
3. Read a longer description of the Gumbo themes
4. View and comment on the specifications

Download builds of Gumbo from here

Milestones

These milestones are very much a work in progress:

Adobe completed its Acrobat 9 transition with the release of Adobe Reader 9. The free PDF viewer application can now view Flash content embedded in PDF documents, and offers substantial performance improvements compared to previous versions of Adobe Reader.

Version 9 also added new collaboration support, added PDF Portfolios support, improved PDF form support, updated the user interface, and more.

Adobe Reader 9 is available as a free download at the Adobe Web site.

The Adobe Media Player (AMP) finally launched with exciting content from CBS, MTV, PBS, Scripps, Universal Music and many more networks... Adobe demo'd this at Adobe Max 2007 and I've been using the betas for months...



"Adobe® Media Player software provides control and flexibility to view what you want, when you want — whether online or offline. You can queue up and download your favorite Internet TV content, track and download new episodes automatically, and manage your personal video library for viewing at your convenience."

Download Adobe Media Player.

Adobe released Flash Media Encoder version 2.5, defined as a software designed to enable you to capture live audio and video while streaming it in real time to Flash Media Server software or Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS).

It now supports H.264 video codec and the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio codec. The AAC support is via a plug-in which can be purchased from MainConcept.

Adobe ColdFusion 8 Update 1 (8.0.1) was released April 3rd (most of you knew already). The good and safe news is that it seems to work fine... nothing broke with the update.

What was updated? You can get the full list here, but I will concentrate only on the Ajax part.

The docs say "We have improved functionality in several areas including AJAX functions, CFPDF, and CFIMAGE. And we have updated several software libraries including Yahoo YUI, EXT JS, Spry, and the FCKEditor."

The FCKEditor component used in the cftextarea tag’s rich text editor has been updated to version 2.5. As a result, the rich text editor now supports Safari 3 and Opera 9.50 browsers. This is great news, but 2.5 was released 11/30/2007... 2.6 was just released, so they went with the latest stable, though it was pretty safe to try the 2.6 RC, which was released a while back.

Next, the Spry framework has been updated to version 1.6.... not too much to say there, I don't care much about it.

Now the important part, the Yahoo YUI Library used for some AJAX-based controls has been updated to version 2.3 and the Ext JS framework used for some AJAX-based controls has been updated to version 1.1.1... I assume they did this because Ext JS 2.0 (released in October 2007 btw) was a major update and it would have taken too much to adapt it? Adobe, trust me, I understand SDLC, but in today's world CF helps us keep up with rapid changing technology and it would be totally worth it ... you will have to upgrade it at some point .... hopefully 8.0.2 will incorporate the a much newer version of Ext.

ColdFusion 8 won the Product Excellence in the Web Development category at the 18th annual Jolt Product Excellence and Productivity Awards, as announced yoday.