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.

The new eclipse integration in Enterprise Architect now supports Flex through their Model Driven Generation feature according to Mike Rankin. I love EA so this is exciting news.

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases.

"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Protocol buffers are three to 10 times smaller and 20 to 100 times faster than XML, according to Google.

Google has prepared a download page that contains protocol buffer compilers for Java, C++ and Python.

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 first 24 hours are over, but the downloads continue to pour in. At press time, the official counter shows that the current rate is approximately 5,500 downloads per minute, and the total number of downloads is roughly 8.8 million. [ars technica]

After more than 18 months of development and a slew of releases (including five alphas, five betas and three Release Candidates), the wait for Mozilla's Firefox 3 is over.

The Firefox 3 release aims to improve the Web experience for the browser's 170 million users while expanding market share even further, coming as it does months ahead of the next major release from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 (IE). Tons of tabbing, bookmarking, memory, security, and well, 15,000 improvements...

Mozilla conducted an application-specific test that compared relative performance on Google's Gmail service. Beltzner said Firefox 3 proved to be four times faster than Firefox 2 and seven times quicker than IE 7.

Memory usage also improved substantially in Firefox 3. Many users had complained about Firefox 2's memory-hogging tendencies, especially when multiple tabs remained open throughout the course of a day.

With today's release, Mozilla isn't just aiming to change its browser. It's also aiming to enter the Guinness Book of Records. Mozzilla is aiming for 5 million downloads, though there is some controversy here as the Adobe Flash Player has exceeded 10 million daily downloads in many occasions.

Check out Compulsion... It allows to create and map hotspots in any Video and make it clickable to anywhere ... Imagine watching a video and clicking on a shirt, chair, location, or anything ... Looks really interesting, I'd love to see the rollout and market penetration ...

Compulsion is a simple, easy to use tool that makes video clickable. The clicks become links that turn the video into an entire interactive universe of your design. You can offer or sell those links for click and shop, gossip, trivia, news, music, more video, or anything you can imagine. Compulsion does not alter the original movie file, and can be used before or after your video is published.
Anyone using this yet?

IIS and Apache running side by side ... why? Well, for me, because I run SVN through Apache in a Windows box. I still like IIS for web sites, especially because I like to keep it similar to my production sites... however, I blogged before about getting multiple SVN repositories working with Apache. I usually switched Apache to listen to an alternate port because IIS binds itself to all port 80 on all IPs, regardless if they are actually being used or not. Good news! I found this Microsoft support document explaining how to unbind IIS from all IPs and include only the ones you want. I know, I actually never even looked for this before, but I have IIS serving my sites and Apache server SVN in the same server, both on port 80. Of course, you can also use this for hosting Trac (easier in Apache than IIS), or even just testing ... By the way, if you don't have the Windows Server CD handy, you can download the Support Tools here.
So, after installing the Support Tools, follow these instructions from the M$ 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.