Category Archives: adobe

adobe, apple, business intelligence, flash, internet, java, microsoft, professional, Web, web authoring

Wolfram announces Computable Document Format for interactive docs

July 21, 2011 onlyconnect

Wolfram has announced the Computable Document Format (CDF), a document format that enables live computation to be embedded within it. “It’s a new way to communicate the world’s quantitative ideas much more richly than we have in the past, and in doing that a new kind of active document,” says Conrad Wolfram, Strategic Director of Wolfram Research. That said, the technology here is not really new. There is a close relationship between CDF and Mathematica, Wollfram’s tool for creating mathematical calculations and simulations. The authoring tool for CDF is Mathematica:

The announcement then is really about a new player for Mathematica content and applications, to broaden their usage. The CDF player is free, though there are some limitations. If you charge for your document, or want to display it without the player chrome, then a paid licence is needed. A CDF document can also be compiled into a standalone executable, blurring the distinction between document and application.

The CDF player is available for Mac, Windows and Linux. There is also a browser plug-in for embedding CDF documents into web pages.

It is easy to find use cases for CDF. It is for documents where there is value in performing calculations or interacting with data within the page. An example is pension planning:

We have all seen those documents with a series of projections based on different assumptions about retirement age, contributions, investment growth and so on. This works better as an interactive chart where you can enter whatever values you like.

Other examples are statistical analysis and business intelligence, textbooks and course books where students can interact with equations and simulations, business proposals where you want to show how financial projections change based on different assumptions, or even general news reports where instead of a static chart you might want to show interactive graphics that let readers drill down into the data that interests them, or see real-time results.

Along with the computation engine, CDF supports a decent range of traditional content formatting features including cascading stylesheets.

Wolfram is correct in assuming that this kind of interactive document is important, and something we will increasingly take for granted in the era of the Web, eBooks and tablets. But can it succeed in establishing its own new document format when we already have HTML, Adobe PDF and Flash, Microsoft Excel and PowerPoint, and other formats which are also capable of embedded interactive content?

That is a key question. Wolfram offers a table which claims to show the benefits of CDF versus competitors such as HTML and PDF, but it is as skewed as these tables usually are. Wolfram says a PDF document cannot be compiled as a standalone executable, for example, but a PDF in an Adobe AIR application comes close. It is also worth noting that you can embed Flash in PDF, which would be an obvious route to something like the pension planning document mentioned above.

Nevertheless, CDF does have advantages. In particular, it has Mathematica, and whereas authoring a Flash applet requires programming and design skills, Mathematica is more approachable presuming you have the necessary mathematical, scientific or financial skills; and if you do not, you should not be authoring the document. Mathematica will construct a user interface automatically. It also has a huge range of built-in algorithms, functions and charts. Wolfram claims that authoring a CDF should be within reach of anyone who can work with an Excel macro.

The challenge Wolfram faces is how to make CDF usable across a broad range of devices and clients. Having to install a player or plug-in is a considerable deterrent. PDF or better still HTML5 has broader reach and works on Google Android and Apple iOS as well as on desktop PCs.

I tried the CDF plugin and player on Windows 7 and encountered several issues. The plug-in does not play nicely with Internet Explorer’s Protected mode and I saw this dialog frequently:

I also had some issues with the player. I could not get an example document on Gulf Oil Spill Estimation to work:

The player is currently for Windows, Mac and Linux – what about Apple iOS? Wolfram says it is working on this, with a two-pronged approach. One idea is presumably based on some sort of app, I’d guess either a player if Apple allows it, or some way to compile a CDF into an app. The other idea is to render the interactive parts server-side, so you could use them in a web page without a plug-in. This second idea could also remove the need for a plug-in on the desktop. You will get a performance hit because of all those trips back and forth to the server, but this could be mitigated by high performance computing on the server that will perform calculations more quickly than your client.

I can see CDF being popular within its niche, but whether it can transition into being a mass-market format I am not sure. Established plug-ins and runtimes such as Adobe Flash, Microsoft Silverlight, and Java on the client are all under pressure, particularly as Apple’s iOS spreads its reach; it is not a good moment to launch a new format that has a plug-in or runtime dependency. I wonder if Wolfram is exploring the possibility of compilation to HTML5 and JavaScript?

Despite these reservations, the broader vision behind CDF seems to me spot-on. There are many cases where we currently see static charts, that would be better served by an embedded computation engine.

adobe, development, mobile, professional, software, software development, Web, web authoring

Adobe releases 64-bit Flash Player 11 beta, AIR 3 with packager for Windows, Mac, Android

July 14, 2011 onlyconnect 2 Comments

Adobe has released a beta version of Flash Player 11 and AIR 3. The AIR release is of limited interest since as yet there is no public SDK; Adobe mainly wants to test compatibility. That said, the announcement describes a key new feature, the ability to package AIR applications as standalone executables on Windows, Mac and Android. You can already do this on Apple iOS, a feature that was forced on Adobe by Apple’s refusal to allow application runtimes on iOS – unless they are WebKit or FileMaker. This is new for the other platforms though, and I assume comes as a result of the popularity of the iOS packager. The effect is that you no longer have to advertise the fact that your app runs on AIR or require users to obtain the runtime; your app will just work.

Adobe may have its eye on the Mac App Store, which will disallow applications that require a runtime. Extending the AIR packager to desktop OS X should get around that limitation.

64-bit Flash Player is also a big deal, and really long overdue, though there has already been a preview codenamed Square which offered 64-bit. Although there are probably not many Flash applications that really need 64-bit, this is good for compatibility with 64-bit browsers and of course desktop applications when compiled with AIR. There could also be value in 64-bit for business intelligence clients which manipulate large datasets.

Another new feature in Flash Player 11 is Stage3D, codename Molehill, which is a new API for hardware-accelerated 3D graphics. Stage3D has its own shader language, called AGAL (Adobe Graphics Assembly Language); my heart sinks a little when I see vendors inventing new languages rather than using one that is already available, such as OpenGL Shading Language, but Adobe says AGAL is simpler and more secure. If you would like to use GL SL with Stage3D, check out the 3rd-party Mandreel framework which comples GL SL shaders to AGAL.

Flash Player 11 also has a built-in H.264/AVC software encoder for cameras, which will improve video chat and video conferencing, and adds potential for applications that stream video out as well as in.

Native JSON support will simplify and accelerate the handling of data in this popular format.

Another feature that caught my eye is socket progress events. When transferring data, it is important to give feedback to the user on progress. A new property lets developers monitor the number of bytes remaining in the write buffer, and a new event is raised when data is being sent, enabling more informative data transfer applications.

LZMA compression for SWF files, the compiled format for Flash content, is claimed to reduce SWF size by up to 40%.

When do we get a full release? Adobe is taking its time, but my hunch is that it will be in 2011, maybe in time for the MAX conference in October.

adobe, bbc, flash, microsoft, professional, security

IE9 ActiveX Filtering causing tears of frustration

June 22, 2011 onlyconnect

I have been assisting a friend who, she told me, could not get BBC iPlayer to work. Further, another site was telling her she did not have ActiveX, but she was sure she had it.

This was puzzling me. She described how she went to the BBC iPlayer site, and it said she needed to install Flash.

She clicked the link and got to Adobe’s download site. She clicked Download now and got a page describing four steps to install, but nothing happened, no download.

She clicked Adobe’s troubleshooting guide, which took her through uninstalling Flash Player and then a manual download. All seemed to work but at the end of it, it was the same. Go to the BBC site, and be told to install Flash Player.

You can understand how computers, at times, can seem downright hostile to the long-suffering user.

What was the problem? I logged on with remote assistance. Somehow, IE9 had ActiveX Filtering enabled.

This is actually a great security feature. ActiveX is disabled on all sites by default. A little blue circle symbol appears at top right.

Click this symbol and you can turn off filtering for this site only.

Yes, great feature, once you are aware of it – but too subtle to be noticed by the average user browsing the web. From the user’s perspective, no amount of uninstalling and reinstalling of Flash Player would fix it, and the PC was about to be flung across the room in frustration.

The other problem is that the feature is too new and too little used to feature in most of the troubleshooting guides out there. It is not mentioned in Adobe’s page on troubleshooting Flash on Windows and in IE, for example.

How the setting got enabled in the first place is a mystery. Maybe a mis-click. It is unchecked by default, and you can see why.

Conclusions? I guess it shows that security without usability is ineffective; and that minimalist user interfaces can work against you if they in effect hide important information from the user.

Incidentally, this is why I dislike the Windows 7 feature that hides notification icons by default. It is user-hostile and I advise disabling it by ticking Always shot all icons and notifications on the taskbar.

It may be more secure, but I would not consider enabling ActiveX Filtering for non-technical users.

adobe, apple, development, mobile, professional, software development

Hands On with Flash Builder 4.5.1 for Apple iOS

June 22, 2011 onlyconnect 2 Comments

Flash 4.5.1 has been released recently, the first with integrated support for Apple iOS as well as Google Android and RIM Blackberry Tablet OS. I was keen to try my calculator app on iOS, having already tested it for Android. You can do most of the development on Windows, but I moved the project to OS X so I could try it in the iOS simulator and then on an actual iPhone 4.

Adding iOS as a target platform was easy: right-click the project, choose Properties, check to add the platform.

Then I worked on the UI. The buttons on my design were too small. The answer I guess is to use relative sizes, but I thought for a quick test I would simply set the device to Apple iPhone 4 and resize the layout for that.

After a bit of tweaking I got the app working nicely in the iOS simulator, again set to iPhone4. I was also able to set breakpoints and debug the app easily.

Then I tried it on the device. I did the Apple provisioning dance. I then compiled a release build, which took a long time and featured a thermometer that stuck on zero the entire time. It worked though, and I got the app into iTunes and synched.

On the device the app did not look too good.

Well, I have read up on supporting multiple screen sizes and on setting mobile project preferences and I am still not sure why this did not work, especially as it looked OK in the simulator. I had auto-scaling on, and the docs say:

When you enable automatic scaling, Flex optimizes the way it displays the application for the screen density of each device.

I fixed the the immediate issue though by adding the attribute applicationDPI=”320” to the ViewNavigatorApplication element.

Now it works fine.

So how is performance? I have managed to create some rather poorly performing calculator UIs in my various tests of cross-platform mobile tools, and this is one of the better ones, though not as responsive as the Titanium app on iOS. However the Flex app is more consistent across Android and iOS, whereas Titanium was poor on Android. Loading takes a few second, but it is acceptable. The app size is only 6MB which is not bad, considering that the necessary bits of Adobe AIR are compiled into it.

Note that this is little more than a Hello World app. My reasoning is that if this does not work well, then nothing will.

So far I am encouraged. Taking into account the development experience and performance across both Android and iOS, this is one of the best I have tried so far with my simple example.

adobe, design, development, professional, software, software development

Adobe announces strong results though much of the business looks flat

June 22, 2011 onlyconnect

Adobe has announced its financial results for its second quarter. Revenue is up 9% year on year, and profits are up too, so it looks like a strong quarter. However, the success is really limited to a couple of business segments.

Here is the comparison with the equivalent quarter last year:

	Q2 2010	Q2 2011
Creative and interactive	429.3	433.1
Digital Media	139.3	136.7
Digital Enterprise	231.9	283.5
Omniture	91.9	115.9
Print and publishing	56.6	54

Adobe has changed the segmentation of these figures since last time I looked, removing the confusing Platform and splitting out Digital Media. Broadly:

Creative and interactive is most of Creative Suite and the Flash platform including both developer tools and streaming servers. It also includes the nascent Digital Publishing Suite for Apple iPad and tablet publications.
Digital Media is Creative Suite Production Premium and individual sales of Photoshop. Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition.
Digital Enterprise Solutions is the LiveCycle middleware, now rebranded as part of the Digital Enterprise Platform, plus the content management platform acquired with Day Software in October 2010, and Acrobat.
Omniture is self-explanatory; this is the analytics business acquired in 2009.
Print and Publishing is a bunch of tools including, oddly, ColdFusion but not InDesign. Technical authoring sits here, as does Director.

So what do these figures tell us? Creative Suite is trundling on OK, but no more than that, particularly when you consider that Q2 included the release of a paid-for upgrade, CS5.5. Revenue from Digital Media is slightly down, as is Print and publishing.

The strong results are in Digital Enterprise, following the acquisition of Day, and in Omniture.

Both of these were smart acquisitions in my view, though I am not a financial analyst. In a connected era, analytics is crucial, with great potential for integration with the design and development tools.

The enterprise middleware also seems to be going well. This is really a strange amalgam of the old Adobe document publishing and workflow servers with the application services that came from Macromedia. Throw Day software into the mix, with Roy Fielding’s content-centric vision for application development, and you have an interesting platform.

Adobe is also benefiting from the Apple-led revolution towards design-centric software.

That said, not everything is going Adobe’s way. The momentum behind both HTML5 and Apple iOS is a threat to the Flash business. Never mind the technical arguments, the fact is that designers are more likely to be working on removing Flash from their web pages than putting it in. Adobe also needs to sustain its prices, and there is plenty of downward pressure on software prices today, partly driven by Apple and its App Store model. I also get the impression that the hosted services at Acrobat.com have not taken off in the way Adobe had hoped.

adobe, cloud computing, design, development, internet, professional, software development, Web

RESTful and modernised: making sense of Adobe’s new Enterprise platform

June 20, 2011 onlyconnect

Adobe has announced its Digital Enterprise Platform for Customer Experience Management. My tip to Adobe: that is too many words with too many syllables for busy IT people who are trying to get their work done. What on earth is it? The same old stuff repackaged, or something genuinely new?

The answer is a bit of each. Adobe has made several big acquisitions over the last few years, starting with the Macromedia merger in 2005 that really formed a new Adobe, bringing together digital publishing and the Flash platform. In September 2009 Adobe acquires Omniture for web analytics, and in October 2010 Day Software. This last one seems to be having a huge impact. Day’s product is called CQ5 Web Content Management and is built on CRX, a content repository which conforms to JCR 2.0 (Java Technology API 2.0), a Java API. Here’s Roy Fielding, formerly at Day and now Principal Scientist at Adobe, from this white paper [pdf]:

The Content Repository API for Java Technology (JCR) is poised to revolutionize the development of J2SE/J2EETM applications in the same way that the Web has revolutionized the development of network-based applications. JCR’s interface designers have followed the guiding principles of the Web to simplify the interactions between an application and its content repository, thus replacing many application-specific or storage-specific interfaces with a single, generic API for content repository manipulation.

JCR is a boon for application developers. Its multipurpose nature and agnostic content model encourages reuse of the same code for many different applications, reducing both the effort spent on development per application and the number of interfaces that must be learned along the way. Its clean separation between content manipulation and storage management allows the repository implementation to be chosen based on the actual performance characteristics of the application rather than some potential characteristics that were imagined early in the application design. JCR enables developers to build full-featured applications based on open source implementations of a repository while maintaining compatibility with the proprietary repositories that are the mainstay of large data centers.

Adobe already has an application platform based on LiveCycle Enterprise Suite, which you will notice now redirects to the Digital Enterprise Platform. Ben Watson, Adobe’s Principal Customer Experience Strategist, explained it to me like this:

The core of the platform now becomes the repository that we got from the Day acquisition. We are also following their leadership around the use of RESTful technology, so changing how we do our web services implementation, how we do our real time data integration into Flash using data services. There’s really four technologies at play here. There’s CQ5, Adobe LiveCycle which is all the business process management on the back end, the online marketing suite with Omniture, and Creative tools which allow to both design and develop all of this content and assets … We had two Java platforms and we brought them into one.

You can read up on the Digital Enterprise Platform here or see a chart of capabilities here. Much of it does look like rebranding of existing LiveCycle modules; but as a statement of direction it is an interesting one.

Is this for on-premise deployment, or cloud hosted? Adobe has a tie-up with Amazon for hosted deployment, though there is no no multi-tenant hosting from Adobe yet; I got the impression from Watson that it is being worked on.

Adobe is aware that it does not stand alone, and there are several connectors and integration points for third-party applications, such as a SAP data services connector.

Adobe also has a series of “solutions”, which are permutations of web content management, analytics, document processing, social media and so on. There is also a Unified Workspace, currently in beta, which is a dashboard application.

The company’s line is that it is well placed to address the challenge of the mobile revolution, and to bring greater usability and social interaction to business applications, the consumerization of IT.

Although that sounds a strong pitch, melding all this together into something new while keeping hold of existing developers and designers is a challenge. Another issue for Adobe is that the company’s strong presence in design, multimedia and marketing makes it hard to appeal to more general enterprise developers. Nevertheless, the combination of Fielding’s influence and Adobe’s strength in design, documents and cross-platform clients makes this a platform worth watching.

adobe, professional, software development

Adobe Flash Builder now targets Apple iOS, BlackBerry PlayBook, Google Android

June 20, 2011 onlyconnect

Adobe has released Flash Builder 4.5.1, a free update to Flash Builder 4.5. The big news is that it now targets Apple iOS as well as Google Android and BlackBerry Tablet OS (as used in the PlayBook).

Although Apple iOS support in Flash Builder was announced when Creative Suite 5.5 was released, it has only now been made available. I will be testing the new support shortly so check back soon. In my simple cross-platform test app, mobile AIR was one of the better performers on Android, so if performance is good on iOS as well this will prove a useful tool.

adobe, bbc, flash, google, linux, open source, professional, software development, Web

Cross-platform concerns as Adobe abandons AIR for Linux

June 16, 2011 onlyconnect

Adobe is giving up on AIR for Linux – at least, in a fully supported manner:

To support the variety of Linux-based platforms across PCs and devices, we are prioritizing a Linux porting kit for AIR (including source code), which Open Screen Project (OSP) partners can use to complete implementations of AIR for Linux-based platforms on PCs, mobile devices, TVs and TV-connected devices. We will no longer be releasing our own versions of Adobe AIR and the AIR SDK for desktop Linux, but expect that one or more of our partners will do so. The last Adobe release of AIR for desktop Linux is AIR 2.6.

This is a curious message. OSP partners include ARM, Intel, the BBC, Google, Toshiba and other big names; but which of these might build an AIR SDK and on what sort of terms might it be supplied? Or it is more likely that, say, the BBC will deliver BBC iPlayer for LInux in a bundle that includes the AIR runtime? Or is it just wishful thinking?

Adobe’s open source evangelist Dave McAllister has a go at defending the decision, pointing out that the growing client operating systems are Android and iOS, not desktop Linux, and that AIR for Linux accounts for only a 0.5% download share. However, Linux developers observe that Adobe’s AIR for Linux effort has always been half-hearted and tricky to install, especially on 64-bit installations. AIR itself is still 32-bit, as is the Flash Player on all systems, though there is 64-bit version in preview codenamed “Square”.

Most people run Windows or Mac desktops, and will not miss AIR for Linux. That said, decisions like this do undermine confidence in the Flash platform as a cross-platform proposition. The problem is, Flash technology is not open source and ultimately whether a particular platform is supported is a matter for Adobe, with all the commercial and political factors that implies.

The risk for Adobe is that when it abandons smaller platforms, it make open standard alternatives and in particular the collection of web technologies we call HTML5 more attractive.

adobe, apple, eclipse, google, mobile, professional, software development

Appcelerator has released Titanium Studio, IDE for cross-platform mobile development

June 14, 2011 onlyconnect

Appcelerator has released Titanium Studio, an IDE built with Aptana, the Eclipse-based IDE which the company acquired in January. It is an interesting products because it lets you build cross-platform mobile apps for Apple iOS, Google Android, and Blackberry, as well as desktop applications.

I downloaded the community edition and gave it a quick try. The download includes the Titanium SDK and is around 150MB.

Titanium Studio wanted to grab file associations for CSS, JS and PHP by default – but at least it asked first

I noticed lots of Python scripts getting installed. The install completed and I was up and running.

Running the IDE requires login, which seems intrusive. You can avoid this by going offline.

I created a new empty Android 2.2 project and got an error on first run. Required jarsigner not found. Required javac not found.

I fixed this by adding the JDK to the path and setting Java_home to the JDK; previously my Adobe CS5 install had set this to its own JRE install.

Next, I built a hello world application.

It feels like a version 1.0 release. When I clicked Run it started the emulator but did not run the app for some reason. A second run after the emulator had opened worked. Code Assist seems a bit hit or miss. There it tooltip help for some keywords, but too brief to be much use, and pressing F1 is unrewarding. No visual GUI designer. Finally, and this is purely a personal thing, the editor has a black background – something I will be sure to change soon.

Nevertheless, this is a step forward for Titanium and presuming the apps perform well I think it is significant and worth investigating.

adobe, apple, development, mobile, professional

Mobile development research shows complex picture

June 8, 2011 onlyconnect

Vision Mobile has published its report on mobile development. It is a detailed report and worth reading, though I would be wary about taking it too seriously since some of the results are puzzling. This is what the report is based on:

We spent the last few months quizzing developers and industry executives about the future of mobile. Our research included 20+ industry executives, along with 900+ developers from 75+ countries working on 8+ major platforms.

There are a few surprises. Android fragmentation is generally regarded as a problem, particularly since operators are slow or reluctant to release updates, but according to the report Android is the least fragmented platform after Apple iOS; the worst is Java ME.

Here are a couple of charts I found interesting. What kinds of apps are people paying for?