Use en_gb locale to download Flash Media Server - Dev Edition

I saw a twitter log from someone mentioning that he couldn't download Flash Media Interactive Server 3- Developer Edition, that was released yesterday. I tried it this morning, and happened to have the same problem.

The 'Download Adobe Flash Media Development Server 3' page shows up, and and it doesn't show Flash Media Server download bar, but lists Flash and Coldfusion as related downloads.

I went to the downloads homepage and tried it again, and this time the page reloaded, with 'ADobe United Kingdom on the titlebar'. And I noticed that the locale in the URL changed to en_gb now, and the download was available! Looks like, Adobe doesn't want US developers to download FMIS yet ;o)

Here is the url that works: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/tdrc/index.cfm?product=flashmediaserver&loc=en_gb

This, am sure is a temporary issue. Hopefully Adobe will get this fixed in by the time you read this post ;o)

Cheers!

Sun microsystem acquires MySQL AB for $1 billion

Sun Microsystems is taking the plunge into the database market with the purchase of open source database developer MySQL for $1 billion

With the move, announced Wednesday, Sun takes a big leap into the $15 billion database market and pits it against the likes of Microsoft, IBM and Oracle

via ZDNet

Sun CEO Jonathan Shwartz has a detailed writeup on his blog here

apple rumours site 'thinksecret.com' dies

Apple had sued thinksecret.com back in Jan 2005, alleging that recent postings on the site contain "Apple trade secrets"

And today thinksecret posted an announcement stating they have reached a settlement with apple and as a result, thinksecret would no longer be published!

Thinksecret.com has been around since since 1999.

R.I.P

Bangalore FUG organizes a nationwide RIA conference - initRIA - 1 seat left

"initRIA is the first of its kind Rich Internet Applications developer conference in India. I, along with some other members of the Bangalore Flex User Group, am organizing this conference with the hope of providing a platform for RIA enthusiasts around the country to interact and learn. You can know more about the conference at our FAQs page." , says organizer Mrinal Wadhwa.

At the time of writing this post, there is just 1 more seat left!
If you are in Bangalore area, and haven't registered yet, GO REGISTER!

Singapore FUG meet - 14th nov 2007

This post has been overdue for a longtime now, blame it on my laziness.

We had the first FUG meet in Singapore on Wednesday evening. It was a great start, I should say. We had more attendees than we expected. Finally looks like the UG meetings here are starting to become more interactive! And to top it up, we had a good bunch of adobe folks joining in!!

Unlike last year (and before) this year Adobe decided not to 'MAX' in Singapore.

Marianne Young, our contact point for the UG activities in Singapore had attended the MAX conference at Europe. And for this UG meet she agreed to do a presentation about things she saw and liked at MAX. Sorta like a highlight. To be honest, I was expecting just a simple presentation with pics she probably snapped during live presentations. Boy! She went ahead and collected real demo material that was used in the actual MAX presentations. A whole bunch of them!! And did a great session to kick start the meeting.

Her session included demos for Flash player 10 - hydra, text improvements etc, thermo, etc. Thanks Marianne, you are awesome!

And during the presentation we had a surprise guest peeking in. Prayank Swaroop, the Flex Evangelist for Asia Pacific is in Singapore for some internal projects and he dropped by at the meet as well. And so did Jack Lim, the BD manager for Enterprise BU from adobe. Suddenly our small little user group meet looked so filled up with celebs ;o)

The second session was from our own homeboy, Lionel/Flashmech. He presented about the PV3D based Effects classes that Tink has put through. Like his session before in the FSUG meet, he did a very impressive job here too!





We also had Stefano Virgilli of AdobeSoftwares.com join us in the meet! Its great to have you Stefano in Singapore!.
He did a brief intro about the upcoming Flex camp and other events. Check out the event pages here:

http://flexcamp-singapore.eventbrite.com/
http://cs3-mobile-workflow.eventbrite.com/
http://flash-lite-integration.eventbrite.com/

I'll be attending the FlexCamp for sure. Haven't decided about the rest yet.


And ArulKumaran mentioned that he will be in India for the next couple months. You'll be missed in the upcoming UG events!

I got a few more pics of the event on my picasaweb album

Thanks everyone for coming. And thanks to Shunjie for putting things together to make the event happen :)

See you all at the next month's event! Go ahead and post your thoughts about what sessions you'd like to see next month here

Singapore Flex User Group meeting

After a couple of months of silence, the Singapore Flex User Group is back again. Its got its own home now - and we have a forum set up as well for discussions.

The first meetup of singapore FUG is gonna happen on the 14th of November. Check out the details here. If you are in singapore, and are excited about Flash platform development and Flex in particular, do join us for the meet!

Adobe will be sponsoring some food and drinks, and Shunjie has promised to give away some free eclipse as well ;o)

Google's experimental site - searchmash - has a Flash UI

Searchmash has been around for more than a year now, and their current UI has been written in Flex!

A few things that I noted:

Their data transfer with the search server is in JSON.
Google maps is being loaded on an iFrame over the SWF.

pretty cool. The only problem I see with this approach is, If a user right clicks on the SWF and selects the 'settings' option, he's pretty much stuck. Only way to get over it would be to refresh the page. This is because the Flash app pops up the settings modal window, and since the iframe sits above the flash app, the user can never interact with the settings window.

I like how they've integrated a video search tab - which searches for the video in google videos ( and hence, youtube) and loads the video player swf from the corresponding site. Simple, and neat.

Techcrunch isn't very thrilled about the app being Flash. They question 'why flash'; and I ask, 'why not?' I mean- searchmash is a site for experiments, isn't it?
The author of the techcrunch article wonders if Flash is as fast as AJAX, and quickly decides to assume its not! He should probably take a look at the benchmarks here

Searchmash also shows snapshots of the results , using snap.com's technology. Apparently, guys at snap.com are very thrilled about this: http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/25/breaking-major-news/

simplespark - a download.com for webapplications

Check it out: http://simplespark.com/

I was amazed at the catalogue for video apps they had. It ran into 28 pages! How many people out there can name something other than youtube?

Flex 3 Beta 2, AIR Beta 2, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Share, Buzzword, FlashLite 3.0....

Spry, Flash player9 update, AIR update for Flash CS3, AIR update for dreamweaver ...
Phew!

All those are available today. And probably more!. Check out Adobe Labs homepage, and its almost full of brand new builds!

FlashLite announcement press release is available here. ( Btw, I heard from some highly reliable sources, that FlashLite 4.0 - planned for 2008 is gonna have AS3 support!!! )

Share is another product (Also built using Flex!) from adobe that goes public today. I see it as an online storage + flash paper thing. It lets you import . Nice to see that adobe also offers a 'widget' to include documents from share to your own webpage. I guess its the first widget from the company that helped all ( or almost all?) companies to create their webpage embed-able widgets? Ironic, hmm?

I also got an invite for Buzzword, if you don't have an invite yet, go ahead and check register yourself at http://preview.getbuzzword.com/. You might get lucky as well!

Like Ryan posted earlier today -"Big Day for Adobe" indeed!

Adobe buys virtub - buzzword

A few weeks back I saw an article on wired.com suggesting that adobe might move into Office tools market. My immediate guess was that they would buy virtub's Buzzword. I was so sure about it, I went ahead and posted about it.

And today Robert Scoble and Ryan Stewart posted the news about Adobe's acquisition of Virtub!

I also another prediction about sliderocket in the same post. Go ahead adobe, make me proud! ;o)