Adobe User Group - Gujarat

Adobe announced support and a special version of flash player to Google and Yahoo! to make the searching in Flash or Flex applications or Rich Internet applications better.

My Personal View:

This is really a good news for me personally and of course it’s good for all flash developers and who have content in Flash SWFs. So far everyone was trying to optimize their flash applications and other techniques to read XML content to give somewhat assurance that Google or Yahoo! will find something from their content. But now Google and Yahoo! can search and in fact view virtually SWFs and click at every links, menus or buttons like their robots / spiders are doing it with normal HTML content in web pages.

SEO Industry Perspective:

This news means a lot for SEO industry as well. Most of my clients were doing argument that, If we are making this whole application in Flash, don’t you think that searching the content would be a problem? Or I will not get much hits through search engines and blah blah. So now, all the flash and flex developers can answer their clients with single sentence that Flash is now search-able too.

So in deep view, what exactly it does and how everything is possible now and why it was not there before? These are the main question everybody should be asking to their own and trying to find out answers for the same. Here you go:

Why searching in a Flash content was not possible till now?

The reason is simple. SWF is a binary file, not an ASCII file where a spider can read it like it is reading some text file. But still, Google and other search engines were trying to read somewhat information about the SWF through the comments posted in HTML file. These comments were generated automatically by Adobe DreamWeaver or by Adobe Flash IDE, while you are generating SWF file or embedding SWF file into the HTML or other scripted pages. So at that time, these IDEs were trying to find out all the static text contents from the SWF files and it was creating a string of all these contents and putting that as comments inside HTML file. So Google and other search engines were able to read that much part of SWF and whatever content was there. So the searching functionality was there but it was too limited. It was not there at all for dynamic contents you are dealing with inside Flash content, which is very common for all the Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

Why searching in a Flash content is possible now?

Now Adobe is trying to open boundaries by opening SWF file format and some other protocols. Adobe wants that more and more third party vendors use Flash SWF as part of their platform, solution or services. So part of that whole strategy, Adobe provided some special version of Flash Player to Google and Yahoo! which they can integrate with their current searching technology tools and spiders to search and store the static and dynamic content in to their database. So with direct help of Adobe, Google and other search engines can virtually surf the Flash content. They can virtually click on various links, menus etc., inside SWF and can store all the data comes in between. So, SWF works like a HTML page and search engines can store the data like they are crawling the HTML pages.

What I need to do if my site contains SWF files to make them search-able by Google?

Absolutely nothing! That’s the great part of the deal. Adobe gave Google and Yahoo! a special version of Flash Player and Google already integrated that player into their searching tools / spiders. It also automatically available for all the flash player versions. Means, it really doesn’t matter that your SWF is compatible with Adobe Flash Player version 6 or 9.

Here is the video from Ryan’s Video, which we can consider as official Adobe statement:

Other Interesting Links / URLs:

• Official Adobe Devnet Article about Flash Searchability
• Official Google Webmaster Central Blog post about Flash Indexing and FAQs

Adobe labs announces Adobe Dreamweaver Beta. You can download Adobe Dreamweaver Beta from here.

Adobe Dreamweaver Beta includes following new features ::

Live View

View your web pages under real-world browser conditions with the new Live View in Dreamweaver — while still retaining direct access to the code. The new rendering mode, which uses the open source rendering engine WebKit, displays your designs like a standards-based browser.

Related Files

Manage the various files that make up the modern web page more efficiently in Dreamweaver. The Related Files feature displays all the documents associated with your current page, whether CSS, JavaScript, PHP, or XML, in a bar along the top of your document.

Code Navigator

The new Code Navigator pop-up window shows you all the code sources that affect your current selection. A click in either Code or Design view brings up the Code Navigator pop-up, which displays CSS rules, server-side includes, external JavaScript functions, Dreamweaver templates, Library files, iframe source files, and more.

CSS best practices

The Property inspector’s new CSS tab shows the styles for the current selection as well as all the applicable CSS rules. Hover over any property to view a tool tip with jargon-free English explanations of CSS principles. New CSS rules can be created and applied in the Property inspector panel and stored in the same document or an external style sheet.

Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks

Write JavaScript more quickly and accurately with improved support for JavaScript core objects and primitive data types. Work with popular JavaScript frameworks including jQuery, Prototype, and Spry.

HTML data sets

With HTML data sets functionality, you can create your data in a standard HTML table, a series of div tags, or even an unordered list and then choose Insert > Spry > Spry Data Set to integrate that data into a dynamic table on the page with sortable columns, a master-detail layout, or other sophisticated displays.

Photoshop Smart Objects

Photoshop and Dreamweaver integration has evolved to the next level of compatibility and functionality. Drag and drop an Adobe Photoshop® PSD file into a Dreamweaver page to create an image Smart Object.

Subversion integration

Dreamweaver integrates Subversion software for a more robust check-in/check-out experience with file versioning, rollback, and more. Once you’ve defined Subversion as your version control system, you can update your site to get the latest versions of its pages directly from within Dreamweaver; no third-party utility or command-line interface is required.

Adobe® AIR™ authoring support

Create multiplatform desktop applications from your Dreamweaver HTML and JavaScript sites with new Adobe AIR™ authoring support.

New user interface

Work faster and smarter across Dreamweaver and other components of the next version of Adobe Creative Suite® thanks to a new level of integration and common user interface elements.

Read the release notes for additional details regarding the Dreamweaver beta.

Just heard that MXNA is now back again, possibly with new scalable hardware and more power. It is also now re-branded as Adobe Feeds. Now can read the Adobe News Paper again every morning :)

Great work Mike and his team. Keep it up.

Adobe today announces new version of Acrobat Connect Pro.

Here are interesting updates for Developer and End user perspective:

1. It does have support of editing the recording. Yes, now you can edit your meetings recoreded previously. That is really cool feature so you can remove unnecessory items from it and can have neat and clean content. Very good for Universities so they can have meeting recorded and edited for perfect reference for some subject or topic.
2. Integration with IMs. With new version of Acrobat Connect Pro, you can see your friends and mates inside meetings. I still not experienced the new version but still, guessing you should able to invite them to join meeting etc.,
3. Improved LMS support for e-learning. Now Acrobat Connect Pro supports tight integration with LMS. A meeting room can be splitted in to some sections for seperate discussion for group of students. With other improvements in e-learning through Acrobat Connect Pro, Adobe tried the best to minimize the distance between virtual class room and the actual class rooms.
4. New version of Adobe Presenter. Adobe also launched new version of Adobe Presenter along with Acrobat Connect Pro, which is add-on to facilitate smoother experience of meetings. In this new version of Adobe Presenter, Now you can have complex puzzle creation support with randomization. There is also improvement in working with video in Adobe Presenter. Now you can also publish your presentation(s) to Mobile Devices and inside PDF too.

Availability:

According to press release, it should be available at end of May, 2008 with languages listed below:

1. English
2. French
3. German
4. Spanish
5. Dutch
6. Italian
7. Brazilian Portuguese
8. Japanese
9. Korean
10. Simplified Chinese

Important Links:

• Adobe
• Press Release
• Adobe Acrobat Connect Pro

Adobe today announces AIR 1.0. In their words, here are how it’s important for Developers and for How it’s good for business.

For Developers:

The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. It’s for all developers like AJAX, Adobe Flex Developers and Adobe Flash Developers.

Developer Links:

• Download AIR
• Download Free Adobe AIR SDK

Business Benefits:

Adobe AIR offers an exciting new way to engage customers with innovative, branded desktop applications, without requiring changes to existing technology, people, or processes. Click here to know more on this.

Here are other important links:

• Get AIR Applications
• Get started
• Showcase applications
• Browser vs. Desktop
• System Requirements
• AIR Developer Center
• Download AIR applications
• AIR FAQs
• AIR for AJAX Developers
• AIR for FLEX Developers
• AIR for FLASH Developers

Last month Yahoo! released version 1.1 of Yahoo! ASTRA libraries for Flash and Flex. Based on community feedback, they revised it and came up with a maintenance release as 1.1.1. Hence there are no new components but many fixes to minor bugs. Here are release notes from Josh Tynjala directly:

AlertManager (Flash)

• Bug fix: Alert dialog lost focus if the user selected the text and then hit the tab key.

Charts (Flash)

• Improved animation and invalidation of markers.
• Bug fix: Setting axis maximum less than the value of an origin-based marker (column, bar) hides the marker.
• Bug fix: With large data sets, line charts are displayed offset from the left, which hides some data on the right
• Bug fix: Axis displays improperly when all items have the same value.
• Bug fix: Infinite loop when calculating minimum and maximum values in some cases.
• Bug fix: PieChart displays the wrong category when values are primitive and equal.

MenuBar (Flash)

• Bug fix: Selected menubar button lost focus if it was toggled very quickly with keyboard shortcuts.
• Bug fix: Skin conflicts between Menu and MenuBar.

TabBar (Flash)

• Bug fix: Styles like textFormat are not passed through to tabs.
• Bug fix: focusIndex setter tries to access buttons before they are created.

AutoCompleteManager (Flex)

• New events
• Added API for adjusting minimum disk space requirements
• Bug fix: caret bug when changing selection of completion dropdown
• Bug fix: itemToLabel bug on certain types of entries
• Bug fix: loopSelection quirkiness

This updated version is available on Yahoo! Flash Developer Center as following:

• Download ASTRA Flash components (1.1.1)
• Download ASTRA Flex components (1.1.1)

Via - http://www.yswfblog.com/blog/2008/02/20/announcing-astra-111/

Today adobe announces new version of Adobe Director 11. Also with this new product release, they also announced a new release for shockwave player also.

Here are the Top features in Director 11:

• Support for more than 40 video, audio, and image file formats
• Native 3D rendering with DirectX 9 support
• Advanced physics with the included AGEIA™ PhysX™ engine
• Support for Adobe Flash CS3 Professional software and video created with Flash
• Unicode support, including multimode publishing
• Enhanced text rendering engine
• Enhanced user interface
• Enhanced Script Browser and full JavaScript support
• Bitmap filters
• Xtra plug-ins

Useful Links:

1. Adobe Director 11 Homepage
2. Detailed Features list for Director 11
3. Pre-order Director 11
4. Pre-order upgrade to Director 11

We are using FlashDevelop as our AS3 code in our daily coding since a long time at Avinashi.

FlashDevelop is came up with a new Beta 6 release for version 3 with obviously some cool features and some bug-fixes. These features are as following:

Changes:

• General UI and localization fixes and improvements
• New Bookmarks panel added for an overview of all your open documents bookmarks
• Captures Flash CS3 compiler errors in FD results panel when CS3 is called from FD
• Contextual generators (Ctrl+Shift+1) for getter/setter, event listeners, override methods, interface implementation, unknown var/method
• First class SWC integration in AS3 projects
• New in templates, set package of new project. Creates the main class with the package you provide
• You can run your project in your web browser instead of FD or external player
• Less aggressive and generally smarter completion
• Improved Flex Compiler support
• Improved Flash CS3 support

Important:

• Java 1.6+ is required for the Flex compiler (ActionScript 3).
• The Flex SDK (2 or 3) is required for ActionScript 3 development if you don’t use Flash CS3.
• Backup your customized user files and uninstall any previous versions of FlashDevelop 3.0.0.

Full Release Notes can be found here.

Download FlashDevelop 3.0.0 Beta 6 (Built from rev. 2133)

And obviously if that seems a nice editor for Flash CS3 developers, you should donate too J

Friends,

Thanks for giving your valuable time to the meeting for the general discussion about structure of user group and other discussions.  I will post photographs soon over here and you must enjoy the food.

I am glad to announce following structure of a group:

• Ashvin Savani - Group Manager and Group site admin
• Jignesh Dodiya - Backup Group Manager and Managing group users
• Naresh Khokhaneshiya - Finding out hot topic for meeting(s)
• Alpesh Vaghasiya - Group promotion and technical reading
• Paresh Khatri - Group promotion and Group site designing
• Mehul Katrodiya - Accounting / Administration of User Group

We will announce a next meeting date and venue soon. Keep watching.