Anyway, Fireworks CS5 has been garnering a bit of attention lately from 2011 Adobe Max last week. I recently viewed David Hogue’s “I did not know that you can do that in Fireworks” presentation on Adobe TV. Through his presentation, he gave us a wealth of tips and information on extensions and commands that you can download.

I took note of two sites dedicated for extensions and commands:

• Aaron Beall – Fireworks Guru
• John Dunning’s Fireworks Extensions

So after playing around with Eclipse and scouring the web, I landed on insideRIA and decided that the manual update was my best bet. But that did not pan out since the the manual update failed.

So finally by checking the Adobe Flex Support page, I had to pay attention to “Eclipse plug-in Users” heading instead of “Stand-alone Users.” Plugin users have to uninstall their plugin and reinstall the new plugin. BTW, by default, the stand-alone is offered so just scroll down the combo box to choose the Eclipse Plugin. (See screen shot below.)

Alas, this is part of my learning process of migrating as a Flash developer from the Flash IDE with FlashDevelop to Flash Builder.

So if anyone who is wondering why Flash Builder hasn’t updated on their eclipse build, check it out here at adobe.com.

DJ

Select the Eclipse Plugin in the dropdown box.

The 64bit issue has been mentioned as well.

Check out the link: http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20009940-264.html?tag=TOCmoreStories.0

DJ

The article is linked below:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-20008290-264.html

My prediction: They’ll announce it at MAX 2010. (I hope.)

DJ

http://jessewarden.com/2010/04/steve-jobs-on-flash-correcting-the-lies.html ,

http://l33.me/apples-ceo-entered-an-insanity-plea-as-the-re (From Flash and Flex Designers Magazine May 2010), and

from an e-learning development perspective: http://www.upsidelearning.com/blog/index.php/2010/05/05/is-html5-ready-for-elearning-development

For a visual, here:  http://theflashblog.com/?p=1975 This debunks Job’s argument that Flash does not have multitouch capability.

I think there is a lot of media attention and Jobs is leveraging the internet to make its claims and people believe them. We know that the web produces good content as well as bad content. So I don’t think we are able to get the whole picture of the situation. I think that the public is veering towards Jobs’ view without examining all the facts.

Another thing is the Federal Trade Commission is investigating Apple into its developer licensing.

http://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/news/1604061/apple-microsoft

This means that Apple will only let developers create applications with their own tools instead of third party tools. So what does this mean for a developer? You have to create one app for Apple iProducts and use tools like Flash  for everything else.

The advantage for Jobs  is that Apple gets to control the App store by determining which app goes on and comes off. Enabling Flash on said iProducts would probably put a dent on the iStore app market. Who would need to buy a game when you can play it for free when developed in Flash on a website? It’s simply makes marketing sense  in order for Apple to generate its revenue. Who can blame them?

As for HTML5, Adobe is supporting that too. Grant Skinner commented “Why can’t we love HTML5 and Flash at the same time too?” But currently, HTML5 is rough on the edges. (It’s currently a draft specification not final. And knowing how the ECMA4 specification failed when Adobe, Microsoft, Apple, and other companies could not make an agreement, it may be a while before HTML5 is finalized and how it is implemented for every browser.) Perhaps it will be a good alternative for video delivery for the future. Still, Flash (or Silverlight for that matter), can produce rich applications and would probably still innovate and push technologies like JQuery and HTML5 to update their APIs.

I observe a lot of negative comments mostly from Apple Fanboys who detest Flash. (Maybe I am a Flash fanboy.) But Flash has been saving me a lot of grief to create web based sites and applications without having to know the DOM intricacies between Firefox, Safari, IE, Opera, and so on. (Well, I know this is resolved by using JQuery.) I just think the software that Adobe produces are very cool and I enjoy developing with them.

I don’t own an iPhone or an iPad. I think they are really cool. My kids love them. Developers who make applications for these devices are of excellent quality. I also think that developing games with Unity that can port to these devices is also a big plus for 3D gaming for these devices. It would be a shame if Apple tells them they can’t develop applications for their platform.

So far from my experience, Windows OS platform dominates the e-learning market, so owning a Mac is a nice to have. (This changed when E-learning suite 2 was announced yesterday which now supports the MAC OS.) Besides, Adobe has been a huge supporter of this market. To me, it would be a a bonus if I could develop e-learning apps in any kind of OS. So to develop iApps with just one development environment – namely Flash CS5 is a bonus.

Just my opinion.

I had recently worked through a quick tutorial on FreeSpin3D on the Adobe Edge magazine December 2009 edition. I had noticed this software through an ad on Flex and Flash developer magazine and so I had decided to check out the demo. Of course, using 3D in real-time to design your site is very cool and convenient. The 3D Phone above is simply applying a motion tween on the layer containing the 3D object and using the trackball to change the rotation about the y-axis.

Here are some of my notes during my tutorial experience:

1)    CPU resources take a hit during development and during rendering. Would it be preferable to be working off a workstation during the design? Regardless, even on the freespin 3D website, the rotating the IPod was chugging along. I wonder if it is an issue with my computer? (However, it is a year old and runs off a dual core Centrino, it should be responding well.)

2)    Behaviors:

• Mouse control doesn’t respond well

• Adding behaviours can be finicky. In some cases, I could not delete the behaviors I worked with.

3)    I would have liked to manually enter the x-y-z rotation values in text fields beside the trackball – feature request perhaps?

4)    It’s nice that they offer a 20% discount when you download the tutorial. This is fair for those who have really tried out the software.

Update: Flash Magazine.com had an excellent review posted.

I tweeted RJ Jacquez, senior product evangelist for the E-learning and Tech Comm suites, and asked him since Adobe produces Robohelp, why wasn’t a Robohelp used for the help for the CS4 suites? It turns out that they did not have enough time, but the Captivate 4 team managed to include it. (See screen shot below.) This is a taste that you will find when CS5 is released. (I hope not too soon, I am just getting used to CS4.)

Adobe version 2 is based off Adobe AIR. It has a much improved interface and using AIR’s internet detection features, a user is permitted the user to toggle between “online” and “offline” help modes via the circle icon at the bottom right corner of the interface. I really like the comment pod (see the caption icon on the menu bar on top) where you can insert private notes or upload your comments to the Adobe community.

• http://www.aescripts.com
• http://www.creativecow.net
• http://maltaannon.com
• http://www.motionscript.com
• http://www.videocopilot.net

Enjoy!

DJ