Adrian Parr’s Blog

Have you ever wondered what version of the Adobe AIR Runtime you have installed on your computer? Well, if you have then you’ve probably found it difficult to find out. Luckily Jason Madsen has built a simple AIR App that will tell you. It does what it says on the tin. Very handy!

BTW, if you want to know what version of the Flash Player you have installed in your browser just visit www.playerversion.com to find out. Thanks Aral.

A blog focussing on the Open Source Media Framework has just been launched. Product Manager Sumner Paine has posted a couple of blog posts. I’d recommend adding their RSS feed to your aggregator of choice.

Find out more …

• http://blogs.adobe.com/osmf/
• http://www.opensourcemediaframework.com
• http://opensource.adobe.com

Last week Mike Downey announced that he has taken a new job with the Microsoft Developer & Platform Evangelism team for Silverlight. Those of you that have been in the Flash world for a while will know that Mike was Flash’s senior product manager for a number of years. He has always been a great advocate of Flash, Interactive Media and RIAs. His departure from Adobe at the end of 2008 came as something of a shock and I was sure that we hadn’t seen the last of him. I think Microsoft have made a shrewd move employing the talents of Mike and I wish him well with his new position. The competition from Silverlight can only be a good thing for the Flash Platform and the RIA industry as a whole.

You can follow him on Twitter here.

This morning I finally got around to watching an interview Colin Moock did with Jim Corbett back at Flash In The Can 2008 in Toronto. Jim is one of the software engineers working at Adobe on the Flash Player. The interview is 50 minutes long and has some interesting insights in to the Flash Player, the history and culture of the team behind it and they discuss current and possible future directions the Flash Player will take.

Watch the video here.

Today Adobe officially released Flex 3 and AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) for the desktop. I won’t say too much about them here, as there is already plenty of info out there in the blogosphere. If you want to find out more, follow the links provided.

I just did a quick Google search for “adobe air” and the sixth result was this website (www.adobeair.com) for air conditioning units. I did a quick Whois Lookup on the domain and it looks like they are genuine and have had that domain name registered since 1999. Just a coincidence?

Here is a list of things I want to look in to during 2008. If there is anything you think I should check out but have missed off this list then let me know.

1. Papervision3D
2. Tweener
3. TweenLite
4. Go (Go ActionScript Animation Platform)
5. KitchenSync
6. Xray (The AdminTool)
7. AS3 Bulk Loader Library
8. SWX: SWF Data Format
9. Adobe Flex 2 & 3
10. Adobe AIR
11. Eclipse and FDT 3.0
12. Cairngorm
13. PureMVC
14. ActionScript 3.0
15. SWFAddress

Not necessarily in that order. Wish me luck!

Last week O’Reilly launched the InsideRIA website, a portal/blog for Rich Internet Application developers around the world. It looks like it is going to be a great resource and it currently has articles written by respected people such as Colin Moock, Rich Tretola,  Tony Hillerson, David Tucker, Tony MacDonell,  Andrew Trice,  Andre Charland, Jonathan Snook and Raymond Camden.

The also have an InsideRIA Atom feed (which I have added to my Google homepage).

The Adobe on AIR Bus Tour is coming to Europe (minus the bus) this summer. At the time of writing the details (locations and dates) are still being finalised. Keep up-to-date by checking the Bus Tour Weblog and the on AIR Weblog. You can also follow the tour via video, Twitter and Flickr.

Here is a link to the Adobe Developer Connection website. It always worth checking here regularly to see what new information there is. There is a lot of content on there. Personally, I quite like the new(-ish) design.