JD on EP

Ryan Stewart had an essay on Sept 6 about how JS/CSS/HTML engines not only vary at a given moment, but can change across time too... the HTML 4.0 spec suddenly outlawed LAYER and EMBED tags and broke the web, so there's historical precedent for what he writes.

Techworld described "zCodec", an apparent scam which offered improved video and audio improvements but which actually delivered malware. (I'm looking forward to the Apollo project, in the hope that we can safely offer desktop persistence, without the trust requirements for installing native code from strangers.)

Beautiful visualization of air traffic patterns, rendered in Adobe After Effects and delivered as QuickTime video.

Someone likes the Acrobat icon for layer cakes.... ;-)

CNET analyzes the current state of mobile web, but I think there will always be different presentation needs for different form facts, different situational use... the big ol' hypertext-document model doesn't seem appropriate for info retrieval on the go.

TechKnow had an article end of August comparing Google Web Toolkit (which lets Java writers compile to JavaScript) with Flex... I'd credit the author but don't see a name on the page, and I'm too lazy to WhoIs again. (As a sidenote, I don't see how JavaScript can provide "richness"... you'd need to extend the browser to get simple audio or video, for instance.)

Om Malik shunned Google hosted applications for privacy reasons.

Elliot Back apparently wrote a routine which could be used to scam Google AdSense and pollute the blogosphere... he got slammed by Scoble, which may or may not indicate an actual problem, and I never got around to testing his work myself.

People try Microsoft's XNA kit for XBox development, and would prefer that it work like Flash.

Ryan Stewart noticed that some of the InterAKT group will be working with Flex.... ;-)

Details on audio improvements in Vista.

James Governor writes: "Adobe doesn't seem to be ruining the Macromedia community-building mojo, which was always a risk. Indeed Adobe is becoming more open and more conversational and using blogs and other cool stuff."

Amalgamated search engine tips from Matt Cutts of Google. (I'm not sure of the Vanessa Fox material, though, 'cause I recall Matt rebutting that elsewhere.)

Y Design Awards is seeking votes on UK SWF projects, but I'm not sure whether they accept out-of-the-country voters.

John Nack is the best source of info for confusion on a Creative Suite updater which got fouled by some type of OS update.

On Sept 12 Slashdot had a debate on "The Future of Rich Internet Applications", which did not appear in their main index. While reading the commentary, the main between-the-lines work seems to be figuring out what the writer *doesn't* know....

Washington Post (linkrot alert) tells of a content provider who withdrew their video content after a Microsoft video DRM exploit -- some people who produce video content *do* want to know how their work is being used.

Happy Birthday to Adobe Mobile and Devices User Group of Boston!

Yakov Fain points out some of the frequently-ignored realities of clientside capability.

Andrew Shorten has a great list of current Flex deployments in the UK.

TechCrunch examines AmateurIllustrator, a social site for illustrators.

Back in August, Chris Pirillo advised on ways to avoid the bloggy echo chamber... of course, the article then got crosslinked into the aggregators.... ;-)

There's a specs-first article on possible CSS changes: "Many exciting new functions and features are being thought up for CSS3. We will try and showcase some of them on this page, when they get implemented in either Firefox, Opera or Safari/Webkit."

Yakov Fain has more Flex info for people coming from the enterprise Java side of things.

Bill Predmore of Pop! Multimedia is interviewd about the early days of Flash, its use on MSN, Bill Nye the Science Guy, more.

MarketingProfs.com cites the reaction to the Adobe acquisition by the development community.

Marcin Wichary hosts a collection of classic Flash splash screens.

Rich Ziade talks about minimizing artwork to first study gameplay... great tips.

Interview with Alan Stubbs deals with photo-illusion.

An article on the future of imaging goes into much detail on how Adobe Acrobat 3D allows for interactive models in documentation, and the future employment opportunities in this area.

Adobe staffer Damon Cooper quells questions about JRun and ColdFusion, on David Fekke's blog.

Om Malik writes at CNN Money on the movement to widgets in webpages. (Encapsulation and namespace collisions remain a problem with HTML implementations.)

Details on keyboard input of FlashLite-enabled Sony Ericsson M600i mobile phone.

ITWorld Canada examines accessibility issues of dynamic websites.

Caroline Jarrett examines why some people prefer to use paper forms instead of electronic forms. (Acrobat technology already has ways to roundtrip from paper to bits and back again.)

Adobe staffer Ben Forta notes that future product development depends mostly on the audience for the tool, not on whether it partially competes against other Adobe technology.

On2 Technologies had big excitement on their live Flash videocasting... I don't have much original information, but it sure sounds good.

Nick Bradbury noted that Rhino Software has been working for ten years now... geesh, we're all getting old or something.... ;-)

Experiments with running IE & Flash under WINE on Linux.

Google promotes banned books, but I'm a little skeptical of all these western corporate bookchains congratulating themselves on offending Judeo-Christians when they avoid posing meaningful questions to those who wish to destroy them. (Oriana Fallaci, thank you... I still don't shop at Borders Books... France prosecutes bloggers who question authority.)