Greetings WOW Members and Web Professionals Everywhere! Bill Cullifer here with the WOW organization and the WOW Technology Minute.
Today?’s podcast is a continuation of the media coverage of the Adobe Max 2008 conference in Milan Italy. I had the pleasure of spending a few minutes with Mark Niemann-Ross, Developer Evangelist for Adobe Systems Inc. Mark?’s had a number of sessions covering a wide variety of topics including “using Adobe Flex and Air to Automate Creative Suite 4 Workflow and Use XMP Metadata to Label, Track and Manage Assets within Creative Suite.
Mark provides an excellent summary of his sessions and an overview on the products and how they enhance workflow and integration. Mark also provides additional detail and links.
Check out the three minute podcast on today’s WOW Technology Minute website.
Today’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by the Web Pro Community Challenge
Sponsored by the WOW and the Adobe corporation, the Web Pro Challenge offers an opportunity to showcase your talent, gain industry recognition, win prizes and benefit the community by designing and developing a site for a non-profit organization. For more information and all of the challenge details check out WebProChallenge.org website.
Transcript of Adobe Max 2008 Milan, Italy-Interview with Mark Niemann-Ross
Length – 5:03
BILL CULLIFER: Bill Cullifer here with the World Organization of Webmasters (WOW) and the WOW Technology Minute at Adobe MAX Milan at the Web Pro Community Challenge Table Top. I have the pleasure to be interviewing Mark Niemann-Ross, Developer Evangelist from Adobe. Thank you for agreeing to this interview Mark. I appreciate you taking the time.
You?’ve presented a couple of times, multiple times, both in San Francisco and now today in Milan. I?’m curious to know, the session had an element of Flex and Air, correct?
MARK NIEMANN-ROSS: Yes.
BILL: Could you for the subscribers of this podcast, give us a better understanding of Flex and Air and then maybe talk specifically about the elements of Flex and Air, summarize the session and a couple of walk-aways in terms of developers, designers, Web Professionals. What would you want us to know about your session on Flex and Air?
MARK: Absolutely. To back way up, the concept behind Flex and Air are really the ability to use all your Flash XML skills and transfer that into more of a front-end type of product, more of a [indecipherable] sort of thing. Up until now a lot of action script has been done in Flash, which is very time-line based. Flex is based around developing an application that allows you to talk to a database service. Air is very much like Flex except that instead of running inside of a browser, Air runs on your desktop. You don?’t need a browser. You can take it and run it somewhere and not even be connected to the Internet and still be used for work. It?’s something that you?’d want to take a look at, especially if you?’re doing Web work. It?’s not an answer to every solution but it?’s really exciting. For us in the Creative Suite it?’s particularly exciting as we start to look at Flex as a programming model. Up until this point if you wanted to automate or integrate Creative Suite what you had to do was either go with some of the C++ interfaces or some of the scripting interfaces, alpha scripts [?], beta scripts [?], the Basic scripts, things like that.
Unfortunately what this means is that everybody out there who?’s been using Flex and Air had to learn an entirely new set of languages in order to satisfy automation-type things. This wasn?’t a problem because it used to be the Creative Suite community over here and the Web community over here. Well, now you can use and design and export to Flash and you can bring movies into Illustrator and Photoshop. It becomes very, very blurry as to what?’s in the Creative Suite and what?’s in the Web.
Along with that blurriness what we?’ve found is that many, many who were being asked to do Flash or Flex projects before are now also being asked to do integrations with the Creative Suite. So how do we bridge those two worlds? The exciting thing that we?’re introducing here is something called Switchboard Patch Panel. These are technologies that are available up on labs at adobe.com. It?’s free. You can download it. You put them into a Flex project. If you?’ve done any Flex program at all this is very simple for you to do. You link it into your project and then suddenly now you can use all of your Flex programming skills and control and automate Creative Suite.
So for example, if you had a situation where you wanted to pull up a set of pictures from Flickr, rotate those 90 or 75 degrees and do an image correction because they?’re all photographed under fluorescent light for example. Well, you could do that by hand. Download the image, bring it into Photoshop, do the correction, do the rotation and send it back out again. Or you go do it, if you chose to, in one of the scripting languages, assuming that you know how to Apple script in Visual Basic. But if you know Flex or Air, you already know how to go and get images from Flickr, Air allows you to download those to a local partner and now using Switchboard you could then pass those individual images on to Photoshop, ask it to do the manipulation and then come back. Again, that?’s a way of leveraging all of that information you have about programming Air and even Flex and integrating it in Creative Suite. Again, that?’s done by a technology called Switchboard. It?’s available on labs.adobe.com. It?’s free and it includes complete documentation.
BILL: Excellent summary. I certainly appreciate your perspective and your time today Mark.
MARK: Sure. I?’m glad to have you around and folks, if you get to MAX, we look forward to seeing you.
BILL: Thank you.
Today?’s WOW Technology Minute is brought to you by Web Pro Community Challenge. Sponsored by WOW and the Adobe Corporation the Web Pro Community Challenge offers an opportunity to showcase your talent, gain industry recognition, win prizes and benefit the community by designing and developing a site for a non-profit organization. For more information check out the WebProChallenge.org.