It’s been a while since this blog has been updated as I have been incredibly busy. I’m going to blog a bit of what I’ve been up to for the past several months. Then I hope to be blogging a bit more regularly, as there’s a bunch of topics that I would like to write about. It’s just a matter of finding the time to type out my thoughts.

Last November 2008 at FlashInTO (the Toronto Flash user group), I was one of the people presenting on some of the new technology announced at Adobe MAX 2009. I did not attend Adobe MAX, but had been closely following all the announcements and was investigation into some of them on my own. I ended up doing 2 small overview presentations one on Cocomo (which has seen been renamed to Adobe Flash Collaboration Service) and the other on the Text Layout Framework (TLF). Both are really cool technologies that I think have the potential to have big impacts on web applications.

The presentation at FlashInTO went quite well, presenting to somewhere between 20 and 30 people. What is quite interesting is that I posted my presentation up on SlideShare and the following day I was surprised to find out it was up on the front page of SlideShare as one of their featured presentations. Then very quickly a good 1000 people had viewed my small little presentation. It’s currently over 3000 views and even more surprising to me is that if you do a Google search for “Text Layout Framework Flash” my presentation is on the first page of results.

Here’s my Text Layout Framework presentation:

Here’s my Cocomo presentation:

Thoughts on Text Layout Framework
Years ago back in the Flash Player 5 and 6 days, I remember that text in Flash used to be a big weakness, as it didn’t render very nicely and as clearly compared to text in the browser. However, Macromedia and then Adobe have done a great job in improving Flash’s text capabilities. Now with the new text engine in Flash Player 10, Adobe has managed to push text in Flash beyond what is capable in the browser. Apparently, it was the InDesign team that worked on the new Flash text engine and the result is basically the abilities of a desktop publishing software inside of the Flash Player. Which is something we would have never seen had Adobe not bought out Macromedia.

In the many months it’s gotten taken me to post this to my blog there’s been 2 fairly large public projects using the TLF: the New York Times Reader 2.0 and Adobe’s Presentations. While the NYT Reader is taking advantage of the offline capabilities found in AIR, I think one of the reasons they ended up using Flash as a solution is the TLF which they were able to use to create a look closer to a newspaper. As Flash Player 10 penetration numbers increase and companies feel more comfortable with using Flash Player 10, I think we are going to see a lot more cool projects using the TLF. I can see designers pushing Flash for more web projects so that they can have the same control over the typography that they do in desktop publishing, without having to resort of images of text.

Thoughts on Adobe Flash Collaboration Service
I don’t think it will be quite as big of a game changer as TLF is, but it’s still amazing how quickly developers can add multi-user functionality to any Flex application using Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS). It’s too bad Adobe didn’t keep the name Cocomo, which stood for something (common collaboration model) and sounded cool rather than it’s new name which is bit of a mouth full. I imagine that one barrier for some will be having to use Adobe’s servers to use this technology and it remains to be seen how pricing will go. However, multi-user applications seem to be on the rise, so it will be interesting to see where this goes. Colin Moock’s Union will be another option to create multi-user Flash applications, but I’ve yet to take too close of a look into Union to see how it compares to AFCS.