New Year, New Job (Same Adobe!)
What's a better way to start a new year than a new job? In January, I moved over from our AIR group, where I was doing iPhone stuff, to our Digital Home group, helping to bring Flash in to the Digital Home and connected living room segment.
I've had an amazing time working to bring AIR to the iPhone (and now the iPad!). It was a very unique opportunity to work within the company on a small, motivated, focused and talented team to bring out what was effectively a secret project and launch it at MAX. With the CS5 launch right around the corner, it's super-exciting to see the technology ship in Flash (apparently our team is in the credits!) and get developers access to what we've been working on.
It's a very exciting change and I've been having a blast these last three months working in the new team. We've been working hard to build out our strategy and get all the pieces in place to really execute and bring out a whole new set of TV experiences over the next few years. Having spent the last few weeks traveling and talking to customers it's amazing what kind of innovation will happen in this space in the next few years. Hardware specs in TVs, Bluray Players, and set top boxes are growing rapidly which will enable content creators and developers to unlock the TV in ways we haven't seen before. To give you some flavor of this, we're seeing a quick move in the industry from 300MHz CPUs last year up to nearly GHz CPUs in the next 6-18 months.
So what is Adobe doing in the Digital Home space? Well, there's some stuff that's pretty obvious, some stuff we've shipped, and some stuff I can't mention just yet. I'm lucky enough to be working with a team that has the first release under their belt which is a Flash Lite 3.1 based runtime optimized for TV-style devices. We've got a ton of customers building content and others shipping that content on their devices. As we go in to the year we'll see a lot more devices ship with Flash. Plus, we're hard at work on the next version of our runtime and our software solution (hint: it's a lot like we've done for mobile web browsing). But more details on that later!
BTW: I'll be at NAB next week in Las Vegas if anybody is there and wants to chat about what Adobe is doing in this space. DM me @hyperionab. I'm also presenting at the theater in the Adobe booth Tuesday at 230pm in the Las Vegas Convention Center, giving a talk entitled "Extending the Adobe Flash Platform Across Screens". It'll also be on Adobe TV if you missed it and wanted to see it.
Track of the Week: Good Times by The Holdup
I've been traveling a bit the last few weeks, and it's starting to feel like spring outside. Nothing better to it off than this week's track: Good Times by The Holdup, off of Stay Gold.
It's a lazy reggae-esque track that feels like a good time hanging on on a warm summer evening, celebrating the main priority of "having a good time". The singer's voice isn't what I'd call classic reggae and he's a little high pitched but it adds to the feel good vibe the song gives.
Opening over a simple guitar riff, and building up with simple drums and the lead guitar, it's an easy song to listen to while you're waiting for the days to get longer and the sun to be warmer. "Cuz it's been a while / since the last time you smiled / and I'm waiting for the next good time".
Track of the Week: Behind the Bushes by The Knife
This week's track is Behind the Bushes by The Knife, off of Deep Cuts. I'd peg the album as a whole an electronica synth / electropop work. It's best known for the song Heartbeats which appeared in some TV commercials apparently.
This track stand out though. It's free of vocals and free of any kind of dance beat. The backing sound is a set of strings with the melody played by a flute (I seem to be picking a lot of flute music recently). Nearly through most of the song there's no rhythm section with the exception of a faint drum section as the song creschendos.
The thing that pulled this one to me is how craftily it's placed in the context of the rest of the album. All sorts of electropop/discopop and them -- bam -- a melodic exploration of strings, flue and synth. It stands up well on it's own, but it's even better when listened in the context of the album as a whole.
Trip to Bangalore
I returned from India on Sunday, after leaving Bombay at 420am, a two hour layover in Dubai, and then a 16 hour flight back to San Francisco. Of my two bags, one was lost and at last check Emirates doesn't know where it is yet. Well played Emirates, well played. I managed to get 10 hours of sleep in last night so we'll see how the jetlag goes.
On my flight from from Bombay to Dubai, I was on the same flight at John Abraham, who apparently is some huge Indian movie star. I had no idea who this guy was except there was a crowd of men and women flanking him everywhere he went. I was in the boarding line with him and the only way I figured out who he was was by reading his name off of his boarding pass and then Googling it.
I left Bangalore on Friday and spent the weekend in Bombay with my sister and my grandma in Santacruz. On Friday night we went to this place called Escobar(great name, eh?) to hang out with and meet my sister's friend. Quite fun.
Spending time in the Bangalore office reminded me a lot of the first few trips I took to the Microsoft Shanghai office in 2005. The team is full of energy, excited and eager to work on cool technology. I love getting to spend time with motivated and excited engineers. The office there is full of talent and I hope to be able to mke it there a few times this year. It's almost alluring enough to make me want to move there for a while. I also had a chance to give a tech talk on Packager for iPhone to the teams there, which was also great.
Track of the Week: Glamorous Lifesystle by The Jacka
This week's track is Glamorous Lifestyle by The Jacka, off of Tear Gas. A bit of a departure from the last few weeks of track of the week, this is track straight out of the Bay Area as The Jacka hails from Pittsburg, CA.
Not a ton to say about this track. It's a fun ditty, full of the usual hip hop bravado. The thing that got me hooked on this one is that it's local to the Bay Area, it's pretty catchy (strings + flute = unusual and fun) and has a great hook. If that doesn't make for a hip hop / pop single, I'm not sure what does. The album as a whole is pretty solid hip hop album. Production is pretty low-fi but he's got a good voice and can rhyme over a beat.
Getting to Bangalore
I'm in Bangalore this week to work with our engineering team here. That's worth a post on it's own at some point (tons of job related stuff that I should get around to posting). What I wanted to post about how incredible it is to get all the way out to India from the states, and the incredible complexity of travel this far. Our flight from San Francisco, on Emirates, was delayed four hours since the arriving flight from Dubai had not made it in yet. Since there was a huge delay, we ended up missing our connection in Dubai that would have taken us on to Banglore, thus we stayed in the Dubai airport for six hours waiting for the next flight. Made it to Bangalore Monday ~8am, an hour and a half ride later we were at our hotel then went on to the office.
Bangalore is a pretty impressive city. For one it feels a bit more progressive than other Indian cities I've been in. I was last in India January 2009, in Mumbai. The streets are quite clean, and there's signage everywhere that says "don't drink and drive" (in English). In fact, at this one round-a-bout, there's a (for lack of a better word) sculpture of a guy who hit a tree on his scooter that says something like "don't let this be you." There are apparently four subway lines coming to the city, with one supposed to be opening this year. Given how bad the traffic is here, that should be a godsend. It takes us ~30m to travel the ~5km to the office. Yikes.
We're here working with the team to design a bunch of the major components of the product that will be made here (again, I should blog on the latest job news) and to kick off our next few sprints. It's fun to work with energetic thinkers and spend time brainstorming on the whats and hows of our work.
I'm here till Friday, when I leave for Mumbai to spend the weekend with my sister. From there, it's back to the states on Sunday.
Track of the Week: Stylo (Alex Metric Remix) by Gorillaz
This month brings us a hot new Gorillaz track. But track of the week brings the remix to the lead single, Stylo as mixed by Alex Metric. It's a total disco/dance track, four-on-the-floor, laced full of overdub and falsetto. Imagine if the Bee Gees had a Macbook with Serato Scratch and Logic, this is the music they'd be making. Comparing it to the studio/radio version of Stylo it's hard to tell that they're the same song. Alex Metric has taken the hook (which is fairly disco in its own right) and made a dance floor banger out of it.
Debugging iPhone App Submissions
In December, I posted about how to debug iPhone code signing issues. We've had a ton of developers building apps and the submission process to Apple's iTunes Connect is far from straightforward. Here are some tips on how to debug your iPhone app submission. Most of these are specific to the pre-release of Flash Pro CS5, but all the certs stuff should apply all the same.
- Export your Distribution P12. Make sure it has a private key and a public cert. Use openssl to verify (instructions below)
- Download your Distribution mobileprovision. Open it up and sure that it has the right App ID (search for the string <key>ApplicationIdentifierPrefix</key>)
- If you're using Flash Pro CS5, ensure you're on Beta 4 or higher.
- Publish your app for App Store
- Rename the IPA to ZIP and unzip. Keep the ZIP.
- Dump your codesign for the .APP that's inside the unziped folder and make sure it matches your Distribution P12 (must have the line in the dump which says "Authority=iPhone Distribution").
- Inside the unzipped folder, look for an embedded.mobileprovision. Make sure it's the same exact file as the distro mobile provision you downloaded in step 2, just renamed.
- Verify the inside of your all looks roughly like this the image below.
- Upload your ZIP to iTunes Connect.
Here's an example of what the inside of the .APP file should look like. Key things in here are for YourAppHere to include an embedded.mobileprovision, Default.png, Icon.png, Icon-Small.png and of course your app's binary (YourAppHere). The rest should be automatically generated when your app is packaged. It's also probably a good idea to keep your file name to letters and numbers.
Lastly, for debugging your p12, use:
abansodmbp:~ abansod$ openssl pkcs12 -in ~/Desktop/asdf.p12
Enter Import Password:
MAC verified OK
Bag Attributes
friendlyName: iPhone Distribution: Aditya Bansod (8HHA9BB65G)
localKeyID: E8 3C CF A0 3B 7F 77 C1 E8 89 96 2F B7 8F 0D E4 FD D3 B9 19
subject=/UID=PSLAU6FDD9/CN=iPhone: Aditya Bansod (8HHA9BB65G)/C=US
issuer=/C=US/O=Apple Inc./OU=Apple Worldwide Developer Relations/CN=Apple Worldwide Developer Relations Certification Authority
-----BEGIN CERTIFICATE-----
<SNIP>
-----END CERTIFICATE-----
Bag Attributes
friendlyName: Aditya Bansod
localKeyID: E8 3C CF A0 3B 7F 77 C1 E8 89 96 2F B7 8F 0D E4 FD C3 B9 19
Key Attributes: <No Attributes>
Enter PEM pass phrase:
Verifying - Enter PEM pass phrase:
-----BEGIN RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Proc-Type: 4,ENCRYPTED
DEK-Info: DES-EDE3-CBC,B2347A9F38B7303D
<SNIP>
-----END RSA PRIVATE KEY-----
Track of the Week: Let Me Take You Out by Class Actress
Track of the Week returns after a week hiatus with Let Me Take You Out by Class Actress off of Journal of Ardency. This is a fun little indie song with very retro, synth'ed out production. Elizabeth Harper, the vocalist and songwriter has great vocals that sound feathery except during the hook when she holds the sound. Journal of Ardency is a great little six track EP that is full of songs like this (and a great name for an EP, btw).
Track of the Week: Dry Your Eyes by Wax Tailor
This week's track is Dry Your Eyes featuring Sara Genn, off of Wax Tailor's In The Mood for Life.
I haven't heard much of Wax Tailor until I stumbled upon this album. In the mold of RJD2, he's a French producer/DJ and on his album there are a variety of guest vocalists and a broad variety of hip hop styles.
Dry Your Eyes carries a trip-hop sound, much in the way Mono's Life in Mono was. In many ways the song brings you back to a time when Sneaker Pimps were on the radio. That's a large part of the reason I like the song, as all those trip-hop acts in the late 90s were making their mark on both electronica and hip hop.
Brooding and built in layers of a plucked guitar, a synth and ambient noises of what sounds like a playground, the track wanders through the lyrics. Sara Genn's delivery of the chorus "Dry your eyes, those tears are all you're given / It's no surprise now, your heaven's what you're living in" is haunting (and somewhat depressing) over the strings.