Adobe Nitro for Portable Widgets

Today at Adobe MAX in San Francisco, my colleague Matt Snow did a sneak peak of a product I’ve been working on for some time now: Adobe “Nitro”. Nitro is a framework that allows developers to design, build, distribute Flash widgets on multiple screens. Take your widget from the web and distribute it to desktop and to your mobile phone. Developers and designers can create widgets in Flash for many targets, widgetize their existing content and make them viral and portable.

Pretty cool, eh? Matt also showed a early build we had as a demo where he showed widgets staying in sync between your phone and your desktop and an RSS and YouTube widget running same binaries on both the phone and desktop. I’m pretty excited it all went off without a hitch. The demo gods were on our side, even more so given our dry run late last ran in to some hiccups.

Most of what we’re working on I can’t share now. The details we’re releasing at the moment are basically what we showed in the sneak peek, but we’ll have a great set of features and products in the coming year and I’m looking forward to sharing as it becomes available.

P.S. shout out to all other sneak peek presenters. As somebody on Twitter commented, some of the demos are like sci-fi, but real. Also, the production quality of the main hall at Moscone SF was out of this world. I’ll post videos soon. You might also want to check out some of the live blogs of the event, too.

264 Words

Adobe’s Open Screen Project

I don’t write a lot about what I’m doing at Adobe and it’s mostly since I’m working on projects that are not released yet and are still under development. However, today we announced the Open Screen Project, a cross industry effort to bring Flash and Flash technologies to more screens.

A the basic level, the next release of our Flash player runtime for devices (e.g. mobile phones, mobile internet devices, televisions, etc, etc) will be free. On top of that, we’re dropping license restrictions on the SWF format (the file that Flash runs on).

Personally, I think this is really cool. It allows people in the creative community to know that Adobe is commited to putting our player and client technologies on devices across all the places where people will want a rich and expressive experience. It’ll help get on the path to have a consistent experience for developers and creative professionals regardless if they’re developing for a desktop/web site, a mobile phone, a Chumby, or whatever other device Flash might run on.

175 Words

Goodbye Microsoft, a Look Back, and Hello Adobe

Last Friday was my last day at Microsoft. It’s taken me a while to write this post, because I’m not really sure what to say, or what I can say to really sum up what were five amazing years with the company. I started working for Microsoft as a Student Consultant at UCSD in 2001, interned the summer of 2002 (in devdiv, the team that makes Visual Studio and .NET) and again in the summer of 2003 (in Hotmail), and the joined full time in 2003. In so many ways, the path my life has taken has been intertwined and driven in no small manner by Microsoft. I have so many good friends, good stories, and great experiences there, that it was sad to say good bye.

I remember the late nights trying to ship various versions of MSN Hotmail, fire drills dealing with live site issues. I particularly remember one were we upgraded a large number of our servers to new version of our codebase and the huge number of hours we spent debugging and testing and fighting to make things work. We ended up having a few guys from Redmond term serv to our data center, hooking up kernel debuggers and finding issues they’d never anticipated in Windows or IIS. It’s amazingly cool being part of an organization where using our own products internally make them better for our customers. It was great to be a part of the team that shipped Windows Live Hotmail (or “mail Beta” as it was called for a while), all on top of a new .NET based architecture with AJAX-y goodness. That was back in 2005, while people may not think of Microsoft as a forward thinking organization we were building the kinds of web apps people didn’t end up seeing en mass until later in 2006.

Then it was off to Shanghai for a while. What a time that was. There was so much we all learned there about building organizations, about what it means to have great people and to have a great team. I was there for nearly a year and a half, and I learned a lot more about “organizational” skills that I’d anywhere before. And I learned some Chinese! Living overseas was an experience I think everybody should have. It helps you learn so much more about who you are, and about the world we live in. We started this cool Calendar while we were there, and a year later, in November 2007 we shipped a public beta. It was a blast to see something start in Shanghai, then be part of the team in California to go live with it.

I’m waxing sentimental here, but it’s been such a fun ride, full of super smart people who love software and know what they’re doing impacts millions of people every day. I’m proud to be a part of all the teams that I’ve been in, and I know they’ll continue doing great things in the future

What’s next for me? I’ve taken a job at Adobe, in their mobile group in San Francisco. I’m really excited about what’s coming up in the mobile space and there were some really cool opportunities in Adobe to do cool things in the market. Looking around at the market, the mobile space to me feels like the Internet did in, say, 1997. Slowly opening up, with greater bandwidth to end users allowing a great wave of development and content to become a driving factor for consumers. Adobe’s in a great place in the market, already with their software (Flash Lite, etc) installed on 450m devices world wide. They’re making some moves that I found compelling and that I wanted to be a part of. This next year is going to be a crazy ride of learning a whole new segment of the tech industry and I’m looking forward to it.

Between jobs, I’ve taken two weeks off between Microsoft and Adobe. I’m halfway done with my vacation already! I’ve been spending a lot of time in coffee shops, reading, brushing up on coding (finally finding some time to work on a pet project), and cleaning up the apartment. It’s amazing how much better it looks when my frames and art are hung on the moulding and not leaning against the floor.

712 Words