negush blog

I’m not dead yet… Just couldn’t find the “inspiration” for writing this past month. Also, I’m working on the design of my future main web page (give me a break, I’m not a designer, I’m programmer).

Anyway, yesterday I was browsing through some Flash/ActionScript sites/blogs, looking for a logo for ActionScript for my new website and/or blog (I’m not sure yet how or where I will embed it – if I will embed it at all) and came across this blog entry from polygeek. Apparently he too would like to see Adobe come up with a logo for ActionScript.

I too feel like there should be some graphical representation of this language (other than the file icon). I know programming languages don’t really have logos, but, come on… what’s another logo for Adobe ? (among the number of logos it has for all the other stuff). And since ActionScript is the language for Flash, Flex and AIR, I feel it should have a rightful place among Adobe’s other technologies by having its own logo.

So far, polygeek’s logo is the best I’ve found (and I really like it) and actually I couldn’t really find another one. So maybe if enough people start using a logo (not necessarily this one) then Adobe will take notice. Who knows ?? Until then, here’s polygeek’s logo: http://polygeek.com/images/family_of_skills/ActionscriptIcon.zip. He actually put the .psd file at our disposal in case we would like to have it. Thank you polygeek.

Adobe just announced their Flash Platform, which now includes both Flash Player and Adobe AIR, the tools for developing content for the players, the Flex framework (not the builder… that’s the tool), all sorts of servers to be used with Flash and third party stuff… From now on, this all this will be referred to as Flash Platform. Also, the diagram representing the entire Flash Platform shows the design tools (After Effects, Illustrator, Fireworks and Photoshop) that can communicate with he development tools of the platform, through the FXG format. The development tools of the platform are of course Adobe Flash and Flex Builder and a new tool for those who tend to be more design centric than code centric in their work – Flash Catalyst (formerly known as Thermo).

Catalyst will be announced by Adobe at the Max conference (which is going on these days). Also, the newest version of AIR is out – AIR 1.5 – which has been much improved from the previous version (better performance, Flash Player 10 and Webkit support) – go on and download it, if you didn’t already. Gumbo (the new Flex Builder 4) will also be available for preview and presented at Max. It seems that the new Flex Builder will have lots of improvements that will be followed (hopefully) by a new lightweight and scalable framework.

Today, Adobe posted some pretty important news to the Flash/Flex community: they are currently working with Google and Yahoo! Search to improve the way .swf files on the web are searched and indexed by the search engines.

It seems that by now Google already has made some important changes to its search methods and its crawlers can now better search and index the contents of a .swf file. Also, Yahoo! is not far behind. According to Adobe, the crawlers will actually run the contents of a .swf file and get any text and links they find. At least for beginning. Later on, they will help the search engines find and index more content from the .swf files.

The best part is that developers do not need to modify their Flash/Flex contents to be better indexed by the search engines, the crawlers are able to work with any version of the .swf files on the Internet. In this case it’s possible that after more and more Flash/Flex content being indexed by the search engines, the ranks of Flash/Flex web pages will increase enough in relatively short period of time.

This is indeed great news and hopefully we’ll see the results in a short time.