O’Reilly: Inside RIA

In this article we're going to cover an exciting, and increasingly popular way to deliver an amazing user experience, video. Few mediums can grab one's attention quicker than video. Let's face it, people on the Internet have almost no attention span -- we've even reduced our conversations to 140 character chunks -- so the faster you can grab and engage the user the better.

This excerpt is from Colin Moock's Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend Course 2. In Course 2 of this unique DVD training series, you'll learn intermediate to advanced ActionScript 3.0 programming concepts. World-renowned ActionScript guru and educator Colin Moock presents this intimate...

In this video excerpt from Lost ActionScript 3.0 Weekend, learn how to create visual content in ActionScript. Guest-star appearance by Adobe engineer Jim Corbett, the creator of ActionScript's display API.

FLARManager is a lightweight framework that makes building FLARToolkit augmented reality applications easier. When I first came across FLARToolkit, I was simultaneously excited and stymied -- there seemed to be so much potential, but it was difficult to use and even harder to understand. Augmented reality is still a long way from maturity, and leveraging FLARToolkit on the ubiquity of Flash Player provides a great opportunity for further exploring its possibilities. FLARManager aims to provide quicker entry to the technology, to allow a focus on new forms of interaction via marker detection and augmented reality.

I was experimenting with Flex 4 this evening, and I realized something -- Incorporating video in your application is now really, really, really easy. Don't believe me, read on...

The recorded MAX 2008 North America sessions are up and online at Adobe Groups. Unfortunately, the videos can't be embedded (as far as I can tell), and only members of the group can view the videos. Fortunately, everyone's eligible for membership.

Good news, Adobe has started to post the videos of the MAX presentations from San Francisco last month. They have about a dozen posted so far with a promise of many more to come. Check them out on Adobe TV.

Today Joost launched it's new, non-download required version of it's service, which joins Hulu and a scad of other companies in delivering real television shows and movies straight to your Flash-10-enabled browser. Joost is based out of Estonia and founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who also founded both Skype and Kazaa. In this entry I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the new online version of Joost.

Dave Johnson, Alexei White and I have finally completed our video training series on Ajax development for high performance and large scale Ajax UIs. We took the book, Enterprise Ajax, we wrote last year and then recorded just over 8hrs worth of Ajax training. Hopefully it's a bit easier for folks to swallow than the 500 page book;-)