I spoke with Emmy Huang, product manager for Adobe Flash Player this morning. She pulled up the Flash Player Dashboard and gave me the exact Player 9 installs as of midnight 07/29/2007, 2,355,270,000 successful installs. I have recalibrated the counter since the counter was off by 15 million installs.

The install stats come from Akamai and are rounded to the million. The player install numbers are not part of any formal published statistics by Adobe. They are very real, but we do not have 3rd party verification other than with Akamai and Adobe.

var so2 = new SWFObject(“/FP9Counter/FP9Counter.swf”, “fp002″, “210″, “70″, “9″, “#000000″);so2.write(“sampleflashcounter2″);

DOWNLOAD FP9Counter ASProject Source

I will check in with Emmy from time to time and update the counter monthly to make sure it is accurate. The trending for the installation rate is that it is slowly increasing over time, thus the counter will always tend to be lower than the actual download numbers.

This scale of installations really drive home the fact that download size still really matters. The smaller the player, the faster the runtime is deployed. Considering that the Adobe Flash Player is the most distributed piece of software in the history of software (and the universe for that matter), keeping it small and efficient is very important.

Small is beautiful! Go Flash Player Go!

Cheers,

Ted

Today I updated the Flex directory and the listing has crossed 150 Consulting Firms providing solutions using Adobe Flex worldwide. Every time I post about the directory I see a flood of new listing and a huge spike in traffic. The exit traffic from the site has been growing steadily. All this from an XML document!

Flex Directory

To celebrate, I will add a large Flex logo.

More to come!

Cheers,

Ted

There is a new version of Director in development, Director 11. We are bringing in several engineers to present on Director 11 3 times at MAX 2007 in Chicago and we are adding a BOF for Director.

So yes there will be sessions on Director 11 at MAX.
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

Cheers,

Ted

Papervision3D’s entry into the toolset of Flash/Flex developers has been nothing short of impressive. The toolset continues to gain momentium and adoption in bringing a true 3D renderer into Flash Player 9 using ActionScript 3. John Grden has been pushing Papervision3d farther than most and recently has been working on a NEW project using Papervision3D in the Star Wars genre.

John thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

May the Force Be With You!

Ted

I put together this Flash Player 9 Counter together using AS3 ActionScript Project in Flex2 that estimates the number of Flash Player 9 installations. I wanted to post the methodology and the source to be as open and transparent as possible. It was fun diving in and writing this widget in AS3 using ASProject. The output SWF file is 1360 Bytes.

var so1 = new SWFObject(“/FP9Counter/FP9Counter.swf”, “fp001″, “210″, “70″, “9″, “#000000″);so1.write(“sampleflashcounter”);

Methodology:

1. Establish a rate for Flash Player 9 installations per millisecond.
2. Determine milliseconds since Flash Player 9 was released.
3. Update the value every 500 milliseconds

I will calibrate this counter this week against the exact dates and values but I am currently estimating that 2.32B Installs occurred the day of FlexCamp but it was most likely earlier. I will get this clear in a later post.

DOWNLOAD FP9Counter ASProject Source

Sure am glad 2.3+B Players can run this application.

Cheers,

Ted

This statistic was posted at FlexCamp last night. This is the reason to target Flash Player 9, reach. I have a hard time wrapping my head around 2,320,000,000 but at 8,000,000 players installed per day it seems to be adding up.

Makes me wonder how many PC’s are out there.

Cheers,

Ted

The stage is set, the Flex mugs and kegs are ready, along with 400 free copies of Flex Builder. Yup, today is FlexCamp in San Francisco, too bad we are SOLD OUT! I will be teaching Flex 101 starting at 4PM today and will be covering the basics of Flex and answering questions. Ideally anyone at Flex 101 will walk away with a good perspective on how to think about Flex development and know all the core elements. Believe it or not but Flex is pretty easy to learn but with all things new, it takes time.

I look forward to seeing you at FlexCamp!

Regards,

Ted

It is great to see one of the best Flex applications, Picnik.com, reviewed by Walt Mossberg. It is even better that his focus is on the user experience and the application value, not the technology used. It is a great read and a sure sign of things to come for Flex technologies.

Now, It’s a Picnik To Edit Your Phots Using a Web Program by Walt Mossberg

I blogged Picnik.com when it launched back in Feb. and since the team has come a very long way with the application. It is still dead simple to edit an image.

Congrats to the Picnik.com team. You all rock!

Cheers,

Ted

I am please to announce that Mitch Grasso will be joining us at Adobe MAX 2007 Chicago in the “Inspire” sessions. Mitch Grasso has been working on a new service called SlideRocket, focused on creating and viewing presentations online and offline. Mitch provided me with a presentation for you to look at showing the new Papervision 3D slide transitions. Here is the sneak peek of SlideRocket.

Sneak Peek of 3D Slide Transitions in SlideRocket

Best to think of it as Keynote or PowerPoint for the web. It is a serious RIA built using Flex and the backend was written using ASP.NET/SOAP/MSSQL.

Mitch started using Flex in April of last year and has taken Flex to a new level with SlideRocket. Having used this application, it is a serious contender for the presentation market in that it is easy to use, easy to share, nothing to install, and it doesn’t clog your email with large presentation files.

I cannot wait until Mike Arrington, Robert Scoble, or Om Malik get a hold of a SlideRocket account, this application will go big. I have been bugging Mitch to finish so I can switch to presenting with Sliderocket for all my presentations and I think we will see a public beta coming very soon.

NOTE: Inspire Session to be posted ASAP to session/speaker list!

Mitch thanks for helping us change MAX 2007!
Adobe MAX 2007. Connect. Discover. Inspire.

See you at MAX 2007!

Ted

If you are working with Flex, you might want to check out the SearchCoders Dashboard AIR application. It provides lightening fast searches from the FlexCoders mailing lists and adds a ton of value to finding information on Flex development. The secret behind this app is the use of LiveCycle Data Services ES combined with Lucene for search results.

Download LiveCycle Data Services ES

I ran into Tom Bray at the on AIR bus tour in LA where he showcased SearchCoders. He then mentioned in passing that they app was using paging in LiveCycle Data Services (was Flex Data Services). If you do a custom search and scroll very fast you will see the dataset page on the fly. It is a very very good use of Data Services and really highlights the value of optimized data exchange.

This highlights one of the problems with LiveCycle Data Services as a product in that much of this value is hidden. When you get into very data intensive applications, there is a world of value in using LiveCycle Data Services. It would be almost impossible to get this level of performance and scalability from other backends. The data exchange here is passing pages of data as AMF3 Binary directly into the fill operation of an ArrayCollection. Technically the ArrayCollection is used normally but the internals are tied to the Paging API within LCDS (LiveCycle Data Services). On the server side, the SearchCoders team created a searchable index of posts with Lucene and query it using Java.

Price: SearchCoders used the FREE LiveCycle Data Services Express edition. SearchCoders didn’t pay a dime to add this high performance data exchange into their application.

Kudos to Tom Bray and Robert Cadena on this great app. Having worked on “Search” solutions for FlexCoders in the past, this looks to be spot on.

Cheers,

Ted