Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Following my post about UK speakers at MAX Europe, one additional session has now been confirmed – Dom O’Brien from Glue London will be speaking about Interactive Video Campaigns; one of the campaigns that Dom and the team worked on was Desktop Keeley for The Sun newspaper. So, if you want to know how they made Keeley come to life in an AIR application this session is for you. The full session description is below:

“We’ll take you through the whole process showcasing our latest work for brands such as Bacardi, The Sun newspaper, The Royal Navy and Royal Marines, Philips and Virgin Money. From idea creation; to channel planning; to doing the shoot; to post production; to building the application. We’ll aim for you to leave with a better understanding of what’s involved and what to think about when approaching campaign work.”

You can register for MAX Europe in Milan here.

The winners of the ScaleNine ‘Skin to Win’ contest were announced today by Juan Sanchez over on the ScaleNine blog, with the winning entry submitted by ‘Undefined‘, a web development company based in Spain.  

Congratulations to the team from Undefined, along with the runner up and spot prize winners – the quality of all the entries was really high and I know that it was tough for the judges to come to a final decision on the winners.

One of the original aims for running the contest was to increase the number of complete Flex themes available, so it is great that all 27 entries submitted to the contest will be available for you to download, use and adapt for your own projects. Keep an eye on the ScaleNine.com site over the next week as they are uploaded to the gallery.

Monochrome are doing some great work with Flex at the moment, so much so that they’re expanding and are looking to hire a permanent Senior Flex developer and also a Flash designer, to be based out of their office in Epsom, Surrey (UK).

You can read the full job descriptions over on their site – if either is of interest then contact Neil Middleton (neil at monochrome.co.uk) for more details.

Last week at Future of Web Apps we were on the lookout for some cool ideas as to how you might use Adobe AIR – to provide a little incentive we teamed up with Carsonified (the event organisers) to offer £5k to the winner of a ‘dragons den’ style contest to help them build the application.  

We had some really great entries for the contest, as well as a couple of strange ones, but we whittled them down to three finalists who then pitched their idea in front of approximately 1200 conference attendees. We spoke to each of the finalists before they went on stage… if you’re interested you can watch how the guys behind Relocally, BoxedUp and UpShotApp described their proposed applications.

The overall winner of the contest was UpShotApp, an existing web-based application that allows you to upload pictures and track what friends, colleagues and clients think about them. They want to use Adobe AIR to provide a desktop uploader, with tight integration (via Switchboard) to Adobe’s Creative Suite applications, so that you can upload and track comments on pictures right from your desktop.

There’s a nice sketch on Flickr which captures the essence of day 2 at FOWA, including the AIR Dragons Den session. Elsewhere at FOWA, we were giving away badges with the mnemonics for Adobe products, handing out ‘AIR for JavaScript developers’ and ‘Getting Started with Flex 3′ books, answering questions about Flex and AIR on the Adobe stand, as well as running a couple of sessions in the ‘University’ track.

A lot of the content from Future of Web Apps has been published online, so if you couldn’t attend you can catch up on what you missed here.

It has been somewhat of a busy news week, what with the final release of Microsoft Silverlight 2, the announcement of Apple’s updated MacBook/Pro hardware and of course today’s news that Adobe has shipped Creative Suite 4, as well as releasing an amazing set of new capabilities with Flash Player 10.

In the midst of all this, Erik Huggers (Director of BBC Future Media & Technology) announced that the BBC will be launching a platform-neutral download client for the BBC’s iPlayer service built using Adobe AIR. This of course follows on from the success the BBC have had from using Adobe Flash Player to deliver content for the iPlayer streaming service.

The current version of the desktop client, which enables BBC content to be downloaded and played back later, is Windows only and has meant that people using Mac or Linux-based computers have had to access content using the streaming service. With the launch of BBC iPlayer using Adobe AIR, you’ll be able to download and watch BBC programmes wherever you like, on Windows, Mac or Linux – this is really great news and something that I’ve been waiting for!

This announcement is a great validation of Adobe’s platform and the work we’ve put in to deliver consistent experiences across browsers (with Flash Player) and operating systems (with AIR). There is still some work to do on supporting Flash Player 10 and AIR on mobiles and devices, but we’re working on that as part of the Open Screen project.

The BBC have an obligation to rights-holders and the BBC Trust to protect content with DRM, and so the recently launched Flash Media Rights Management Server (FMRMS) will be employed to protect downloaded content within iPlayer; this is already working well with Adobe Media Player and so I’d expect a pretty seamless implementation within iPlayer also.

There’s no exact date for the launch of the download version of iPlayer, but “later this year” is referenced in the announcement.