Andrew Shorten

Morgan Stanley have launched a comprehensive online trading tool called “Matrix” which allows their customers to get closer to the trading floor than ever before; the application enables them to view live pricing, get informed opinions for market professionals, review historical market data and make derivatives and foreign exchange trades in real-time, directly from their browser.

This impressive rich Internet application (RIA), which has a strong focus on the quality of the user experience, was built using Adobe’s Flash Platform technologies, and integrates real-time data, with the delivery of audio, video, reports and rich interactive charts to provide a next-generation trading platform for Morgan Stanley’s customers.

The sheer quantity of data presented within the application, combined with the performance and responsiveness of the user interface, is impressive and really demonstrates the potential that rich Internet applications offer. This certainly has to be one of the most ambitious and successfully executed applications built using Flex and raises the bar as to what can be achieved within the browser.

For more information on the project and a virtual walkthrough of the application visit Morgan Stanley’s website: http://www.morganstanley.com/matrixinfo/

More pictures below:

Last Friday I delivered a pre-launch briefing to UK journalists on today’s announcements around new Flash Platform tooling, specifically the beta release of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. In addition, we invited web design and development agency howard/baines to talk about their experiences using the pre-beta version of the tools to create a rich Internet application. Both these sessions were recorded, so I thought I’d post them here.

The first video provides a high level overview of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder, followed by a demonstration of building the Employee Directory application - this might be useful if you’re looking to get up to speed on the announcements and want to see the designer/developer workflow between the tools in action:

In the second video, Clive Howard and Jeremy Baines talk about the communication challenges normally faced when working on a project and how, using Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder, they were able to rapidly prototype and build a rich Internet application deployed to Flash Player.

Today, we announced that the first public beta releases of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder (previously known as Flex Builder) are available on Adobe Labs.

“Design in Mind” was one of the core themes for this release, and these tools, together with the updated Flex 4 SDK, deliver on that to make it easier than ever create high fidelity, rich Internet applications that target the Flash Platform.

We’ve published a lot of information to help you get started with these beta releases and hope that you’ll have an opportunity to give us your feedback in the forums, so that the final releases of Flash Builder and Flex 4 SDK, due later this year, are ready for prime time.

For information on what’s new, check out the following articles:

• What’s new in the Flex 4 SDK
• What’s new in Flash Bulder 4
• Getting started with Flash Catalyst

For more articles, tutorials and videos head to the Adobe Developer Connection site.

AgencyNet are the digital agency behind the impressive multi-screen ‘Fanbase‘ application, which was developed for Atlantic Records. The team used Adobe AIR and the Flash Lite Distributable player to bring the application to consumers, accessible as both a desktop application and mobile service.

David Brown from AgencyNet has kindly agreed to present an online session in which he will uncover the key factors to consider when developing and deploying content to multiple devices with Adobe’s distributable player solution. Topics include Multilingual content, multiple input types, and consistent user experiences across screens.

The presentation is TODAY (Thursday, 30th April) at 11am PST, which is 2pm EST, 7pm UK and 8pm CET.

To join the session just register here.

There is a three part video interview with Shantanu Narayen, Adobe’s CEO, up on FT.com today as part of their “View from the Top” series, in which they talk to CEOs about news and trends within their respective industry.

In Part 2 of the interview, the conversation is focused on the adoption of Flash on mobile phones and the competition between Flash and Microsoft Silverlight, as well as Adobe’s strategy for getting new technology adopted as a standard and cloud computing. There is some interesting discussion about Adobe’s relationship with Apple and Google.

You can watch that video here, from which you’ll also find links to the other parts of the interview.

There is also an article in today’s FT and available online which summaries some of the discussion points.