What I just realized today, however, is that since Chrome is built on Webkit, Google can build and deploy HTML5 functionality, contribute it back to the Webkit open source project, and watch it propogate virally into every other browser built on Webkit.

I think Google is building Chrome as a real-world demonstration platform on which to prove the features of HTML5 and create the future.

A couple of years ago I said we’d look back at June 2007 as the time that Safari turned a corner. But now I realize that it’s really Webkit that’s the important technology. If I’m right about Google’s strategy, then over the next two years we’ll see many of the technologies that constitute HTML5 appear in the Webkit open source code base and start to appear in other browsers.

Now come give it a spin!

In a past life, I worked on a collaboration product called eRoom. The main way eRoom sent out notifications was that inside its server there was a giant spam machine that could generate nightly or immediate emails when documents changed. Each user could specify their own notification preferences at various levels of the hierarchy (documents, folders, or entire rooms), but the net result was a metric buttload of email. With the right set of email rules on the receiving end, this can work, but it’s not pretty.

What if a document could tweet? Set aside the mechanics — for example, don’t worry about what Twitter account it’s using, or how people go about following the documents — and just ponder for a second what it would be like if the documents you cared about talked to you from time to time in your Twitter client. If you followed a document, from time to time you’d see a tweet saying something like David Coletta left a comment on 2010 Project plan: “it would be awesome to hit this date!” or Bill McFill edited the document 2010 Project Plan.

Key to this idea is that no one would have to press a button to make the document tweet. Instead, authors would specify some criteria about which documents should tweet, what they should tweet about, how often, and so on. Maybe it would also be important for people on the receiving end to specify these same things, but I’m not sure. And I’m not ruling out a manual process too, but the point is that you wouldn’t have to think about individual tweets if you didn’t want to.

So given the ideas above, would this be a useful approach to getting notified about the documents you care about? Should authors get to specify the criteria, or should followers? Could it be really simple, or would it only work if there were lots of fine-grained controls? Could this be the only way you get notified, or would there have to be email notifications, toast-style popup notifications, and so on as well?

I got it working again as follows.  I renamed the top level directory of the previously opened workspace, launched Flex Builder, and this time it started up just fine. Then I quit, renamed the top level directory back, and relaunched. That worked fine, and subsequently quitting and relaunch worked fine too. 

Hope it doesn’t happen again.

Noteflight – Moccasin

We’re looking for a summer intern developer on the Buzzword team in Newton, Mass for 2009. If you are interested, start with the official Adobe job position, click “apply now” to get yourself into the system, and feel free to email our recruiter Cindy Vink Loggins, cvink at adobe dot com with any questions. Or, if you know someone who might be interested, please forward them this post or the link to the job. Also, if you’re a blogger, please do me a favor and repost!

Here’s the gist of the job:

Position Overview

What is the Buzzword team up to?

Buzzword, the first real word processor for the web, is a breakthrough in collaborative authoring for documents that matter. The Buzzword team joined Adobe Systems Incorporated in 2007 in order to take Buzzword to the next level, building new features, integrating with the Acrobat.com product suite, and scaling up to hundreds of thousands of users.

The Buzzword application is built on the Adobe Flash/Flex platform, written primarily in ActionScript 3.0, an object-oriented language familiar to people who know Java and C#. Additionally, Buzzword incorporates a server that is written in C# using Microsoft .NET and SQL Server 2005.

Responsibilities

What are we looking for?

The Buzzword team is looking for a software development intern to join us for the summer. You should be a computer science major (or equivalent) going into your junior or senior year, with a passion for writing great code, learning new technologies, and discovering just what it takes to build commercial software. You’ll receive mentoring from Buzzword team members, and you’ll see every part of the software lifecycle: requirements, design, coding, testing, and release.

What would you work on?

Here is a small sampling of the projects you might work on as an intern on the Buzzword development team:

• New features: if you’re a strong contributor, you’ll get to work on important new product features right along side the rest of the development team.
• Bug fixing: there’s no better way to learn your way around a big code base than by fixing some bugs.
• Prototyping additional browser support: Buzzword relies on some small but critical bits of JavaScript to support keyboard control and system clipboard access, so we are currently limited to IE, Firefox, and Safari. You would prototype versions of this code for other browsers.
• Load and/or performance testing: In order to gauge future hardware needs, you would write a load simulator for our server, execute it, and analyze the results.
• Writing tests: Buzzword has a built-in automated test framework, with hundreds of existing tests that exercise product functionality and check for bug regression. You would write new tests, and analyze existing tests to remove duplicate functionality and improve coverage.
• Experimenting with Buzzword mashups: there are many unexplored possibilities for mashing Buzzword with other applications on both the client side (in the browser) and the server side.
• Site statistics analysis tools: both the Buzzword server and Google Analytics gather ongoing server usage statistics; you would improve on them and build new ways to look at how our users use the product.
• Secret projects: we’ve got new products coming down the pike that we can’t tell you about in this ad.

Again, next step is to see the official Adobe job position, and feel free to email Cindy Vink Loggins, cvink at adobe dot com with any questions. (This position is located in Newton, MA.) ]]> http://www.colettas.org/?feed=rss2&p=294 2 http://www.colettas.org/?p=294 http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/TheJoyOfFlex/~3/L-5PJFzuBK8/ http://www.colettas.org/?p=286#comments Fri, 05 Dec 2008 16:46:52 +0000 David Coletta http://www.colettas.org/?p=286 In case you’re wondering, the new college grad developer position on the Buzzword team at Adobe Systems Incorporated is still open! If you are a recent grad, or will be graduating soon, from a BS/CS or MS/CS program in the U.S., and you fit this job description, I’d really like to talk to you.  You can email me directly at dcoletta at adobe dot com, or call our recruiter, Erin Fife, at 408.536.5382, efife at adobe dot com.