So if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out. And make sure to bug Chuck to update it some more. Or even better, offer to contribute some tips and tricks!

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

I think Google gets it: Netbooks are going to be huge and they’re going to be a place where the web can “beat” the desktop. In a lot of ways they’re the perfect combination for the next generation of the web. The devices are small, portable, probably going to be connected most of the time, and have memory and resource requirements that require an optimized experience. I love Windows 7 and think it’s beautiful, but I do wonder how well it will run on netbooks. Microsoft seems tepid in how much it’s going to support or encourage netbook use.

Netbooks: A Boon for Rich Internet Applications
But people moving to the web-centric netbook experience are going to want a close approximation to the desktop environment. User experience is still going to be important on these small devices. We’ve seen how important a great user experience is (and how much of a selling point it is) with the iPhone. Google is a lot of good things but they aren’t user experience gurus and they don’t get design.

So what fills the gap? If only we had a good, lightweight layer for this new operating system that could play video, support games, enable real time communication, and let developers create beautiful user interfaces that felt like desktop applications with a much smaller footprint. Oh wait, we do, it’s the next generation of rich Internet application technologies like Flash and Silverlight.

Isn’t the netbook: a hybrid mobile and PC device, the perfect fit for RIAs: hybrid web and desktop technologies? You get the audio/video aspect, a framework for building very rich user interfaces, real-time web connectivity, and an existing ecosystem of developers and designers. All in a small package that’s meant to run with less resources than a full operating system requires.

I think netbooks are going to be a big deal for RIA developers. I think it’s a large addressable market and things like Adobe’s work with ARM to optimize Flash for their chipset are going to pay performance dividends in a big way. Throw in the cross-platform aspect and you’ve got the perfect way to build applications for a hybrid web-desktop-mobile device like the netbook.

Pooneekay Vatsoom Ahdtuih

Pooneekay Vatsoom Ahdtuih

Some of the cool technical stuff is that the digital living room player is smart enough to offload the graphical processing to chips inside of the TV that are specifically meant to handle high definition video so the footprint of the player itself is smaller and you’re not trying to push a bunch of HD video through the software.

Louis: What made you decide to develop TweetDeck? You certainly went a different way with your product than others did, using the multi-column format, integrating Summize, groups, etc? What drove its initial feature set and had you choose the AIR platform?

Iain: …. AIR was an easy decision at the time – I had already been developing applications in Flex for financial institutions in London and there was no quicker way for a one man team to develop an application cross-platform.

Louis: TweetDeck, while popular, has also highlighted issues on Twitter’s end, especially around the service’s API limits. Also, the product has been a notorious memory hog and can take a good share of processing power. How are you working to reduce the demands taken on power users’ desktops, and how have you found working with Twitter and their API team, as they recently upped the API accesses users could hit per hour from 100 to 150?

Iain: I have worked very closely with Adobe to make improvements to the TweetDeck codebase and to work around various AIR/Flex issues. CPU & memory usage is an ongoing area for improvement and can sometimes be a bit of an art-form but we are getting there and the current version is a marked improvement over previous versions.

We’re always working (both on the actual runtime and with developers) to make sure that the AIR experience is better. I know the AIR team has been helped tremendously by Iain and all of the TweetDeck users. So congrats on a year Iain and thanks for helping make AIR a success.

The Flash Platform is coming to Android. Today HTC is shipping their Android-based HTC Hero smartphone and it’s the first Android device with Flash on it. There was a lot of news this week about Adobe delivering the full Flash Player 10 experience in the browser and this is an important step towards this. We’ve set up a section on the Adobe Developer center with HTC Hero information and Adrian Ludwig has a good video that shows off what you’ll be able to do with the device there. Adobe’s mobile evangelist Mark Doherty also has a lot more info. One of the cool things for Flash developers is that this is the first device with multi-touch support for Flash content.

I think the main thing this shows is that Adobe is committed to mobile devices and ensuring that every phone, not just smartphones, has some kind of Flash support. Ultimately it’s about bringing the best Flash experience that the phone can handle. Once we get the runtimes out for Flash Player 10 and AIR then we’ll be able to bring a much more full fidelity experience to higher end devices. But we’ll also continue to support the less powerful devices as well with as many features of the Flash Platform as possible.

In addition to the support for the Flash Platform on the Hero, HTC also announced they’re joining the Open Screen Project (OSP). As I’ve been talking to customers about the OSP I’ve discovered a lot of interesting tidbits about the project. One of them is how we’re working with members to port Flash Player to their devices/chipsets/operating systems. In this case, with Android and the HTC Hero, we gave HTC an ActiveX and Linux reference implementation of the Flash plug-in. HTC then used those to implementations to port the Flash Player to the Android web browser on the device. Adobe, HTC, and Android engineers then worked together to optimize it.

That’s happening with a lot of our partners and all of the work we do helps feed into making Flash Player 10 available for more devices. As an example ever since ARM joined the Open Screen Project engineers from both Adobe and ARM have been working together to make optimizations to the Flash Player for ARM chipsets so any netbook, smart phone, or embedded device with an ARM chip will get an optimized Flash Platform experience. I think it’s going to be a good year for Flash Platform developers who want to get into the mobile space.

Be sure to check out all the winners, Mark Doherty has some great YouTube videos of all the winners in action. And we also have some very cool Flash Lite news coming up in the near future, so stay tuned.

MAX is also a great place to come mingle with the community’s best and get a chance to talk with the engineers who make the products. There are also a couple of big surprises we’ve got for the keynote that I’m excited to see the reaction to.

Hope we’ll see you in Los Angeles.

Kevin Towes has a great writeup on the changes. The important part for developers:

The specification documents how the RTMP protocol works, this will enable you to send and receive data from Flash Player or AIR. You can learn how to use the RTMP handshake, understand how the RTMP Chunk stream is formed, how RTMP command messages are created and the message formats. This information will let you leverage the client side ActionScript classes, NetConnection , NetStream, SharedObject and others that today move data back and forth between Flash Player and Flash Media Server.

There are a couple of things that aren’t included in the spec. As most of you may know, we’ve been evolving both Flash Media Server and RMTP over the past couple of years and have created specific protocols based on it to enable our partners to do things like protect digital content. Those include, for example, RTMPe for encrypting RTMP streams and RTMFP (the real time media flow protocol) for doing P2P communication between Flash Players.

While it took us longer than I would have liked, this is still very significant for our developer community and the wider Flash ecosystem. With the AMF, FLV, F4V and RTMP specifications now open developers have a published set of rules that will let them better integrate SWF applications into their backend systems and architecture. These two specs are the keys to communicating with the Flash Player and I hope this shows that we continue to try to make the Flash Player as transparent as possible even if we aren’t open sourcing it. It’s also important to note that you’re allowed to expand on the RTMP spec and create unique implementations for your own needs.