Adobe offers to Google and Yahoo! Flash Player Technology – Is It Really A Good News?

Jul 012008
 

I’ve just read via the AXNA that Adobe, Google and Yahoo! worked together to allow SWF searchability. My first thought was ‘finally they made it’ :)

But while reading the FAQ I’ve been a little disappointed by how this indexation seems to happen:

[...]The Flash Player technology, optimized for search spiders, runs a SWF file similarly to how the file would run in Adobe Flash Player in the browser, yet it returns all of the text and links that occur at any state of the application back to the search spider, which then appears in search results to the end user[...]

FlashFlex

[...]All of the extracted information is indexed for relevance according to Google and Yahoo!’s algorithms. The end result is SWF content adding to the searchable information of the web page that hosts the SWF content, thus giving users more information from the web to search through[...]

So I’m afraid that it means that there will be absolutely ‘semantic’ information on the indexed tag. Is this text a title, a paragraph or an image caption? Does this mean that the SEO effort we have to do on SWF are only based on text and keywords?

If you have text with an Alpha of 0 but that have a tween, will it be indexed?

I’m very happy that A_G_Y are working to offer a better indexation and searchability of SWF but as far as I understand it, they are completely missing the SEO point here.

What do you think?

Ahmet

Stepping Down as an User Group Manager –> Moving to Zurich @ Microsoft Unified Communication

Jun 182008
 

I am stepping down as the ‘User Group Manager’ of the Adobe User Group Geneva. It was a great time for me being a UGM, Adobe really cares about us and the community, I have an incredible collection of Adobe’s T-Shirt :p.

I’m very proud of the growth of AUGG, we started in November 2006 with 5 members, today we are around 80 members. I had the opportunity to meet some of the best developers and designers from Geneva and the ‘Romandie’, participating to great meeting (the best one must have been the venue of Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow) and also had some hangover ;)

I resigned from my current role at MBA-Exchange.com & Careernomics.com, where I had also a great time and a great first full time professional experience.

Now I’m moving, early August, to Zurich, Switzerland biggest city with around 1,5 millions inhabitants :)

I have been enrolled at Microsoft (Unified Communication) as a ‘Software Development Engineer in Test’, which is an entry position in Microsoft empire. I’m really looking forward to all the knowledge I’ll be able to gather there and working with the team. I have already started learning C# and Visual Studio 2008 and my first impression is to enter in a serious coding experience :)

Thanks to everyone from the AUGG and thanks to the MBAx team :)

Ahmet

Adobe AIR Cookbook Available in Beta

Jun 182008
 

Just a quick note to relay the information, Adobe’s great idea of offering online community driven cookbook is now extended to AIR.

Access AIR Cookbook

I am even a bigger A**

May 302008
 

Good news for me, I just passed the Adobe Certified Expert in Dreamweaver CS3 exam and achieve a not so good score of 80% in 30 minutes. After my certification in Flash CS3 two weeks ago, it is now the time for the next one :)

I wanted to thanks the folks at Adobe who offer me the certifications (as an Adobe User Group Manager), it really a great idea and preparing those exam offer a good training.

Ahmet

What I love in DW CS4

May 272008
 

I had the hand on Dreamweaver CS4 for more than one month now, I’ll share with you what really helped me in my everyday life. To shorten, for people afraid of my English: if you didn’t make the move to DW CS3 du to the lack of improvement you will be happy with DW CS4!

It has been totally redesigned in terms of User Interface (UI), it is now aligned with the whole CS3 UI (and even better has it get ride of the top title bar):

Dreamweaver CS4 - Topbar

There are a lot of new features, that I’ll let you discover in details directly on Adobe Labs my favorites are below.

Related Files: Displays all the documents associated with your current page.
This feature is really useful, imagine your are working on a php file, that include a lot of other files (php, CSS, JS). Dreamweaver will offer you a shortcut to these pages, so you are now only one click away from the files you need to edit.

Related Files in DW CS4

Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks: Improved support for JavaScript core objects and primitive data types.
This one is also a time saver, lately I was opening Aptanta when I had to edit JavaScript files, but now I can stay within DW.

Code Hinting for JavaScript and Ajax

[...]Work with popular JavaScript frameworks including jQuery, Prototype, and Spry[...]

Subversion integration: You can update your site to get the latest versions of its pages directly from within Dreamweaver.

Definitely a must have for every web projects!

That was the features that saved me the more time, after the deception of Dreamweaver CS3 I am really happy with the new version!

If you are interested go download it and get a serial number (you need to enter your serial number from your copy of Dreamweaver CS3, GoLive 9 or GoLive CS2).

Ahmet

I’m officially an A**

May 162008
 

I just passed my exam of Adobe Flash CS3 Certified Expert (ACE) and achieve a not so bad score of 92%… in 15 minutes (from the 90 minutes available).

Exam wasn’t hard but there still was some tricky questions.
Well, now it is time for the next one :-)

Congratulations to Cédric who did as well pass his exam!
Ahmet

Certification Exams Preparation Guides are Online

Apr 102008
 

About a month ago, I checked the preparation guides page on Adobe.com for the ACE (Adobe Certified Expert) exam but none of the CS3 were online. Now this have changed and we can download all the preparation guides via Adobe.com.

That a good news as I have scheduled a test for the ‘Adobe Flash CS3 ACE Exam’ for the 16th of May :)

Does anyone know where to find other (free) preparation guides?

Ahmet