Congrats! I know the feeling. On top of the world baby! All the love and hapiness in the future…
Browsing articles from "October, 2005"
What was up at MAX
So I finally got back from MAX. There have been a number of posts already on the subject, so I won’t write a long post to repeat things already said. The big things at MAX were of course Flex 2, AS3 and the new VM, the announcement of Macromedia Labs, and Flash Lite 2.0 (to be available to developers in January).
Some minor things were a sneak preview of After Effects 7.0 (I’ll post a video of it later), cool new collaborative API’s to Breeze, and the fact that Director is really going nowhere (they showed two new things for the next release of Director, one being UI improvements and the other support for Flash 8. Dejavu anyone?)
One thing in particular got my attention: Stephen Elop used his keynote to throw mud at Microsoft by saying: "We’ve got two words for Microsoft: Try again". Now this of course made everyone laugh. But I had to ask myself later why Stephen tries to down-talk Microsoft’s Expression product line. If it were that bad and would in no way be able to compete with Flash, why would he even bother to talk about it? And in a number of sessions I also saw how many Macromedia employees pledged support for the Mac and Linux platforms. In my mind, support for margin operating systems (sorry, but Linux and MacOS are margin OS’s) is the most important aspect of the Flash Platform.
From what I’ve seen, Expression is a direct competitor to Flex. And from what I’ve seen it does things amazingly well, much better than even the new revamped Flex 2 framework with AS3. And Microsoft’s got muscle, that’s for sure. It seems that Macromedia is a little intimidated by Expression, and I believe they should. Should Microsoft decide to support multiple platforms with XAML (which I doubt), Flex and Flash would quickly find themeselves in a very competitive market.
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Engaged
Wow, what a feeling. Just the night before I left for MAX I proposed to Hanna, my love for life. And she accepted.
The whole 11 hour flight to Los Angeles I just stared at my hand with the engagement ring in amazement and happiness.
And now that I’m in Anaheim I just want to get back home.
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Congratulations,
I recently got married to my wife, we’ve been together for nearly 8 years (started as high school sweet-hearts). My advice two you both would be to love each other completely and not be another divorce statistic. -
Congratulations
-abdul -
Congrats dude. Tell you what Ill goto MAX for you so you can go home LOL :O)
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Congratulations
Miikka
Come say hi at MAX
Why?
I just checked and I think I’m the only Finn attending , so only I can give the answer to the question that seems to be on every bodies mind: Are there any ice-bears in Finland? 
No really, it would be nice to have a chat with as many of you as possible. About Flash and Flex as much as about ice-bears.
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I’m in the airport, on my way! See you all there!
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Wow, I`d like to do same, but the HellConsulate denied my visa. So, Can`t say the same boss.
Good luck there. -
Me and my co-workers (Christian Petersen and Stas Zayarsky) are already in Anaheim. Tomorrow we will looking for you to meet if you care
We’re hiring
Woah, we’re really on fire. Clients keep on pouring in, and there are some very interesting projects going on or about to start. That’s why we at Valve need to more excellent guys and gals to join our existing team of 35 pros to help us build the most engaging and valuable user experiences. We’re looking for (full-time and freelance):
- Flash developer(s)
- HTML/PHP developer
- Art Director
- Graphics designer(s)
- User interface designer
- Concept designer
- Copywriter
- Project manager
These positions are open at our Helsinki office. While we primarily are looking for guys and gals from around Scandinavia, please feel free to apply if you don’t mind cold and dark winters
To apply, please send application, CV and references to me. More information will be posted on our website at www.valve.fi
I’m weird!
So I filled out my profile in the introNetworks-application for MAX 2005. And I tried to fill it out correctly. I’ve got loads of soulmates experience and skillwise (upper right and lower right sections). Well, there’s a lot of Flash developers coming to MAX. But take a look at the upper lefthand section. Thats personality. And no one is even close!
I must be very weird indeed.
Or maybe I’m positively unique?
No… It’s propably the first.
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There’s also a chance it could be a bug in matching engine …
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I sent you a message in introNetworks app
See you at MAX 2005!
Time to forget about old browsers
One other observation I made while going through all of our statistics for our websites, is the absense of old browsers. No-one has not been targeting Netscape 4 for the past few years, but even a year ago statistics did show – depending on the target group of course – that old browsers accounted for 1-5 % of all traffic to the sites we’ve built.
But now in most cases there really is no precense at all from old browsers. In most campaigns we get about 50.000 visits, and it’s great look at the stats and find only a very small number of users using old browsers (usually less than 10 hits came from NS4 or IE4, and half of that came from our internal tests). We even had one campaign with 25.000 unique visitors, and not a single old browser, wohoo!
So if a clients still asks to develop for NS4, I have some great material to convince them to rethink their view.
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Hi
I’m curious what you get for IE Mac. I have an educational resource that seems to get about 30% from it, but these are mostly schools.
I’d like to know what the normal website figures are like for it and have not been able to get any good statistics.
I’d greatly appreciate it if you were able to check that out.
Thanks,
-Cort -
Hi Cort,
The figures I’m taking about are mostly for Finland only, our global campaigns have not reached so many visitors as to make them reliable. In Finland Macs are mostly used professionally, advertising agencies acounting for most Macs, so the stats look very depressing there, usually well under 2 % mac users. Within the mac user group we see about 80% going with Safari, most of the rest use IE5. But again, thats Finland…
Flash version penetration
I’ve always thought the flash penetration statistics over at Macromedia were a little too optimistic. Although we’ve created quite many campaigns targeted at young people – who probably upgrade their Flash Players quickly – we’ve never seen penetration reach the numbers mentioned on Macromedia’s site.
Up until recently, we’ve developed for Flash 6. Looking at some of our campaigns in March, our statistics tell us that only 88% were able to see Flash 6 content. Compared to the 97,7% mentioned on Macromedias site for the penetration in Europe, the difference is too big.
And I would not blame Finland. Compared to, say, Germany or France, users here are technologically far ahead. We have faster computers, more Internet users (% population), faster connections, and we dominate in the adaption rate of Firefox.
Maybe the MM statistics are just wrong a little too optimistic compared to a real-word situation, or maybe the Finnish Linux users are to blame;)
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It’s definitely possible for samples to differ. The NPD/MediaMetrix study uses members of their regular web-based consumer focus groups. The audience for a particular website may or may not match these general consumer norms.
jd/mm -
Sure, it’s very much possible that samples differ. But I can say for certain that when we combine all statistics for all of our campaigns and websites, we’re getting close to 50% of all finnish internet-enabled habitants. And still we see only a little under 90% of penetration for Flash Player 6.
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I wonder, why Macromedia MXNA had classified this post as Flash Mobile
was very excited about it as well )
Congratulations on having return to home and I hope your girlfriend (or should I call her a fiancee
I share your point of view on Expression. But Flex 2…. so many new useful features… very nice indeed..