My Last Week at Adobe

A little more than six years ago I was working at Fujitsu as well as contracting with Macromedia doing work on the DRKs and other Macromedia projects with my brother Josh. I was then made an offer I couldn’t refuse (thanks to Mike): to move out to San Francisco and join the Macromedia Central team and kick off six amazing years of ‘work.’

What I thought might last a year or two, has ended up being one of the greatest experiences of my life. And as you can probably tell by the tone, it will be coming to an end very soon. I recently submitted my resignation to Adobe and this will be my last week at the company.

I have worked for what I believe is one of the most amazing and innovative groups of engineers, product managers and management in the world. I have worked on great projects; some that have been immensely successful, some not so much. I have had the privilege of working on projects with some of the largest and most influential companies in the valley such as AOL, Yahoo! and Facebook, as well as many other smaller ones. By bus, train, or airplane, I have travelled hundreds of thousands of miles to more countries, cities and conferences than I care to count visiting with thousands upon thousands of developers, customers and partners. All of my closest friends are people I have met while fulfilling my role as evangelist while at Adobe or Adobe employees themselves. I seriously have my dream job. All of this made the decision to leave that much more difficult.

But recently I was presented with the opportunity to help start a new company here in Dallas that will be focused on creating both hardware and software for large interactive multi-touch and mixed reality display systems. I will be running day-to-day operations for the company, along with two other partners and a team of stellar engineers and developers. We are going to be pushing the envelope of what is possible in Flash on some cutting edge hardware, so I won’t be leaving the community to far behind.

This was an opportunity that my time at Adobe has adequately prepared me for. Adobe has afforded me the opportunities and freedom to fill many different roles and have provided all the support necessary. So I would just like to publicly say ‘thank you’ to the company for bringing me to this point and opening so many doors for me.

But more importantly I want to thank the community. It is the Flash community that made my job so enjoyable and made me so successful. We have the most amazing and open community. We have our spats now and then, but we all seem to be able to sit down and have drink together and put that behind us. How cool is that? And while I won’t be an ‘official’ Adobe representative any more, I look forward to seeing you at conferences and events in the future in my new role and showing off some of the cool projects we will be working on.

PS. While my Adobe email address will not work after this week, you can still reach me at daniel.dura@gmail.com.

Find Flash, Flex and AIR Jobs on Twitter

If you are looking to hire someone who knows Flash platform technologies, or you are a developer looking for a new gig, I have started a new Twitter identity that might help out. Go and check out @flashjobs.

Over the past few years I have probably seen hundreds of requests from agencies, small businesses and enterprises who are struggling to find developers with Flash, Flex or AIR experience. Usually I would pass them on to recruiters or every once in a while I would pass them on to someone that I knew was looking for work. Despite the current economic conditions, I am still getting requests.

In the never ending quest to remove things from my inbox, I setup this account on Twitter where I will be posting job listings that I find worthy of the great developers who are following the account. It will be a short description of the listing and a URL for more information.

If you would like to post a job to this account, please send an email to daniel.dura@gmail.com with a URL to the job listing and a short description. I will then post it to the Twitter account for developers to see. For developers who are following the account, you can be instantly notified through Twitter of new openings that are available by following @flashjobs. If you are looking for a good Twitter desktop client, check out TweetDeck.

Just as a quick FYI, I also have @flexjobs, but I don’t plan on using it at the moment. All Flash platform related jobs will be posted to this one Twitter account for the time being.

Flash Player Coming to Palm Pre and webOS

One of the most exciting announcements that came out of Adobe today is that Palm is joining the Open Screen Project. Robert Scoble has some interesting comments and is following the news as well. What this means is that the Flash Player is coming to Palm’s new webOS platform and the Palm Pre. If you haven’t checked out the Palm Pre and its revolutionary OS, go check out this video on Engadget. The goal is that OEMs will have Flash Player delivered by the end of 2009, which means you will probably start seeing it on phones in 2010.

To me, the Pre represents everything great about the iPhone, and more. While hardware is a huge part of the appeal to any particular platform, it is the whole picture that matters. With Palm, not only is the Pre a great form factor (it has a keyboard!), but webOS builds on all the ‘Web 2.0’ ideals and allows developers who have invested in Ajax and Flash based technologies, take advantage of those skills for creating content and applications for a true open web platform. And last but not least, using Palm Synergy it creates a single view for all of your cloud based information and helps maintain your data independence.

So, while I am a huge fan of the iPhone (I have two for heaven’s sake), I am extremely excited about getting my hands on the Palm Pre and hopefully I can pull a few strings and get a build of the Flash Player running on it before it is generally available! There have to be perks to having this job, right?

Adobe: A Family Business

While this may be slightly off topic, I figured this was a good post since most of you that know me, also know my brother Josh. (Is it just me or has his blog been even more quiet than mine!) Anyways, he just announced on Twitter (here, here, and here) that he is leaving Blockdot, the adver-gaming company he has been at for a while, to take a position with Adobe. Ill leave it to him to give more of the details. But suffice it to say, I think Adobe made a great choice.

To close, here is a little fact which you may or may not find interesting. It was Josh who introduced me to Flash! It was back in 2000 I believe. While I had toyed a very little with Flash 3 and Flash 4, Josh really encouraged me to try it out again in the Flash 4 and 5 days. Needless to say, I got hooked 🙂 A year or so later I started a blog, I then joined the Macromedia Central team which both Josh and I had been contracting with at the time, and the rest is history.

So, now that there are two Duras at Adobe, what should we do with our new found power? (insert evil laugh here)

New Adobe AIR Marketplace

If you have written an AIR based application, and have yet to post it to the Adobe AIR Marketplace, now is the time. Last night we updated the Marketplace and it has a new look and feel and has added numerous new features. You can upload your AIR application file, manage your profile, and monitor downloads, ratings, and reviews of your application. You can also add a link so that users can purchase your application before users download it.

WordPress Comment Moderator AIR Application

UPDATE: This application is now available. Please see the following page: http://www.danieldura.com/moderator/

I wanted to give everyone a quick sneak peak of something I am working, that I should be releasing next week. As you can tell by the footer on this page, this blog is powered by WordPress. I have found WordPress to be one the best, most feature rich, well coded, and well designed publishing platforms. It is easy to update, is customizable, and most importantly (for me atleast) is very extensible.

One problem I have though is that the dashboard is a web based application in my browser and one of the functions I use the most is, comment moderation, only sends notifications via email. What I really wanted was a desktop solution to alert me when new comments are awaiting moderation.

I did find one solution, but it is only on Windows. Man, I really wish there was a way to have a cross platform application that even allowed me to approve and deny comments from my desktop. Hmm… what could I use…

As you probably figured, AIR is a PERFECT candidate for this use case, and so I just went ahead and built an app myself. This screenshot is the application actually working. I have it running against a local version of a WordPress installation. It gives alerts when new comments are awaiting moderation, tells you how many comments are awaiting moderation in the dock menu, and allows you to approve comments, mark them as spam, or delete them.

If you want to try out the application, you will have to wait a week or two. I still have a few bugs to fix, and I want to test it out against a real installation first, probably mine (or maybe my brother’s since he doesn’t seem to be posting much lately.) If you have any feature requests or if you think this is interesting, please feel free to leave a comment, it will give me a chance to test out the app as well!

Have you registered for MAX?

I was just recently in a meeting, where we were discussing some of the activities going on around MAX 2008 and some of the information we will be sharing about that time. All I can say is WOW! This will be my seventh or eighth MAX. I honestly can’t even remember how many I have been to at this point, especially if you include the international events. But this is the one I am the most excited for, and I already know all the secrets! 😉

We have a great session line-up with great speakers, many of whom are engineers at Adobe. And not to mention, we are holding it in the infamous Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, which is just a few blocks from our San Francisco offices (the old Macromedia building). If you really kiss up, I might even give you a tour 😉 On top of that, the price right now is very reasonable.

So, stop thinking about it and sign up now. I hope this doesn’t come off as a sales pitch, but I know you won’t be disappointed by this event. I think we are going to sell out pretty quick this year if last year was any indication. Not to mention, I think the demand for tickets is going to be even higher because of the location. So hurry up! Sign up here.

Free Flex, Flash and AIR Books

Recently I was lucky enough to participate in the authoring of a book on JavaScript development in AIR with Mike Chambers, Kevin Hoyt, and Dragos Georgita. What has been great about this book is how well it has been received by the community and the fact that you could download a PDF copy of it for free (you can still purchase a hard copy as well at Amazon). What wasn’t great, was that it was only in English.

Over the past few months, Mike Chambers has been working on a solution to this problem, and what he has come up with is going to be an amazing resource. The site is called toString.org and encourages developers to submit translations to the site for publishing. Mike describes the site as:

…a site that hosts books about Rich Internet Applications, with a focus on book that leverage the Adobe RIA Technology Platform (Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR, Adobe Flex).

Currently there are two books on the site, both the Flex and the JavaScript pocketguides for AIR development. There are already a few translations as well. Mike is not done with the site yet as well and says that many new features are coming soon, including offline support through an AIR application, REST APIs, and diffing capability for reviewing changes between updates.

Heading to Europe for the onAIR Train Tour

As you may have heard, we are soon to head out on the first leg of the onAIR Tour in Europe. This time we will be sporting backpacks and making our way from city to city the European way, via trains (instead of our much beloved bus.) We have high expectations for this tour, we are already seeing amazing registration numbers. So if you have not registered, you will want to do it soon so you aren’t left out.

An Update on Adobe's Investment Program

Over the past few weeks I received many questions about the $100 million investment program Adobe announced at MAX 2006 in Las Vegas. It has been about a year since the announcement, and many people have only heard about our investment and subsequent acquisition of Virtual Ubiquity, the makers of the Flex based online word processor Buzzword.

I did a little bit of research, and John Leckrone, who is in charge of the investment program at Adobe, pointed me towards a new site recently launched that contains specific information about the program, called Adobe Ventures. Virtual Ubiquity, while deservedly receiving a great deal of buzz recently, is only one of the numerous successful investments we have made over the past fifteen years. On this site, you can see a list of many of the companies that we have invested in as well as those who have made a variety of successful exits.

Adobe has invested in companies as diverse as Netscape, Seibel Systems, Vignette, EFI, and Shutterfly, as well as more recent startups such as MobiTV, Scrybe, and Bunchball. Those are just a few of the companies you may have heard of. I recommend that you check out this website and review the full portfolio. It is an impressive set of companies, and it was an eye opener to me that we had such a history of successful investments.

The real question you should be asking yourself is if your name is missing from this list. If you are interested in Adobe’s investment program, I encourage you to visit this site and submit a proposal using the link provided there.

Here is a list of some of the important links: