Flash SEO....coming to a SWF near you!!

Adobe announced last night that they have been teaming up with Yahoo and Google to give them the ability to better search and index Flash files. Adobe has given both search engine companies a special version of the Flash Player that will allow them to crawl and interact with a swf just like a user would. This will give search engines the ability to see and index any text in you swf, even including button labels. This really opens up a whole new realm for Flash developers. And also more to think about when designing you flash website.

Adobe explains why this effort is significant:

"Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player. We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers, and end users"

Adobe evangelist and blogger-at-large Ryan Stewart sums up the advantages to developers of Flash content with this:

"Google is going to have their own rules for how this new Flash Player indexes and uses the content. So will Yahoo. But we’ve given the search engines the technology to see SWF files in the same way they see HTML files. So now the art (or black voodoo magic) of SEO optimization can come to SWF files as well. That means it’s a big new world for Flash developers. You can poke the system, see what works and what doesn’t work. See how Google will handle deep linking and URL changes in Flash. It’s all up for grabs and it’s really exciting to think about what the Flash community can discover about SEOing SWF files."

Here is google's latest release about the subject. Improved Flash Indexing

As I said earlier, this really adds great things for the Flash development community, because the SEO side of Flash has always been a sore subject. But now we as developers get to figure out the best way to handle the search ability, indexing, and deep-linking in our Flash apps now.

AIR Developement with Flex Presentation

The presentation at IPSA went really well (I thought anyway). We had a pretty big crowd, especially for a summer meeting. And some really great questions from the audience. Even though I'm a little late here are the presentation slides and source code.

The slides can be seen and downloaded here AIR Development with Adobe Flex.

The Flex project archive can be downloaded here. Project Archive

If you so choose you can view the video of the presentation here. Presentation Video

A few notes on the application:

Because of the scope of this particular project it was only developed for windows. Yes, I know what you're saying, " but AIR is cross platform." And you'd be correct. But there are, has you know, differences in the Mac and PC OS's. And because of these differences, there has to be logic that causes the app to act a little different based on the OS it is running on. Ex. Because this app is a system tray app, and because OS X doesn't have a system tray, you would have to write the logic for notifying the user but bouncing the dock icon on a mac, vs. flashing the system tray icon on a PC. So, unless you add this logic the app will probably throw errors on OS X.

I have also removed all of the images from the app. You will need to create you own icons and add them to the App XML file before running this app.


Please feel free to leave any questions in the comments or contact for any help on tweaking or adding to this app.

Also please let me know how the presentation was. I always like to get some feedback from people.

Thanks and Happy AIR-ing!

Talking at IPSA on Friday!!!

I'll be speaking at IPSA on Friday June 13, 2008. I will be talking about AIR development with Flex. I will be going through a brief overview of Flex and AIR and then diving into the code of an branded AIR app that I just finished for Intermark Interactive. I will be posting my slides for the presentation next week. Look forward to seeing you guys there!

Poor Project Requirements equals Poor Project Development

I am currently developing a website for a large company where my major role has been to develop a Flex app that resides in each of the product pages that shows info, swatches, etc for each of the sub product lines. I was given a psd of the comp of two different product pages, and that's it. I looked over the comps and made the assesment that the pages were laid out and functioned the exact same. Great! I can make one Flex app that loads in a different XML file for each product and a different CSS file for some changes in the app colors. Not a problem. So that's what i did. I begin the analysis of the app one morning and by the end of the following day the app was complete. It was a Flex app built on the Cairngorm framework and it looked and functioned just like the comps. (Cairngorm rocks by the way) Awesome, I had finished way before my deadline, now on to the next project. Now we could just give the other products a XML data file and those pages would be complete.

Not even close. I then demoed the app inside those two product pages to the client. The client liked it. The client then preceeded to give me the structure of some of the other product pages. They want it to look and "function" just like the pages that I had just completed, except for the fact that these new product lines are totally different. So now I have spent way more time than was budgeted shoe horning new items and functionality into the original app. Had I known these requirements from the get go, i could have planned for them and made better app design decisions. Thanks to the help of Cairngorm the files have stayed well separated and the app well developed.

Lesson here...don't start app developed until ALL requirements have been gathered from the client and signed off on by them. As developers we have to push back on our AE's, PM's or whoever is handling the requirement gathering until we have all requirments needed for the development process in documented form. If we aren't given the time and/or ability to push back and wait for the needed requirements then the quality of the finished app and the accurateness of our time estimations will suffer greatly. And this will damage our employers bottom line much worse than than taking the extra time to do proper requirements gathering.

Hello Blogsphere!

First post from the deep south. As you can see the blog is currently a blogspot template. :) That will be changing soon!

This blog will focus on Flash and Flex development. Hope you check back for the new design and keep coming back for a developer's ramblings of the beauty and frustration that is Flash/Flex development.