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just found a very cool Adobe AIR-based desktop-app for accessing Google Analytics…try it out!

on July 6th-8th, Adobe is hosting iPhoneDevCamp in San Francisco, a BarCamp-styled gathering “to develop web-based applications and optimize web sites for iPhone. It is a non-commercial event, organized by volunteers, with attendance free to all. By the completion of the weekend event, a number of iPhone-ready web applications and web sites will be launched to the public.”. more than 120 developers have already signed up, temporarily establishing the most highest iPhone/person-density on the globe there’s also some sweet irony since Adobe is hosting the event while their Flash (Lite)-platform initially won’t be supported by iPhone.

Adobe Apollo/Flex continues to dominate this weeks tech-news with two - though distant - product announcements.

Virtual Ubiquity is aiming for a public beta-release of their Flex-based word-processor BuzzWord (Screenshot courtesy of GigaOM) in summer 2007. thanks to Apollo, BuzzWord will run both on- and offline, which puts it way ahead of Google Docs. it’ll be interesting to see if Flash-based apps for print-production will handle pagination and typography better than current Ajax-offerings (Google Docs f.e. sucks majorly by not even supporting headers & footers).

proving that they’re eating their own dogfood, Adobe itself announced plans to release an online, free & ad-supported version of their flagship-product Photoshop. as noted by Michael Arrington, this must be scary news for all the current players in the online photo-editing market…

sooner than expected, Linden Labs yesterday announced integration of voice-messaging into Second Life for Q2/2007, with a beta-run starting as early as next week. while residents have been using Skype and other popular teamspeak-applications since ages, the native SL-feature will go further by offering 3D-enabled, spatial audio. if done properly, this will increase the VR-experience massively.

on-/offline application development-platform Apollo gets presented to the web industry at Adobe Engage. lots of coverage… Read/WriteWeb has a good summary of what could be one if this years hottest products.

Search Engine Land congratulates Flickr on its upcoming 3rd birthday. the photo-sharing community which is now owned by Yahoo! pioneered the frontiers of Web 2.0 in many ways, mainly by bringing tagging and other Ajax-UI paradigms to the mainstream. happy birthday!

fowa2007, day #2 - wifi is still sluggish & expensive.

nothing too breathtaking from Microsoft (Chris Wilson) and Adobe (Mark Anders), though the Flex-demo was kinda intriguing - flash is finally making sense for developers. the CEO (?) of Scrybe gave a short performance-comparison of actionscript 2 vs. 3, which also seemed kinda impressing. He should’ve demo’ed Scrybe though, to really show what Flex/Apollo can do (btw, my Scrybe-beta account still doesnt work ).

check out Twingly, a screensaver (Windows only) done by swedish students which visualizes blog-activity on a rotating globe…

Khoi Vinh (director of design for NYTimes.com) - avoid the “The Siren Call of Web 2.0″ (Web 2.0 - pros can’t get enough, users have no idea what it is!)… good talk on NYTimes’ design approaches & challenges, hopefully slides will be available…

Jonathan Rochelle (Google) - “Google Docs & Spreadsheets - the product name sucks, but at least nobody will be confused”.

Daniel Appelquist (Vodafone) - “thematic consistency - ensure that content provided by accessing a URI yields thematically coherent experience when accessed through different devices”. check http://dev.mobi, a developer-community focused on mobile webapps (take their survey and receive a 20 US$ iTunes gift-certificate).

Rasmus Lerdorf (creator of PHP): “I don’t find joy in the process of programming. it’s kinda tedious & hard.”…great, geeky tech-talk. if you’re into performance measurement, check out http_load / valgrind / callgrind / Kcachegrind (prints nice execution-path trees). Rasmus on security: “the web is broken you can all go home now.”

and with these wise words I’m closing this post & and say goodbye fowa 2007 - we’ve had a blast!

according to Read/WriteWeb, Firefox 3 will offer support for running web-applications offline. though it’s not yet clear on which level this might happen, this is major news for providers of service-based web-software. the biggest advantage of online-apps - using them on any device with net-access with no need to sync data - is at the same time their worst caveat - when connectivity goes down, so do online-apps and all data stored within them (that’s why it is a good idea even for fulltime Gmail-users to backup their mail via POP3).

of course, Firefox isn’t alone in trying to move web-apps offline - Adobe’s Apollo framework promotes offline-services on top of their successful Flash-platform. Flash has bee used to store data in a local cache for quite a time, as it has been the only cross-browser solution besides storing (mini-chunks of) data within cookies (Niall Kennedy gives a good overview on various methods of storing data locally). applications like Scrybe (private beta) let us anticipate the way future online/offline-apps might look&feel.

besides Adobe, several open source projects are working on solutions for the offline-dilemma: the Dojo Offline Project and POW (Plain Old Webserver) both implement a proxy http-server for running local copies of web-applications. while Dojo Offline isn’t available yet, POW - a firefox plugin (which means basically a web-server implemented in Javascript!) - is ready for download.

naturally, existing web-apps require heavy modification to work with any of the mentioned offline-approaches, meaning we still have to wait for real-life apps leveraging the benefits of going offline.

Adobe released a versatile online color-picker coined kuler a few days ago. the flash-application not only suggests matching color-schemes by pre-defined rules (analogous, monochromatic, triad, complementary etc…), but also allows registered users to store, share & rate schemes. as a bonus, color-schemes can be downloaded for use in Adobe CS 2. a nice tool, not only for the color-blind