Scribd Steps Up Its Game With iPaper. new flash based pdf viewer. looks nice.

Buzzword. online word processor done all in flash. i’m impressed. slick looking app. all the features i need and the docs look nicer than google apps. no right click is annoying though.

You’re not on a fucking plane (and if you are, it doesn’t matter)! - (37signals). this made me laugh, though i disagree.

Joyeur: Joyent Slingshot. joyent is developing a system for rails-based thick clients somewhat like adobe’s apollo project or the proposed firefox3. one odd thing from the screencast, it looked like you could look at all the code from the downloaded app.

adobe’s apollo project

Techcrunch has really great interview with Kevin Lynch, Adobe’s chief software architect for the Apollo project. The apollo project is a cross-platform runtime which will use existing Adobe technologies like flash, flex, & pdf along with standards based html and ajax to create downloadable web apps. These apps could then be used even when a user is not connected to the internet. The interview lacked a lot of technical detail but still made the project sound quite interesting. There was a follow-up article on TechCrunch which shows some screenshots of demo app developed by Adobe.

If Adobe can provide a solution for installable rich-client apps which can be easily migrated from current web-based apps and have an easy-to-use data storage/sync solution, I think it would be quite compelling. The flash player currently has something like 98% penetration and is supported on Windows, Mac, and Linux and has a sizable developer community. There could be a lot of potential for web-centric sites like flickr, youtube, last.fm, etc. Flickr could have a standard rich client for managing and uploading your locally stored photos whereas youtube could provide a simple video editor and encoder so that users can upload their movies already encoded as flash video. Another interesting item is that Adobe has open-sourced their ActionScript virtual machine to the Mozilla Foundation. Actionscript, which is used in Flash, is simply an implementation of ECMAScript which is standard used for Javascript. This is a great move for Adobe. Besides getting the benefit of open-source development on the VM, Adobe will be using the same VM in Flash and PDF that Mozilla will use it within Firefox for Javascript. This provides a really great story to developers of web-centric client apps and should definitely help the platform pick up mass and steam.

And who gets screwed if this takes off? Microsoft. Microsoft has a similar competing technology called Windows Presentation Foundation, or WPF. The only problem is that it only works on Windows. Interestingly, the interview briefly talks about WPF and Lynch points out that WPF will only be supported on Vista and XP SP2 so Apollo will actually be supporting more versions of Windows (98, XP) than Microsoft itself.

Macworld Video: Adobe Photoshop CS3 beta. you can download the beta now. the photo merging tools demo’d in the video are pretty cool. via ram.

kuler. a very fancy color pallette picker by adobe.

Sue, kiss, marry | Economist.com. Short article about how Macromedia and Adobe came together. It started with sueing each other and then realizing the nonsense of it after 9/11.