One day after the release of the new Flash Player, Adobe is shipping Creative Suite 4. Adobe CS4 is shipping in seven bundles, Premium and Standard editions for Design, Web, and Production, and a Master Collection bundle. Check out the prices and bundle details over at Adobe. Those wishing to try out the applications will have to wait a bit as the demo versions are not out yet.

 Looks like we will not have to wait for the 23rd of September (or the 24th of September if you are on this side of the world) to see Adobe’s CS4 Event because all the information on the new Crative Suite is now available on Adobe’s website! CS4 has new version of Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, Fireworks, After Effects, InDesign, and other members of the Creative Suite. New features of the suite include 3D painting in Photoshop and Bones and Inverse Kinematics in Flash. The demos of the applications are still not available nor are the actual release dates but they are expected to ship next month. The Suite is available in the same Design, Web, and Production bundles (Premium and Standard) that were introduced in the last release. Check out all the details on Adobe’s website.

Google has released its new open source browser as promised today. I have downloaded the browser a bit ago and I am very impressed by it. It is very fast, transition between the tabs is smooth and quick, and it has a very clean interface.

Oman3D renders in the same exact way as it does in Firefox. I have checked other websites I operate and they all look perfect in Chrome (including ones made in Flash and those with Arabic characters as well). WordPress Turbo (Gears implementation) seems also to be a bit faster, but I might just be imagining that because I love this thing way too much!

You can download Google Chrome for free for Windows Vista and XP via this link.

All good web developers need to download Chrome to confirm that their websites do not break in it.

Google has announced that it will be launching sometime TODAY a new open source internet browser called Google Chrome that uses technologies taken from Google’s own Gears and other open source projects such as Firefox and Webkit (the rendering engine used in Apple’s Safari and Google mobile OS Android). In addition to its multi-process tab system, security sandbox, and other end-user features, Chrome will be be equipped with a new JavaScript Virtual Machine called V8 which features hidden class transitions, dynamic code generation, and incremental garbage collection to let Chrome have better interactive performance for web applications. V8 will be independent from the browser so that other browsers can use it as well if they want to.

Google has release a detailed cartoon illustrating the new features of Chrome. You can view the cartoon here. Chrome will be released today in a 100 countries for Windows. Linux and Mac versions should follow shortly afterward.

 The latest issue of Adobe Edge has a detailed article on the new features of the next edition of the Flash Player codenamed Astro. Major additions to the player include the ability to create custom filters and blend modes using a new technology called Adobe Pixel Bender, native 3D engine, and a new text engine that allows device fonts to be anti-aliased, rotated, and styled. Astro also features many performance improvements and new ActionScript API made in response to community requests.

You can learn more about these new features by reading the article on Adobe Edge. You can also download the Flash Player 10 Beta 2 and check out demos of the technology over at Adobe Labs.

It is essential for everyone of us to learn about the law and our rights and obligations when we deal in any sort of business. The Legal Guide to Web & Software Development aims to provide those involved in the web and software development business with the fundamentals of intellectual property, employment and sub-contracting issues, and contracts relating to web and software development.

The 500+ pages book is divided into two sections, the first covers the general legal fundamentals covering intellectual property and employment issues, and the second section provides a detailed explanation of a number of contracts relating to the web and software development business.

The book is good in the way it generally uses simple terms to explain the legal aspects of copyright, trademarks, patents, trade secret, database rights, and the impact of consultancy/employment contracts on all of these issues. The book also nicely provides practical examples throughout the first section to illustrate the legal concepts and makes suggestions on how to establish an effective trade secret protection program.

The second section of the book offers a detailed explanation in a clause-by-clause manner on how to draft a number of development related contracts, namely: an ‘employment agreement’, a ‘consultancy agreement’, a ’software and website license’, a ‘website development agreement’, and a ’software development agreement’. The book is worth the purchase just for the second half of the book as it explains all the essential clauses of the specific contracts it covers and the boilerplate clauses found in the majority of contracts such as the confidentiality clause, the dispute settlement clause, the termination clause, and others.

A section worth highlighting in the book is the chapter on licensing and opensouce licensing, a topic which I had a general idea about but was not familiar with the specifics of. The book nicely explained the differences between major opensource licensing and the issues to be considered when developing and using an opensource application.

The book comes with a CD containing all the forms and contracts discussed in RTF format. These are poorly formatted and not as usable as a Doc file, but they would just do the job.

I thought that the book was generally very good, it should be of help to anyone involved in the web and software development. The author claims that it is directed towards developers and clients at the same time, but I thought that the contracts were extremely worded to the benefit of the developer rather the client, which does not always happen in practice, because the developer does not always have enough bargaining to dictate the terms to suit his own needs and would have to take the terms written by the client. The book does at many times provide alternatives for clauses with varying levels of favouring to the developer, but it does not talk at all about extreme clauses that would be in favour of the client and which might be detrimental to the developer, and those are important to the developer because he might not always have the choice but to take them.

Another issue, which is not major but really annoyed me was the fact that the author Stephen Fishman really still thinks that website owners need to have a permission to link to another website. The book does not explain the difference between hot-linking, deep-linking, and linking to a website’s homepage. He also wrongly suggest that linking could constitute a trademark infringement when in most cases it does not as the mere usage of a trademark name to identify the product in a manner that does not mislead to its source is acceptable. I believe that it is legal to link to any publicly available web page on the internet without the need to acquire a license from the owner. Hot-linking and framing is a much more complicated issue that was unfortunately not covered in this book.

Regardless of the few criticisms of the book, and taking into consideration the fact that this is one of the very few books on the topic, the Legal Guide to Web & Software Development is still an essential read for web and software developers looking for a straight forward legal guide that covers all the legal aspects of their craft. It offers an easy to understand explanation of intellectual property and provides an explanation of a number of widely used contracts in the business of web and software development.

Adobe and Google made a big announcement yesterday about a new technology developed by Adobe and to be used by Google and other search engines to better crawl and index Flash content on the Internet. Historically, a major drawback for using Flash was the fact that it was almost invisible to search engines. That did not only mean that the content in a Flash file itself cannot be found by Google, but all content linked to from the Flash file was also invisible to Google if the only reference to that link was in Flash.

The new technology developed by Adobe is a special Flash player that will enable search engines to crawl and read the text content in a Flash file as if it were a regular user viewing the Flash file. A search engine such as Google is supposed to be able to go through a Flash file, click buttons, read the textual content throughout the movie, and even follow links in the Flash file. This means that Google should be able to index text within a Flash file and follow links made from within Flash.

The announcement mentions that Flash will be on equal competing grounds with HTML in search engine optimization, but that is not true. Flash has major SEO issues other than merely the inability of search engines to read the text or links in it. A search engine does not usually just tell what website has the information we are looking for, but it leads us the EXACT SCREEN on which the keyword we searched for is. However, in most websites made purely in Flash there is no way to link directly to a certain screen because of the dynamic structure of Flash based content.

Flex (the Adobe tool for creating Flash rich Internet applications) provides methods for creating applications that use components to recreate information on a screen, but an application will not usually call that URL from within the application but will instead use a method to load the content directly onto the same browser window, so that direct Flex link we need will not exist for Google to find it in the first place.

It also means that if Google manages to discover that a certain Flash website has a specific keyword, Google will not be able to point you to the exact screen that has that keyword. This is, of course, better than not showing up the website at all, but it is a major findability issue. It also worth noting that it is still not clearly known what exact sort of text will be visible to Google, Flash is capable of having static or dynamic text directly created in the file, yet Flash is also capable of generating the text using ActionScript. It is also still unknown if Flash will be able to read only links called using the ActionScript getURL() method or just links attached directly to a textfield or using HTML in Flash.

This new technology will still be of a great benefit to HTML websites that use Flash for their navigation, because without this technology Google would have not gone deeper than the homepage if the only means for going inside the website was through that Flash navigation. Now Google can crawl the links in Flash menus and access the entire website.

It is also worth noting that Adobe has made this search engine Flash player compatible with all existing versions of Flash and developers will not need to take any action to make their Flash files accessible by search engines.

You can learn more about Flash Searchablility by checking Adobe’s FAQ on this topic.

Mozilla successfuly released yesterday the latest major edition of Firefox, though faced by an animation major blooper in its attempt to make a Guinness record for biggest number of downloads on the first day as its entire went down as a result of the massive number of people attempting to download the new version. Mozilla has recovered now and you can download the shiny new Firefox 3.0 with enhanced support of DOM, CSS, SVG and the newly added the capability to display animated PNGs (if you know how to make them!).

Serious web developers should also check out Firefox add-on Firebug and the Web Developer Toolbar to help them debug and test their websites in Firefox.

Download the new Firefox 3.0 via this link.

Adobe released yesterday the public beta of the next edition of its image prototyping application Fireworks CS4, web development application Dreamweaver CS4, and sound editing tool Soundbooth. Major enhancements in Fireworks CS4 include a new UI, CSS export, PDF export, support for Adobe’s new Adobe Type font engine, and AIR authoring tools. Dreamweaver CS4 on the other and adds a new live viewer for better display of content within Dreamweaver, a new related file manager for CSS, JavaScript, and XML navigation, enhanced CSS functionality, support for Photoshop Smart Objects, and Adobe AIR authoring tools as well.

These beta applications can be downloaded at Adobe Labs, holders of CS3 licenses can use the beta versions indefinitely until the official version comes out while non-CS3 license holders can try the applications for two days only. Check out Adobe Labs for more info.