In less then a week I will be in Europe with my team to talk with customers, engage with developers, speak at events, learn a ton and have some fun!

Specifically, members of the Flash Product Management & Evangelism teams (Mike, Lee and Thibault) will be hosting several Flash User Group meetings to discuss Adobe’s roadmap for Flash Player and AIR. These will be great, interactive meetings where you can get detailed information about the new features and innovations happening in Flash.

Simultaneously (in some case, back-to-back events while in others, joint events) members of the Developer Product Management & Evangelism teams (Adam, Michael and myself) will be hosting several Flex User Group meetings. In the Flex User Group meetings we’ll discuss the recent changes to Flex, provide an update on the roadmap for the runtimes and tooling as it relates to Flex, discuss the incubation of Flex within the Apache Software Foundation and educate developers on how to get involved. In several meetings, we will be joined by active members of the Apache Flex project who will discuss their own personal involvement, give an update on progress and in some cases highlight their own potential engineering contributions to the project.

All of us will then suit up and head over to FITC Amsterdam to talk further about Flash, Flex and HTML. I am quite excited for my session where I will cover what Adobe is doing for HTML/CSS/JS developers. My session will be focused heavily on the work we are doing to better the foundation of the web – through work with standards, contributions to WebKit and partnering with browser/tooling vendors to lessen the fragmentation and inconsistencies rampant in the web. I’ll provide a detailed update on CSS Shaders, Regions and Exclusions but more excitingly – will highlight new contributions we are working on or partnering with others on. Want to know more about Shadow DOM? I’ll cover it. Want to learn more about how presentational attributes can (and should) be normalized between CSS and SVG for cleaner more performant code? I’ll cover it. Want to know more about how Adobe is helping the way you load and manage media in an HTML application? I’ll cover it. Etc etc etc. It’s going to rock!

Here is the detailed schedule, including links to registration sites for the User Group events:

• Flex - London, 2/20
• Flex - Paris, 2/21
• Flash - Paris, 2/22
• Flex - Bordeaux, 2/23
• Flash - London, 2/23
• Flash/Flex/HTML - FITC Amsterdam, 2/27 – 2/28
• Flash/Flex - Hamburg, 2/29
• Flex/Flash - Lisbon, 3/2

And lastly, I am spending dedicated time with individual developers, enterprises and agencies to learn more about what they are doing with HTML. What content are you building with HTML? What is difficult about it? What tools are you using? What are the roughest parts of the underlying web (audio? performance? precision? graphics? etc) and how can we make meaningful contributions to soften those pain points? I am in total sponge mode – trying to learn as much about how developers work (or attempt to work) when building HTML-based content and trying to identify the places where Adobe can help. To enable that, I highly encourage anyone to find me at any of these events and talk about what you’re working on, regardless if its Flash-based or HTML-based.

I am beyond excited to hit the road and talk to developers. There was definitely a bumpy road for Flash and Flex at the end of last year but these user group tours along with soon-to-be-published whitepapers about Flash/AIR and Flex will help quash rumors and clear up confusion. I am also very excited with what we are doing to enable modern web developers and designers working with HTML, CSS, SVG & JS. Though this may be hard for some to hear, I am excited that Adobe is recognizing there are choices when developing interactive content. Instead of ignoring those choices, we are working to make sure that regardless whether you chose Flash or HTML as your client technology, Adobe provides stellar tools and services that cater to both those worlds while also solving hard problems.

See you in Europe!

Its that time of year, friends.

I really enjoy putting together my Top -10 Albums list (2009, 2010). There is something very methodical yet whimsical about taking the time to sit and review the year in relation to music. This list is essentially my soundtrack for the year – most highs and lows were punctuated with a track or loop from one of these albums and re-listening to some of this stuff while creating this list has brought back a flood of memories. I guess making this list is a guilty pleasure since it lets me indulge in a bit of nostalgia.

And man, what a year. Lots of milestones were hit (Blaire Brown: MILESTONES!). Some great things happened, some not so great things happened – definitely a year where I feel like I GREW UP. (That was bound to happen eventually, no?).

So I hope you guys dust off your lists and share them with me. Without further preamble, here is my Top 10 Albums of 2011.

10. Drive, Original Soundtrack :: Various Artists

Every time I put a soundtrack on my list (last year was the first with the Trent Reznor/Atticus Ross’ soundtrack for The Social Network), I feel dirty. There’s something so…commercial about putting a compilation of varied artists’ songs, purely meant to augment a film, as a standalone selection on a music Top-10 list. But, screw it. This is *my* list and I loved this soundtrack with every fiber of my being so its ON people. Two tracks deserve special mention: “Desire” and “Nightcall”. I mean, wow, just wow – both songs captured the pulpy intensity the movie embodied (I loved the movie, by the way) and I find myself listening to both often.

9. AraabMuzik :: Electronic Dream

For a while there, I felt like I was the only person who liked this album. But slowly but surely – it caught on. Lets ignore the fact that the album name is one of the worst ever, the music speaks for itself. Its dance-worthy for sure, pulsating and fevered in pitch, but I found myself mostly listening to this while biking to and from work (don’t hate, I only put one earpod in so I consider that kind of safe…). So apologies to anyone who heard me scream while flying down Market: “You are now listening to ARAAAAAAAB MUUUUZIIIIIIIK.” (Also, I love how it bugs Shark that he says that too much in every song).

8. The Rapture :: In the Grace of Your Love

My love for this album grew ten-fold after seeing them live (at a horribly crowded show filled with under-age monsters). Wow, what a party. The beats are perfect, the lyrics…interesting, the whole thing put together is like a perfect grilled cheese sandwich.

7. The New Division :: The Rookie

Big thank you to Fred for introducing me to these guys at a super nerdy and super fun game night earlier this year. As a hardcore Joy Division and New Order band, it was brainless that I would dig New Division. Starfield is one of those perfect “landscape-y” type of songs that speaks to my heart and feet. To those whom I sit around at work, its pretty much this album that caused the near constant swaying and humming the last few months.

6. M83 :: Hurry Up We’re Dreaming

Oh so French….such ear candy, you must be deaf if you don’t like at least one or two tracks off this album. Take your pants off people: its time to dance.

5. Active Child :: You Are All I See

That voice, those chords, the harmonies. At times it’s too much for me. The self-titled track has made me cry. There’s nothing more that needs to be said.

4. James Blake :: James Blake

I’m embarrassed to say I got into James Blake and this self-titled album quite late, probably in the last month and a half. But not a day too late. It took some time to grow on me. Like the album cover art, I found it too diffuse, distracted, at times even cheesy with the emotion and piano riffs – but then as it took ahold of my ears I realized all of that was what made each song perfect and I wouldn’t want a single note changed.

3. Youth Lagoon :: The Year of Hibernation

Trevor Powers – what a cute, awkward, simple young kid making such beautiful music while living in the middle of…nothing. This album is full of beauty – you can just tell he put his heart and soul into it and I am a sucker for such creativity like that. Posters, Montana and Ghost To Me were three of my favorite tracks. I listened to this album a lot when things were cray-cray-crazy at work, and it did wonders to calm me down and help me focus. Word to the wise: its a lovely album to fall asleep to.

2. Kurt Vile :: Smoke Ring For My Halo

I may go so far as to say this album will join me on a desert island somewhere sometime. Whose Top-10 list is this album *not* on?

I don’t want to change but I don’t want to stay the same
I don’t want to go but I’m running
I don’t want to work but I don’t want to sit around all day frowning

1. Tycho :: Dive

Let’s take a moment and talk about how awesome Scott Hansen is. First off, not only is he an amazing electronic musician, with meticulous compositions and pitch-perfect production, but he’s a fantastically talented graphic designer as well (he works under the name ISO5050). He’s also a Flash nerd, which of course makes him skyrocket straight to my heart. I’ve seen him live a couple of times (he played Flash in the City SF’s after-party two summers ago!) and he is one of a few electronic acts who can translate the simple power of their album into an engaging live show. Bravo Tycho! This album was a soundtrack on many flights, Muni rides, dinner preparations and long car rides. iTunes tells me I’ve listened to this album 43+ times and yet each time I’m able to discover something new. Like just last night I realized there’s this little synth sample on ‘Dive’ that is similar to my ‘new email’ notification sound (which sadly is annoying when you’re on holiday break). If you haven’t listened to this album yet, do so and thank me later.

Tycho: you speak to me.

I, along with my colleague Andrew Shorten, have posted an update on Flex where we answer a number of questions regarding Adobe’s commitment to Flex SDK.

Please read it here.

As part of this, we announced our intention to pursue an open development model for Flex, similar to the model already used for PhoneGap and Day.

I encourage you to read the post and comment or ask questions on the blog.

Note: We posted a very important update with more questions and answers on 11/15/11. Please read the updated post here. 

After an embarrassingly long time with an embarrassingly fugly blog, its time to unveil the new, fly, iamdeepa.com!

I have to say, updating my blog was strangely mesmerizing. It was a fun opportunity to play around with WordPress’ advancements, modifying CSS/HTML and PHP in a variety of different editors, and in general taking a little walk down “blogosphere memory lane”.

I learned a few things while redesigning the blog this past week. A couple of notes below:

1. Don’t wait too long to update your WordPress version! I hadn’t updated my old blog’s WordPress version in 4 years. This meant I had to painstakingly update by hand from WordPress 2.2 to WordPress 3.2 including dependent plugins and whatnot. Never will I be so delinquent in updating – its a pound of hurt.
2. The maturity and cleanliness of WordPress themes has really improved. I love the theme I chose (F8 Lite by Graph Paper Press) and its free to boot. I was impressed by the variety of choices and felt kind of inspired to create my own custom theme. Once you figured out how the PHP templates all worked together, it was pretty trivial to go in and hand tweak changes – especially if its in one of the standard templates (like header or footer).
3. I ended up hand tweaking a fair amount of CSS and PHP and tried a couple of different editors. I ended up being most happy with Coda. It was simple and straightforward and lightweight. I’ve become more and more fanatical about, whenever possible, culling together a smaller set of purpose-driven utilities for my development environment rather then having open a big and heavy IDE. Coda was something in line with that desire and I found it to be perfect for what I needed to do. I also briefly played with Mou, and liked the potential there. It took a little bit to get used to the hot-keys such that I wasn’t hunting and pecking down each menu, but once I got the hang of it I was able to write/edit prose fast and see exactly how it would look in-context.

I’m hoping this new redesign kickstarts me into posting more often. I have a couple of interesting posts in the pipeline about Flex as well as HTML5, so keep an eye out for those.

BTW, I tested the new site out on Mac only browsers (and not all permutations). If you find any issues, please leave a comment with which platform/browswer you were using. Thanks!

My wonderful friend, a fellow techie and all around inspiring, creative and passionate dude, Amit Gupta, has recently been diagnosed with leukemia. He’s the man behind amazing things like Jelly, the photospectactular mailing list/blog Photojojo and the recent new venture: Material. If you’re a fan of any of these sites, a fan of Amit himself, or a survivor of AML – please take a moment read this.

It looks as if Amit will need a bone marrow transplant some time soon. Unfortunately, minorities are incredibly underrepresented in the national marrow donor pool. This is where we need your help! It is painless to register as a bone marrow donor. Please take a moment to do this if you’re unregistered but please please please especially do this if you are of South Asian descent (India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Maldives or Sri Lanka). My fellow brown friends, I’m looking right at you – you could end up saving my friend’s life!

Registering as a bone marrow donor is incredibly easy. You can do it in person through registry drives in your area (check here to find one near you). Bay Area/San Francisco friends, there are drives coming up in the next few days. You can also register by mail if getting to a physical drive proves difficult.

Amit – you’re a fighter who gets shit done. You will beat this my friend!

UPDATE! The incomparable Seth Godin sweetens the deal.

Let me draw your attention to an important update from the Flex product team over on the Flexteam blog. Important to read and spread broadly.

Go Flex!

It seems like every year I come back from MAX, write my “Thoughts on MAX” blog post, take a nap and BOOM – its already next year’s MAX. 

This year is no different. MAX 2011 is right around the corner and I’m pretty excited about everything queued up for the conference including  juicy announcements, stellar sessions and (my fav) early ideas shown off at MAX Sneaks. So if you haven’t registered already, get on it! The Flex and Flash Builder teams will be at the conference this year en masse and, as usual, I will be doing the “What’s New in Flex SDK” session.

But lets take a moment here….

These are some exciting times for any content developer trying to get their experiences in front of the masses. Whether you’re aiming to build an in-browser experience, a standalone desktop application, a tablet or smartphone app – the medium by which to share your content is multifold. Of course, once you determine which screens you want to target, the technology choices are plenty: Flash/Flex, HTML, native, etc. The options are numerous and the rewards are incredibly high. At MAX this year, you can learn all about our Flash-based solutions for application development regardless if you’re targeting iOS (YES, we run on Apple iOS) or a TV. Its the one-stop shop to learn what Adobe has to offer, and I suspect you’ll be impressed.

I truly believe that the move to mobile is equivalent to the move from a mainframe to the PC, or PC to the browser. And remember, the mobile space (for both providers and technology choices), is a marathon, not a sprint. So make sure you are well aware of all your options and use MAX to learn more about Flex and Flash for mobile application development. See you there!

The Flex PM team is heading to India for the Adobe Flash Platform Summit in Bangalore from July 27th – 29th! I attended this event last year and it was an awesome mix of developers and designers working on some really great Flex apps. I’m excited to attend again this year with my Flex PM crew (for one of them, his first trip to India!).

I am going to be giving two sessions. One is a breakout session which is an overview of Flex 4.X. We will cover what Flex 4 introduced, including Spark, as well as the awesome new mobile capabilities delivered in Flex 4.5/4.5.1 for Android, iOS and Playbook development.

The other will be a hands-on 3 hour workshop which will walk folks through building a Spark-based application for desktop and mobile. I love hands on labs as its really fun to jointly create a rad app, so I’m really looking forward to this session!

I hope those of you in and around India can attend the event – we will be sharing a lot of information about how to write truly compelling and performant Flex applications for the web, desktop and mobile devices!

The Flex SDK and Flash Builder teams are extremely excited to advise that the previously-announced June updates are now available for download – that means you can now build and package Flex mobile applications for Google Android, Apple iOS and BlackBerry Tablet OS devices!

Flash Builder 4.5.1 includes Flex 4.5.1 SDK, AIR 2.6 SDK and the updated iOS Packager that provides for great performance of Flex and ActionScript applications on iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch devices.

Flash Builder 4.5.1 also includes RIM’s plug-in for packaging applications for the BlackBerry PlayBook (requires BlackBerry Tablet OS SDK). Note that an over-the-air update to PlayBook devices is required before Flex 4.5.1 applications will run on the device.

If you already have Flash Builder 4.5 installed then an updater is available from Adobe.com or through Adobe Application Manager (AAM). New trial downloads of Flash Builder are version 4.5.1, so don’t need to be updated after installation. If you want purely the standalone Flex 4.5.1 SDK, grab the builds off our opensource site.

If you haven’t yet seen how Flash Builder 4.5 enables you to build mobile applications then check out Serge Jesper’s video on Adobe TV. Also, check out the Adobe Developer Center for articles, sample applications and more…

We look forward to seeing your apps in the Android Market, Apple App Store and BlackBerry App World!

Man oh man, crazy few weeks. The most exciting thing is that we announced Flex SDK 4.5, Flash Builder 4.5, and Flash Catalyst CS 5.5!

I’ve basically been traveling non-stop for the last two months talking to customers, visiting user groups and speaking at conferences. Really a whirlwind time making my way through Paris, London, Amsterdam, Cologne, Hamburg, Vienna and…Denver. (I kid, I kid, I love Denver!). I seriously had the time of my life (and celebrated my birthday in Paris!).

My 360Flex Denver keynote is up live if you want to check it out. It has some awesome demos of mobile application creation with the Flex 4.5 SDK and Flash Builder 4.5 as well as demos of several of the handy new coding productivity features in Flash Builder 4.5.

Additionally, an interview I conducted at FITC Amsterdam with ActionScript Hero is online as well.  We talk about several of my favorite topic: Flex, FlashBuilder and women in the sciences.

Also, I had the privilege of attending FFK in Cologne and participating in the keynote as well as presenting a breakout session on Fx/FB 4.5. Marc has organized an *awesome* Flex and Flash event and I am super excited to have gotten previewed in my first ever opening titles sequence.

So yeah, I am full with fun

After some serious pressure, I’ve crumbled and am now on twitter (@iamdeepa).

I dunno guys, I think this twitter-thing may catch on?….

Now that we have announced new workflows in Flash Builder 4.5 to develop, debug and deploy standalone mobile applications for smartphones and tablets, let’s take a moment to clarify which build of Flash Builder will provide Flex and ActionScript mobile project support for Android, Blackberry Tablet OS and Apple iOS.

First off, it’s important to understand the distinction between Flex Mobile projects and ActionScript Mobile Projects.

With Flex Mobile projects, you can use all of the new mobile specific functionality added to the core Flex SDK to develop Flex-based mobile applications. For example, Flex Mobile projects lets you use the new Flex mobile components like ViewNavigatorApplication and ViewNavigator to handle the navigation of application views and persistence of data and UI across those views (learn all about the new mobile features in Flex and Flash Builder 4.5 here). Flash Builder 4.5 helps you create a new Flex Mobile project through the File -> New menu:

Similarly, Flash Builder 4.5 helps you create an ActionScript Mobile Project which lets you use pure-ActionScript to build an application for mobile devices (ie, if you are building a game). In an ActionScript Mobile Project, you cannot us any Flex classes within the project.

It’s important to note that both Flex Mobile and ActionScript Mobile projects provide the full workflows in Flash Builder to develop mobile projects in code, in design view, preview the application on the desktop or on the device, debug on the desktop or on the device and package up the application for delivery to a marketplace.

We have officially announced Flash Builder 4.5 and Flex SDK 4.5 which will ship in May of 2011. Flash Builder 4.5 will ship full support for building AIR-based Flex and ActionScript applications atop Google Android. Additionally, Flash Builder 4.5 will ship full support for building AIR-based ActionScript applications atop Apple iOS and Blackberry Tablet OS.

We will deliver an update to Flex SDK 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5 (hereby referred to as Flex SDK 4.5.X and Flash Builder 4.5.X) in June of 2011 which will enable building AIR-based Flex applications atop Apple iOS as well as Blackberry Tablet OS. This compatibility matrix may be confusing to understand initially, so the table below aims to illustrate the mobile project support for each platform with each release of Flash Builder.

*Project will actually target AIR 2.5. You will need to make a manual change to your project to enable this configuration. This will be clearly documented on the Adobe Developer Center and RIM’s developer site upon launch in May, 2011.

We are incredibly excited to ship Flex/Flash Builder 4.5 in May and follow that release up with a quick update for full Apple iOS and Blackberry Tablet OS support in June!

Just over one year after Flash Builder 4, Flex SDK 4 and Flash Catalyst CS 5.0 shipped, we are incredibly proud to announce Creative Suite 5.5 which includes Flash Builder 4.5, Flash Catalyst CS 5.5 and Flex SDK 4.5! Together, these three products bring developers and designers the premiere set of tooling workflows to rapidly design, develop and deploy rich applications on the web, desktop and now mobile smartphones and tablets!

Most notably, we are excited to introduce new capabilities in Flex to build applications for Google Android, BlackBerry Tablet OS and Apple iOS. Flex SDK 4.5  adds new mobile components and capabilities into the core Flex framework to build performant, standalone applications running atop Adobe AIR. Additionally, Flash Builder 4.5 gives developers a full set of workflows to rapidly build, debug and deploy mobile applications built with Flex SDK 4.5 or pure ActionScript. You can learn all about the new mobile development features in Flex and Flash Builder 4.5 by reading Narciso (NJ) Jaramillo’s article on the Adobe Developer Center.

To get a high-level understanding of new Spark components added to Flex SDK 4.5 as well as broader improvements to the core Flex framework, check out Deepa Subramaniam’s overview. Similarly, grab a birds-eye view of all of the exciting development enhancements to Flash Builder 4.5 by reading Andrew Shorten’s introductory article here. And of course, take in all the new workflows enabled by Flash Catalyst CS 5.5 by reading Jacob Surber’s overview article here.

In addition to the exciting new mobile features and workflows added to Flex and Flash Builder, we focused on significantly improving productivity for developers and designers. For developers, we have made it much easier to write Flex and ActionScript code. Flash Builder 4.5 introduces dozens of new coding productivity features which rapidly accelerate the coding and testing of Flex and ActionScript projects. Whether you’re writing MXML or ActionScript, the new Flash Builder 4.5 coding features will make you write better code faster. To understand all of the new coding and productivity features in Flash Builder 4.5, regardless if you’re a Flex or pure-ActionScript developer, read Sameer Bhatt and Sreenivas Ramaswamy’s article on the ADC.

Additionally, we focused on building a robust bi-directional workflow between developers and designers. Flash Catalyst CS 5.5 introduces a new bi-directional workflow with Flash Builder 4.5 such that designers and developers can work together to create rich and visually expressive Flex components and applications. Check out Jacob Surber’s article to understand the new workflows introduced in Flash Catalyst CS 5.5.

It doesn’t stop there – we are proud to announce a new addition to our Flash Builder product family – Flash Builder for PHP! Co-developed in partnership with Adobe and Zend Technologies, Flash Builder for PHP provides the perfect development environment for building expressive applications with Flex and PHP for the web and mobile devices. To read up on all of the detailed workflows Flash Builder for PHP provides Flex and PHP developers, check out this overview article by Kevin Schroeder.

We are very excited with the wealth of new features and workflows available in this next release of the Flex product family. Please take advantage of all of these new features and workflows by pre-ordering the products today! To learn more about the pricing options for Flash Builder 4.5 (Standard Edition, Premium Edition, Standard PHP Edition and Premium PHP Edition) check out this handy Flash Builder Buying Guide. Additionally, you can pre-order Flash Catalyst CS 5.5 here.

We hope that you all have as much fun designing and developing applications with these new releases as we on the product teams did making them. And with that, go forth and build more apps!

Sincerely,

Me!

Fresh on the heels of speaking at FITC Amsterdam and visiting Flex customers in Europe, I am back to present both in the keynote and a regular session at FFK in Cologne, Germany. If you are planning on attending, please say hi! With me are Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow and we’ll be hitting up a couple of user groups as well (Hamburg and Vienna), to share announcements and demo new things at play with the Flash Platform (including a bunch of new Flex 4.5 and Flash Builder 4.5 features).

Hope to see some of you at any of the upcoming events!

Yes, you heard me right – Flex on the iPad looking and feeling smooth.

I’m in a rush getting Flex 4.5 out the door but I wanted to make sure people saw Christophe Coenraet’s blogpost showing off Flex on the iPad. Its absolutely worth checking out!

The Flex team is thrilled that 360Flex Denver is right around the corner! This is going to be a fantastic event with a stellar lineup of speakers and sessions, including engineering and product management representatives from the Adobe Flex, Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst teams. We will demonstrate the Flash Builder and Flex SDK 4.5 features and workflows for building mobile applications for deployment on Android, iOS and RIM devices, as well highlight the dozens of new coding productivity enhancements in Flash Builder that will significantly speed up ActionScript and MXML coding. Additionally, we will be showcasing the enhanced design workflows in Flash Catalyst ‘Panini’ including roundtripping with Flash Builder.

It doesn’t stop there….we have some new announcements to share about mobile platform support as well as publicly discussing the new (and improved) open source contribution model for the Flex SDK. Additionally, we will have sneaks of upcoming features slated for the next versions of the Flex product family.

Check out the 360Flex Denver schedule to make sure you know when Adobe members are speaking. Below are some must-see sessions that I’d highly recommend attending before they fill up:

• What’s New in Flash Builder 4.5, Andrew Shorten
• What’s New in Flex SDK 4.5, Deepa Subramaniam & Steven Shongrunden
• Multi-Density & Multi-Platform Development with Flex SDK 4.5, Narciso (NJ) Jaramillo
• Flash Builder Tips & Tricks, Sreenivas Ramaswamy
• Flex Performance Tips & Tricks, Evtim Georgiev
• Whats New in Flash Catalyst ‘Panini’, Jacob Surber & Peter Flynn
• Good UX, Garth Braithwaite

So, if you haven’t registered yet – get on it! For a special 20% discount, enter ‘AdobeRocks’ when you register. And, don’t forget, registration includes 4 hands-on sessions on Sunday which will deep dive into Flex 4 development, mobile development for Android and Blackberry Tablet OS as well as an introduction to Away3D.

See you in Denver!

Better late then never……

As per tradition, here’s my Top 10 list of albums that came out in 2010. I know, its late – I usually aim to do this early in December but this winter ran away from me in a flurry of work and fun. So instead of spending hours upon hours on each individual entry, this post is quick and dirty – but the hope is that some of these choices will resonate with people out there or just introduce folks to some new music worth listening to.

This is a fun little exercise and I encourage you to try it. Granted, its hard to restrain yourself to just the albums that came out in 2010 versus the albums you listened to in 2010, but you know, you can bend the rules however you want – whatevs. And lets be honest, compiling Top 10 lists are fun (in a non-judgmental way).

So lets get on with it. I present to you my Top TEN of Twenty TEN.

10.  Beach House :: Teen Dream

An emotional and compelling album. Perfect to work to or lay in bed and listen to the rain.

9. Band of Horses :: Infinite Arms

I got into Band of Horses pretty late, but I’m glad I eventually stumbled onto them.  The album got canned by Pitchfork – the writer claiming the album lacked ‘heart’. Was he too cerebral? I think so – this album has as much heart as Everything All the Time or Cease to Begin, if not more because it seems much more mature then their last few albums. B of H kept me company on many a long flight this past year – I took them to China and Egypt and criss-crossed the US and after logging all those hours together we’re STILL friends!

8.  Flying Lotus :: Cosmogramma

If you spend your days in front of a computer like me, work to this album. You won’t regret it, I promise.

7. Four Tet :: There is Love in You

Shoot, the last entry’s description applies to this as well. I spent many a day biking to and from work with this album playing in one ear with one headphone. Its good even when listened to like that.

6. Caribou :: Swim

Jeez, is this album NOT on any Top 1o lists of 2010?

5. The National :: High Violet

God, that VOICE. Matt Berninger’s voice absolutely kills. High Violet has gotten as much play as Alligator, Boxer and Sad Songs for Dirty Lovers. Apologies in advance to my neighboring co-workers who heard me sing, hum and tap my foot to this album.

4. Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross: The Social Network Soundtrack

GASP! I know! A soundtrack on a top-10 albums list? I can’t help it. This thing is a monster – EVERY track is filled with magic and so much nuance. Imbue this album, its worth it.

3. The Walkmen :: Lisbon

They can do no wrong. The range on this album is impressive – loud, crashing songs that jolt you awake and quiet, melancholy melodies that can ease your mind. Absolute ear candy, no doubt about it.

2. Arcade Fire :: The Suburbs

Yay, they’re back. Where to start…this album is GRANDIOSE. The storytelling, the composition, the variety – it all worked to make an exceptionally poetic album.

1. Nicki Minaj :: Pink Friday

I channel Nicki on a daily basis. You should too.

Wanted to re-post Andrew’s post on the Flex Team Blog about our new (and growing) PM family!

I have the best job in the world and am super excited to have friends like Jacob and Adam join this great world of mine.

Word.

I wanted to make sure folks saw Andrew’s post on the Flex Team blog about opening up the Flex 4.5 (Hero), Flash Builder 4.5 (Burrito), and Flash Catalyst 1.5 (Panini) pre-release program to more participants! The MAX preview builds posted on Adobe Labs showed off three iterations of development work. The builds available in the pre-release program show off SIX iterations of development, so there is a lot of new functionality as well as polish that we are eager to show people.

To request access to the pre-release program, please fill out this quick survey.

My friends over at Dropcam are hiring for some really cool positions:

• Flash/Flex Developer
• Lead Designer
• Android and iOS Engineers

First, a word about Dropcam. I think they’re dope – its a great idea, business model and really interesting technology. They provide the hardware as well as software (delivered as an extensible service) for setting your home/business up for real-time monitoring through video. Clever customers even use Dropcam as a high-tech nanny or baby cam!  The growth opportunity they have as well as the fact that they are a small and highly-skilled company means that if you get hired into one of these positions, you’ll be part of the core group overseeing Dropcam to success. Plus, I can vouch for the fact that they are cool and fun and hip!

So check them out and apply for the positions as you see fit. The Flash/Flex developer role is particularly meaty – I know there are folks reading this blog who would be well suited.