Foremost for many is official Mac OS X 10.5.x Leopard support!

Also general 64-bit support (Vista, Win2k3, XP, Leopard, RH 5, Suse 10, Solaris 9 / 10).

Minor enhancements (depending on your position):

• Allows attributeCollection to be mixed with regular tags and allows additional attributes - useful working across multiple tags
• AJAX upgrades to FCKEditor 2.5, YUI 2.3, ExtJS 1.1.1, Spry 1.6
• Implicit arrays / structs can be nested
• A bunch of other minor stuff

Bug fixes include the notorious resetting of the Global Script Protection flag in the CF Admin, non-XHTML generated by AJAX components, Break On Exception issues in the debugger, false server monitor memory reporting for complex CFCs in application scope (affecting most of the frameworks) [not fixed: it appears incorrectly in the Issues Fixed section - but it is one of the Known Issues which is accurate].

Download and enjoy!

Note for Leopard users: you need to download the 64-bit OS X version and do a clean install so if you have a hacked-up CF8 running somehow on Leopard, make a CAR of your CF Admin, shutdown and move your old CFIDE and JRun4 directories, do a clean install and then load the CAR back in!

Free, lots of storage, lots of cool Photoshop-inspired effects and tools, share your photos with your friends. It's what Flickr would be if it was created by a multimedia company instead of your regular Web 2.0 crowd.

Kudos to Adobe for getting out there in the Software-as-a-Service market with another cool Flex-based offering, showing what the technology can really do.

My only grumble was the length of time it took for my verification email to arrive (which may not have been Adobe's fault). Once I was in, uploading, touching up and sharing photos was a breeze. A great experience!

• Deploying into Large Scale ColdFusion Environments - Michael Collins
• Integrating ColdFusion with .NET - Josh Adams
• Building Hybrid Applications with ColdFusion and Java - Jason Delmore
• Adding Live Chat with ColdFusion and BlazeDS - Adam Lehman
• Document Driven Applications with PDF - Sanjeev Kumar

I'm particularly excited to have Michael's talk on the schedule since this covers a number of very important topics for enterprise ColdFusion shops - including a lot of new material, not seen anywhere before!

Josh's talk is an excellent complement to John Bland's session on .NET integration. John will cover the mechanics of the architecture and how to build .NET assemblies you can call from ColdFusion. Josh will cover specific uses of the feature to leverage Microsoft's Sharepoint and Office technology.

Likewise, Jason's talk is an excellent complement to Andrew Powell's session on ColdFusion and Java. Jason will cover ColdFusion and Java integration with pros and cons and Andrew will dive into building your entire business model in Java and using that with ColdFusion for presentation.

Adam's talk brings coverage of Adobe's newly released open source remoting system, BlazeDS, showing how it can be used to create interactive applications with ColdFusion and Sanjeev's talk goes deep into the Adobe PDF integration that ColdFusion 8 brought to the table, including architecture level information.

• Leveraging Basic Design Pattern in ColdFusion - Phill Nacelli
• Refactoring in ColdFusion: from Procedural to OO - Dan Wilson

Adobe should be providing session titles and abstracts soon (I hope) so that we can populate their five sessions on the schedule.

I'll be blogging about schedule additions / updates as they happen - stay tuned!

The page has a link to sign up for information about MAX to be emailed to you as it becomes available.

Connect crashed a few times on Ray after about an hour in but he logs back in pretty quickly (Adobe really need to fix the Leopard compatibility problems with the Connect Add-In!).

It was a great talk - well attended - and I learned a lot about how powerful Spry really is (I hadn't looked at it before because I thought it was "too simple" - my mistake).

Big thanx also to Kit Kurktchi and Neetek for sponsoring Pizza!

Adobe Developer Week is back, next week, March 24th thru 28th. Topics cover AIR, ColdFusion 8, Blaze DS with twenty sessions spread throughout the week.

Lots of AIR / Flex 3 stuff as well as three ColdFusion sessions!

It was an enjoyable discussion with some differing opinions and looks like being the first of an ongoing series of roundtable format shows. Next week's edition will cover's New Atlanta's announcement of BlueDragon J2EE going open source, among other things.

You can download episodes (sorry, "editions") from the site or subscribe via iTunes.

It walks you through installing CFEclipse and the ColdFusion Extensions from Adobe, using snippets (and the SnipEx server), tasks / todo lists, code / application wizards and so on.

If you're new to Eclipse or still on the fence about it, it'll be good reading.

You can watch the recording if you missed it live.

Not being there in person I missed out on beer and pizza, courtesy of meeting sponsor Broadchoice.

It'll be a big event - we have around 150 RSVPs so far across the three groups!

• 6:30pm for food / drink / networking
• 7:00pm for the main presentation from Ted Patrick, Adobe's Technical Evangelist for Flex

The raffle will include:

• iPod Nano
• Flex Builder 3 Professional ($699 value - when released)
• CS3 Web Premium Suite ($1,599 value!!)

Due to the popularity of this event, we will be in the "Town Hall" open space inside the security area so you must RSVP using the BACFUG web site - http://bacfug.org/ (scroll down - the RSVP link is below the meeting information)

Direct RSVP link.

About this presentation:

Flex 3 and AIR are getting close to launch and in preparation, Ted Patrick from the Adobe Flex/AIR product team is traveling to select cities to show off the great new features and help prepare us for this exciting launch.

Flex 3 is a feature-packed release, adding new UI components like the advanced datagrid and improved CSS capabilities; powerful tooling additions like refactoring; and extensive testing tools including memory and performance profiling, plus the addition of the automated testing framework to Flex Builder.

Adobe AIR is game-changing in so many ways, extending rich applications to the desktop, enabling access to the local file system, system tray, notifications and much more. Now you can write desktop applications using the same skills that you've been already using to create great web apps including both Flex and AJAX.

Don't miss out on the opportunity to see and hear about this highly anticipated release of Flex 3 and AIR during this special pre-release tour. Plus, in addition to giving away some one of a kind Flex/AIR branded schwag, we will also be raffling off a copy of Flex Builder 3 Professional (pending availability), a full commercial copy of CS3 Web Premium and an iPod Nano at this event!

About Ted Patrick:

Ted Patrick is a Technical Evangelist for Flex at Adobe Systems. He worked with Flash since FutureSplash Animator and watched its evolution from animation to application.

Ted helped Macromedia/Adobe with the development of ActionScript 3, AVM2, ASC compiler, and Flash Player 9 for some 18 months prior to Flex 2's release.

Prior to joining Adobe in May 2006, he provided consulting services at PowerSDK Software and Cynergy Systems.

Ted is a serial entrepreneur having successfully started-up 4 times and raised over 7 Million in VC funding for companies he founded.

3 companies have been successfully sold to other businesses and one was sold to a publicly traded company in 2001. Ted is actively involved in the Flex development community and works at Adobe to define the future of rich media.

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We will be raffling off some incredible prizes:

• Flex Builder 3 Professional (shipped after launch)
• CS3 Web Premium
• Apple iPod Nano

Read the BACFUG website for more details and make sure you RSVP (on the BACFUG website) since the meeting will take place inside the security perimeter at Adobe's San Francisco building!

AIR Beta 3, AIR extensions/updates for Flash CS3 and Dreamweaver CS3, Flex 3 Beta 3, BlazeDS, Brio Beta, Flash Player 9 Update...

Good grief!

I just installed the new Flex Builder plugin but won't get a chance to put it through its paces for a few days. The AIR installer is sitting on my desktop and I'm just about to install the updated Flash Player. Oh, and I have my Brio account but haven't had time to play with that either. Maybe Adobe think we need something to keep us busy over the holidays?

Check out Adobe Labs to see what you might be missing!

A new beta of ColdFusion? Hmm, I wonder what that will be?

So why did I not pre-order Leopard and rush to install it?

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I've already posted the raw notes I took in the sessions which were pretty much just a brain dump of what the presenters were saying without much of my own commentary. In general, the sessions were extremely good. My goal was to learn a lot about AIR and some useful stuff about Flex and the conference met that goal perfectly. The AIR sessions were great and covered a lot of ground, with plenty of information about the file APIs and using SQLite, the embedded database. There was also a fairly good balance between Flex and AJAX in the AIR sessions (some presenters actually showed the same functionality in both Flex and AJAX side-by-side). The two Flex sessions that I attended - both led by Joe Berkovitz - were really good with a lot of practical information about designing and building large Flex applications.

What about the other aspects of the conference? The size of the conference (around 1,000 people I think) meant that all the sessions were together on one floor and all the food / community / vendors were together on another floor. That meant you didn't have to rush between sessions and you had a chance to network in the hallways between sessions. The session rooms were rarely completely packed so you always got a seat. It was nice and relaxed. It was much better than Chicago in that respect.

The food, however, was a serious disappointment. Tapas-style food was fun and interesting on Monday lunchtime but it was the same sort of thing at the reception on Monday night, at lunchtime on Tuesday, at the special event Tuesday evening and at lunch on Wednesday. Nothing was labeled so if you had allergies or just plain ol' don't like certain things, well, you were pretty screwed. And if you didn't like / don't eat fish, you went pretty hungry. I eat pretty much anything but I lost a few pounds this week because not much appealed to me on Tuesday (either at lunch or at the special event) and on Wednesday I completely skipped lunch. The most charitable thing I can say about the special event was that the jazz band was pretty good. Like Chicago, the event was in the conference center and was just food and drink (and they ran out of beer apparently - I stuck to wine). The Chicago event was $100 for guests and since I couldn't imagine what would be so special it could be worth that much money, my wife & I skipped the guest pass. From what I heard, we made the right choice. The Barcelona event was $75 for the guest pass and, with hindsight, we probably wouldn't bothered with that either. Come on Adobe, do something special next year in San Francisco - or at least don't charge guests such outrageous amounts.

Apart from the food - and Tuesday evening's event - everything else about the conference was really enjoyable. It was great to finally meet so many European community members - there was a large British contingent, as well as folks from every part of mainland Europe. Barcelona itself is a beautiful city with great public transport and is also an interesting city to walk around. The beach was really nice (so I'm told) and the hotel restaurant was really good (at the Vincci Maritimo), although the relaxed European approach to schedule meant that they opened when they were ready, not when the posted hours said they would open.

Of the two MAX events, Barcelona was by far the better experience in many ways. It'll be interesting to see what Adobe do next year since both events will likely be even bigger...

One other thought (added later): whilst it was great for speakers that they were in one of the nearest hotels to the event (as was the case in Chicago), there seemed to be no networking in the speaker hotel: folks did not congregate in the bar in the evening. The hotel was amazing quiet in the evenings. That was also true to some extent in Chicago. The bar was more of a networking location in Chicago but still you only got to network with other speakers instead of a broader range of attendees. I suspect this will be less of an issue in San Francisco since everyone should be staying within walking distance of the Moscone Center but it's something to think about.

Yesterday, my wife & I went to see La Sagrada Familia temple. It's a big tourist attraction these days (it wasn't when my wife last visited Barcelona) and you can't really explore the building now. There are long waits for the elevators, there is a lot of scaffolding inside, you get to go through the building in one direction and that's all. The old side of the temple is beautiful (the nativity facade) but the new side is ugly with cubist sculpture. I'm glad I've seen it but I was a bit disappointed to be honest.

Today and tomorrow, I'm mostly focused on AIR sessions. There's a ColdFusion BOF tonight that should be very interesting. I'm wondering whether the general sessions and/or sneak peeks will bring something new that we didn't see in Chicago.

Wifi access seems good so I may well be blogging live from sessions.

Cop a load of this cover shot of MacWorld magazine with ColdFusion 8 on the free CD accompanying the magazine!! (via Andy Jarrett)

If you try to install CS3 for OS X when you have Safari 3 Beta installed, you'll hit an annoying problem.

Here's what happens. The install seems to go really well until you get to the end of disc one and then you get a blank alert box that you cannot interact with and you cannot quit the installer. You have to force quit the installer to get out of this situation.

Here's how to do it the right way. If you still have the Safari 3 Beta .dmg, mount it and run the uninstaller (if you don't have it, download the beta again from Apple's site). The uninstaller will remove Safari 3 Beta and restore your Safari 2 install. Now you can install CS3 without a problem. It takes up to two and a half hours depending on whether you install the entire suite or just select parts. It's huge.

Once you have successfully installed CS3, fire up the Safari 3 Beta installer again and you're back to where you started. No mess, no fuss.

Remember to run the updater - Help > Updates... from any program in the suite!

According to the Sys-Con press release "After ColdFusion became part of the Adobe product line Adobe recently decided to discontinue its support of the magazine." Well, I'm just glad that Adobe had the sense to pull the plug on this feeble excuse for a magazine.

Read Michael Dinowitz's take on this news which worries that this looks bad for ColdFusion. I disagree. CFDJ - and Sys-Con's two dozen(!) other magazines - just reflect badly on Sys-Con.

You can register for MAX 2007 here.

With Ted Patrick driving the focus to be more developer-centric, MAX should be a great conference this year!

• Introducing ColdFusion 8 - Ben Forta
• ColdFusion 8 server monitoring - Part 1: Using the Server Monitor in development - Charlie Arehart
• Using the ColdFusion 8 step-through debugger for Eclipse - Brian Szoszorek
• Image manipulation capabilities in ColdFusion 8 - Ryan Favro
• Flash Media Server event gateway example application - Ramchandra Kulkarni

For those of you who missed his talk, his slides are full of details about the many, many language enhancements in ColdFusion 8, including several in-depth slides on <cfthread>.

Top 8 reasons to buy ColdFusion 8:

• Making apps is really easy, including Eclipse Plug-ins (including debugging) and Wizards, Server Monitor
• Have confidence in production applications - Server Monitor & API, Multiple Instances, Stable & Backward Compatible
• Your users will be happier - Flex and AJAX, Reporting, PDF Applications, On-demand presentations, Images
• It's nice and secure - Multiple Admin accounts, Multiple configurable RDS accounts, Strong encryption
• CFML Evolution - JavaScript operators, Argument collections, CFC interfaces, File handling functions, Array and Structure creation, CFC serialization
• Plays well with others - .NET, Exchange Server, RSS & Atom, LiveCycle Data Services, Flash Media Serve (gateway etc)
• It's fast! Really, really fast! - Overall server performance, CFCs, List functions, Logic functions, more...!

BlogCFC and the adobe.com store run 30-40% faster with no other changes.

What do you get? A slick, clean monochrome interface with simple, intuitive controls. A library mode and a reading mode. Bookshelves to organize your books. Bookmarks. Text search. All in a 3Mb download.

Adobe has quite a few free sample books in its library to get you started.

Bill McCoy has plenty more details in his blog, in particular details of support for EPUB (aka OPS), an open standard, reflowable XHTML-based format.

Remember to RSVP on the BACFUG website so that Adobe security have your badges ready when you turn up.

7pm, 601 Townsend St, San Francisco (as usual).

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You can build AIR applications easily with Flex using the beta of Flex Builder 3 but you can also build AIR applications with HTML.

You need the AIR SDK (again, from Adobe Labs) and a text editor (and access to the command line to run the adl and adt SDK programs to run and package AIR applications respectively).

Of course that might be a bit more work than you want to do. In which case, install Aptana - either standalone or as a plugin for Eclipse / Flex Builder - and then install the AIR plugin for Aptana. Now you simply create a new "Adobe AIR" project, fill out the application information wizard, select your JavaScript libraries (it assumes you are building an AJAX application) and off you go!

Dave noted that Adobe has been active in Open Source for a good long while but has recently begun to move away from the Adobe Open Source License (a vanity license - like the old Fusebox license) to more standard licenses such as BSD and MPL. We've seen the ActionScript Virtual Machine released to the Mozilla Organization (as Tamarin) and this week the Flex 3 SDK was just released as Open Source with the ActionScript and MXML compilers and ActionScript debugger all following later this year.

You can keep tabs on Adobe's voice for Open Source on the Open at Adobe blog.

You can read about (some of) Adobe's Open Source projects on opensource.adobe.com, which includes the Adobe Source Libraries and the Generic Image Library. The latter was accepted into the Boost project for C++ - an open source library project that I was involved with back in 1998, when I was still involved with the ANSI C++ Standards Committee!

Dave also mentioned RIAForge which is probably the most well-known Open Source effort around Adobe technologies, as far as the ColdFusion community is concerned.

There are quite a few changes between the Apollo Alpha (aka "M3") and the new AIR (aka "M4") builds so you'll have to make some source code changes to rebuild your Apollo apps. It's not a big deal - I had my Apollo app - an administrative console for a website - up and running as an AIR app in just a few minutes. Despite the new Flex 3 SDK, my (recompiled) Flex apps and my new AIR app seem to work just fine with my existing CFMX 7 and CF 8 sites.

And tomorrow I get a whole day of training on AIR so I'll have more to say in the next few days.

While I was at Adobe / Macromedia, I went to just two MAX events: DevCon 2002 in Orlando, FL and MAX 2005 in Anaheim, CA. In both cases, I was scheduled to speak (although my talk was pulled for DevCon 2002). In general, employees don't get to go to MAX unless they're part of the "MAX team" (speakers, community folk, infrastructure, support etc).

Now I'm no longer an employee, I can go to MAX whenever I want - so the question is: do I want to? I'm going to CFUNITED on my own dime and I already went to cf.Objective() on my own dime. As a speaker at both of those events, I didn't have to pay the conference fee itself. So MAX will be comparatively expensive for me. I got a lot out of DevCon 2002 and MAX 2005 in terms of networking and, with the latter, some good sessions about Macromedia technology outside my core focus. It really will come down to budget, I suspect.

A question then occurred to me about the trial period. You have the option to install ColdFusion 8 as Developer Edition, Serial-licensed Edition or Trial Enterprise. The former won't work for a public site (IP address restrictions). The middle option won't work either - ColdFusion 8 is not yet on sale so you can't buy serial-license keys (and, as you may have discovered, it won't accept CFMX 7 serial-license keys!).

So that meant going to production on a trial license which the installer says will last 30 days. Since I didn't want to run the risk of having my production servers revert to Developer Edition unexpectedly, I asked whether the 30 day trial was really a 30 day trial.

Damon Cooper said that the ColdFusion 8 Public Beta Trial Period actually extends to July 31st, despite what the installer says. He also asked me to blog this (since it's likely to be a common question).

We at Scazu are very excited about launching our service on ColdFusion 8 as it means that certain "Phase II" features can now be part of our initial release (leveraging image manipulation and AJAX integration specifically - as well as server monitoring functionality).

Remember: you need to get explicit permission from the ColdFusion team to take a site to production on the Public Beta build!

The Mozilla Public License will be used to cover the source the AS3 Flex SDK (available in source form since the release of Flex 2) as well as the Java source for the AS3 and MXML compilers, the debugger and the core AS3 libraries from the SDK.

Most of the infrastructure should be in place by the summer with a full transition to open source by the end of 2007.

You might also want to watch the video interview with Ely Greenfield and David Wadhwani by Robert Scoble of PodTech.

Big thanx to Jennifer for all her hard work over the last few years!

It was a very impressive show - and as Ben pointed out, this is early in the tour and there are many, many more features to be unveiled across subsequent User Groups and also at cf.Objective() 2007.

Ben also referred to his blog post about per-application settings in Scorpio which he unveiled at the Seattle User Group last night.

I'll be blogging some more tomorrow about what he covered tonight. For now, I'm going to enjoy my Scorpio m&m's - Adobe red and ColdFusion blue with the Scorpio logo on them. Yummy!

I don't remember last year's prices but this years seem to be in the same ballpark. The difference this year seems to be options to attend for just a day or just two days - I don't remember that from previous years (mind you, Anaheim was the last MAX I attended and that was because I was asked to speak at the last minute, before that it was Florida).

MAX is once again scheduled to overlap with On Safari, the Bengal breed national cat show, which is in Toledo, OH this year. Jay & I are thinking about coming out to Chicago, driving to Toledo for the cat show and then driving back to Chicago for MAX and hanging out with our friends in Chicago. We'll see how things pan out. The MAX early bird runs until July 23, so we have quite a while to make up our minds.

Hmm. So I refreshed the browser and got my installation instructions. Five steps.

Step 1. Verify System Requirements. "Make sure you have a Silverlight compatible Macintosh operating system and browser." How? It doesn't tell me. So let's assume I'm compatible.

Step 2. Download Silverlight. Click. A new page. Click "Download" button. Thank you page. WPFe.dmg downloads in the background. At this point, there is no call to action. I downloaded something and the page I'm on says nothing about what to do next.

Fortunately, I'm smart, so I click the browser back button twice to get back to the page that listed the five steps. OK, so now I need to go to my desktop and double-click WPFe.dmg and see what happens... It just mounts the disk image. Now I have to click on the mounted disk and then double-click on the WPFe.pkg file.

Click Continue. Click Continue. Click Continue. Click Agree. Click Continue. Click Install. Enter my password and click OK. Click Close. Close and restart my browser.

Go back to Microsoft's Silverlight page.

There's a big blank space where the video should be... I wait... and wait... OK, so it isn't going to load anything.

So, let me see if I got this right... I downloaded a 3.5Mb disk image and installed the application (after lots of clicks) and... nothing! No errors, nothing. Just a big white space.

Maybe one of the other demos will work?

I click the Page Turn demo and wait while it loads 14 page and then wait and wait and wait while it does... something... with a spinning beachball locking up the entire browser... finally it runs again...

A red page. There's a turned up "tab" on the bottom right of the page. I click it. Nothing happens. I click it again, several times. Nothing. I notice a small icon below the page so I click on that. I get a row of thumbnails.

I mouse over the first one and the whole row jumps away. It's like one of those terrible click-on-the-monkey ads on the web! I finally manage to click on a thumbnail and I'm rewarded with a full-size picture.

I finally try to click and drag on the "tab" on the page and it actually turns like a magazine. Wow! I'm sooooo impressed. No tooltips, no mouseover hints. It's supposed to be intuitive.

I have to wonder if Microsoft has actually tried installing and using Adobe's Flash Player...

Next wek Ben Forta will be here talking about what's new in Scorpio. When Ben goes on tour he announces something new at each meeting so if you read all of the blogs for the previous meetings you will still miss something! There will be food and beer! And stuff to give away! And Ben Forta! You know you wanna.

RSVP now at http://www.bacfug.org
Tuesday, April 24, 7pm
601 Townsend St
San Francisco

Tell your friends!

It was a somewhat odd feeling walking out of those doors for the last time as an employee. It's been an interesting (and sometimes wild) ride over the last seven years and I'm going to miss the people, the enthusiasm and the great way the company treats all its employees. If you get a chance to work at Adobe, I'd highly recommend them.

I'll be back in the Adobe building as a visitor on the 24th, when Ben Forta brings the Scorpio roadshow to San Francisco. Don't forget to RSVP on the BACFUG website for that must-see event!

And moving forward I will become a customer of Adobe. By pure coincidence, I bumped into a long-time colleague in the enterprise sales division this morning and let him know I was leaving but that I would be contacting him in due course to buy some ColdFusion Enterprise licenses.

So, see you at BACFUG, see you at cf.Objective() and see you at CFUNITED!

Ben will be showcasing several of the new features in Scorpio so this is a must-see event. Scorpio is going to be an incredible release of ColdFusion so make sure you attend Ben's tour and see for yourself!

For other Scorpio road show events, see the ColdFusion events listing on the Adobe website.

• North America MAX 2007 - September 30-October 3, 2007 - McCormick Place West, Chicago
• EMEA MAX 2007 - October 2007 - Barcelona, Spain
• Japan MAX 2007 - November 2007 - Japan

I hope I can get to MAX this year. On Safari is in Toledo, OH immediately prior and my wife and I have friends in Chicago so we could turn this into a nice little vacation with the conference in the middle.

You'll learn how we built the back end that supports several functions behind Acrobat Connect and Adobe Document Center - and Kuler - as well as some of our pain points and, in particular, the problems that arise when dealing with error handling around the boundaries of systems in a Service-Oriented Architecture.