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!

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.

Also check out this Tech Note and my own hints and tips post from about a year ago.

Perhaps in the past you've tried to wave your mouse over the thing you want people to see or you've click-dragged over something to cause an application highlight in order to emphasize it for your audience?

None of the above work all that well for a remote broadcast event: you simply can't do the former and the latter options usually don't transmit well because the mouse movement may not appear in real time for all your attendees and the default application highlight often causes the text to be much harder to read.

Now you can "Pause and Annotate" - an option in the sharing drop-down (on a Mac, you get a little Connect icon in the menu bar!) - which freeze your shared screen and brings back the main Connect meeting room window with a set of drawing tools down the right hand edge. You can draw on the screen (freehand lines, boxes, circles), highlight things with a colored "marker", and write text over the screen. This is a very effective way of bringing something to the attention of your audience and explaining it visually!

To go back to regular screen sharing, simply click the Resume button (which appears in annotate mode).

The Connect drop-down also allows you to change what you are sharing (which windows, applications etc) so you can switch your sharing setup dynamically during your presentation.

I figured I'd start a series of short posts highlighting some of the features I'm finding very useful that are either new in this release or which I had never noticed before in the Breeze product.

#1. The Note pod and the Chat pod both let you email the contents of the pod via the 'actions' popup (the cog in the bottom right of each pod). This is a great way to handle the minutes from your meetings because you can easily capture both the notes you took during the meeting as well as the entire discussion that took place.

I noticed this during the cf.Objective() 2007 steering committee meeting this morning. Nice!

Oh, yes, next year's cf.Objective() conference is being planned. As you can see from the site, the location and dates are fixed and the committee is figuring the budget and fee structure right now as well as nailing down the track and topic guidelines. Expect to see a call for speakers and topics within the next few weeks.

Me? I'll be in San Francisco, helping the team put the finishing touches on Adobe Acrobat Connect which is "expected to be available in November 2006 as a free trial version through the end of the calendar year" (see the press release from September 18th).

It's also On Safari next week in Portland, OR which is effectively the Bengal breed national cat show.

Charlie has also done a great job pulling together a fairly extensive listing of all the recorded Breeze presentations out there - see his User Group Television section.

That's the official announcement of the new product line for which I've been working on some of the back end systems. More details in due course.

My wife's mom'n'dad were in town last week and my wife was keeping them occupied while I was at work. Their hotel had free wifi so my wife installed MSN Messenger on dad's laptop so she could IM me at work and let me know what the plans were for the evening. Unfortunately, MSN's default install sets it to start at Windows startup and so once dad went back to Denver, every time he logged on (to AOL), MSN would kick my wife off chat.

Now, dad's not a computer expert so trying to talk him through the MSN preferences to reset the start at boot time flag would have been hard. Doubly so, since he uses Windows and we use Macs, and we use Adium and Fire instead of MSN!

Breeze to the rescue! I sent him a Breeze link on AIM and he was able to log on as a guest easily enough. I made him a presenter and he installed the Breeze add-in and rejoined the room. I got him to share his desktop and then let me request control of his system. He sat and watched while I located MSN, located the preference and disabled it and quit MSN. Quite painless.

He was very impressed with how easy it was - and admitted that he found it pretty strange to watch his computer doing things without touching the keyboard!

Breeze. Remote technical support made easy.

Since the acquisition closed, I've been looking at a variety of new roles here and I recently accepted one that I officially started yesterday. I am now part of Adobe's Hosted Services group. I'm a "Senior Computer Scientist" now (finally my grey hairs count for something) and will be continuing my architecture focus, likely in a much more hands on manner.

So what does the Hosted Services group do? Well, we "own" Breeze ASP (hosted) and a variety of PDF services, including Create Adobe PDF Online. My role will focus on the software infrastructure behind the services. It's a very interesting space to be in as Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) is gaining increasing traction across the industry.

I won't be able to talk about what we have planned for the future (for obvious reasons) but I expect to be talking about a broader range of Adobe products and services over time. It will mean that I won't be as active in the ColdFusion community as I have been in recent years - fewer user group talks and much less involvement in most mailing lists - but I intend to remain very active with Model-Glue, ColdSpring, Reactor and CFEclipse - as well as continuing to work on Fusebox 5!

I hope you'll all keep reading, despite the slight change of focus here!

I responded to the speakers' mailing list with some tips for using Breeze effectively and figured that it would be good to share them more broadly in a somewhat more generic form.

Tip #1: Use a dual monitor setup - put the Breeze meeting up on the second screen with preview mode enabled so you can see what your audience sees (and the chat pod!) and share your primary screen.

This allows you to watch the chat so you know instantly if your audience are having problems and you can also take questions during your presentation.

Tip #2: Make sure you run through the audio configuration wizard in Breeze with the exact audio setup you plan to use in advance of the meeting. This will figure out the background silence levels and the sensitivity of your microphone. Go to Meeting > Audio Setup Wizard... once you're in Breeze.

Keep your head/mouth at a consistent distance from microphone during the configuration and during your talk! Some folks have a tendency to rock back and forth in their chairs while they present - this creates a bad audio experience for your listeners as you move closer and further from the mic! Update: Dave Watts suggested using a headset microphone and recommended USB headsets from Logitech and Plantronics.

Also make sure you have a quiet, private environment to broadcast from (cube farms are not a good environment for this, nor are most homes with kids and pets running loose!).

Tip #3: Create an effective presentation slide deck. Well, duh! This isn't just about Breeze but it's worth repeating anyway. Most presenters speak for 1-2 minutes per slide so bear that in mind when you're creating a presentation. If you have more than about 35 slides, you probably won't get through them all in a 50 minute presentation and you won't leave any time for Q&A!

Think about the structure. Most (effective) presentations typically have this sort of structure:

• Title slide (presentation title, your name, company, maybe email address).
• Goals of the talk - "what is this talk about?" - tell your audience why they are here and what they will (hopefully) learn
• Introduce yourself - "who am I and why should I be talking about this topic?" - establish your credentials but don't brag!
• Agenda - explain the structure of the talk - it's often a good idea to drop the agenda slide in between each major section of the talk so the audience know where they are and highlight the relevant part of the agenda slide each time.
• The meat of your talk... blah, blah, blah!
• Summary slide(s) - recap your main points and remind your audience of what they (should have) learned during the talk and this should probably mirror the earlier goals slide.
• Resources slide(s) - pull together all the books / links that your talk references and list them here so your audience can find them easily in the handouts or online later.
• Repeat title slide with full contact information - this is often easier with a regular slide layout than the graphical "title" layout used for the first slide.