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!

For immediate release

On-Demand Services Attract In-Demand Architect

CASTRO VALLEY, Calif. -- Feb. 16, 2008 -- Sean Corfield today announced that he will be joining Broadchoice, Inc. headquartered in San Mateo, California as their Chief Systems Architect and Vice President of Engineering. In this new position, Corfield will oversee the evolution of Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ platform, expanding the capabilities and scaling the on-demand service to meet the ever-increasing customer base. Corfield said "Broadchoice has a really gifted team that has already created a winning service, used by companies such as Cisco. I'm excited to be part of that team and to have the opportunity to really take the platform to a new level." Broadchoice's Digital Marketing Manager™ is created and powered by Adobe technologies.

Richard Bennion, Broadchoice Founder & CTO, is a long-time advocate of ColdFusion and has been a pioneer in digital marketing for twenty years. "Bennion's energy and enthusiasm was key in attracting me to this role," said Corfield, "and he and I share an enthusiasm for great experiences created by great technology."

Also joining the Broadchoice team is Luke Kilpatrick, co-manager of the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) and manager of Fire on the Bay, an Adobe Fireworks User Group serving the San Francisco Bay Area. Kilpatrick brings a wealth of experience in UI development and content management systems to the Broadchoice team. Corfield said "Kilpatrick's a friend of mine and I'm looking forward to having him on my team."

About Sean Corfield
Sean Corfield has been a freelance consultant since leaving the Hosted Services group at Adobe Systems, Inc. in April 2007 and was formerly the Senior Architect for the IT division of Macromedia, Inc. for almost six years. Prior to joining Macromedia, Corfield drove the architecture of a number of high-traffic, high-profile websites for a diverse group of companies after working on the ANSI J16 C++ Standards Committee for eight years and building compilers, interpreters and runtime systems. He is also manager of BACFUG and a frequent speaker at ColdFusion conferences around the world, as well as a contributor to a number of open source ColdFusion projects.

About Broadchoice, Inc.
Broadchoice is the leader in providing on-demand marketing solutions for the enterprise. The Digital Marketing Manager™ platform provides a fully integrated, enterprise application for web content management, enterprise marketing management and channel partner management.

For those who aren't sure, this is intended to be a somewhat tongue-in-cheek announcement but the news is real. I start the new job on Monday, February 18th, and I'm looking forward to hiring some of the best talent to help me grow a very exciting product! Stay tuned!

I use Gmail a lot on my iPhone and one of my clients has standardized on Google Mail/Docs for their communications so I'm constantly reading mail and documents on my iPhone. Gmail was OK on the iPhone and Google Docs was bearable but Google Reader was a nightmare. At the weekend, I noticed Gmail suddenly got a lot nicer with a very iPhone-style UI, sliding panels between labels and mail. Great... now what about the other apps?

Tuesday night, I got home from said client's site and eagerly updated my iPhone firmware. The new "location" feature in the Maps application is very sweet (and seems sufficiently accurate for my needs). Then I started reorganizing my home screen. Screens. That's when I noticed that Google had updated most of its apps to be iPhone-friendly. Google Docs makes a great reader now, even for fairly large spreadsheets. Google Reader is a huge improvement!

So now my iPhone has:

• 43actions - a great little GTD (Getting Things Done) task manager
• Calculator
• Calendar
• Clock - with 10 cities
• Maps
• Notes
• Stocks
• Weather

• Google Docs
• Google Mail
• Google Reader
• Belfry Scientific Calculator
• My client's Google Docs
• My client's Google Mail
• ColdFusion 8 QuickDocs
• IMDB - I'm always looking up movies and actors so I need that accessible!

• Mail
• Phone
• Safari
• Settings

• Bejeweled
• Code Breader - a simple take on "Mastermind", a childhood favorite
• InARow touch - aka "Connect 4", another childhood favorite
• Mahjong

• Camera
• iTunes
• iPod
• Photos
• Text
• YouTube

Anyway, a big thank you to Apple and Google (and those games companies) for making my iPhone an even more lovable and addictive little toy!

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.

My team is already using cfcUnit heavily as an integrated part of our development process - as well as several other ColdFusion frameworks - so we're looking forward to applying Paul's input and framework expertise across a range of projects that we have planned.

You'd be reporting directly to me, alongside another software engineer (so you'd be the third person on my team). My team is part of a near 30-strong group working on Breeze- and PDF-related hosted service offerings.

You can read the job listing on Adobe's "Cool Jobs" site which outlines the requirements and lets you apply online. (You may have to click the link twice - it'll probably show "not found" first time because you don't have an active session on the website... that's what I get for trying to link directly to a job inside the frameset!).

Software as a service.

What do you think about this possibility? When I mentioned living without the desktop before, the entry drew no comments, although the article it linked to mentioned both Writely and NumSum. Does Google's acquisition of Writely change your perception of this sort of service?

(I'm putting this in the Open Source Software category because if offers free alternatives to proprietary desktop software - even tho' the services aren't actually "open source")