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March 7, 2006
Thanx to Nectarine, I was there at WebDU, albeit virtually as part of one of their great Flash animations...
Watch my cameo as Sgt Bosco "Don't Touch My Mac" Baracus.
Aw, thanx guys! I'm touched!
November 7, 2005
I mentioned this before but just wanted to give you an update: release 1.2 is now available from the Macromedia Exchange. If you have a static site and want to automatically generate a news feed of changed pages, it works very cleanly inside Dreamweaver.
October 19, 2005
Mike Chambers gave a great overview of how to use the open source Flash / JavaScript integration kit to communicate between rich media and HTML together on a single web page. He used the MXNA click report as an example: you can interact with the chart and the HTML on the page updates accordingly (without a page refresh); you can also click on categories and feed names (in the right hand column) and the page content - both Flash and HTML - updates without a page refresh. It's a slick experience and Mike showed that it really isn't that hard to achieve.
Then he talked about the new-in-Flash Player 8 ExternalInterface API that makes it even easier to interact between HTML and Flash using JavaScript. Impressive!
October 13, 2005
There's a shiny new webDU 2006 website with all the details of the conference, taking place at the beginning of March next year.
If you get a pop-up from the Macromedia Flash Player offering an upgrade to the latest player but it errors out when you accept, you may find this Tech Note about the auto-update useful. Note that the error only affects people who were running a beta version of Flash Player 8 and did not upgrade to the release version.
September 28, 2005
Microsoft have a pretty spectacular celebration of their 30th anniversary that showcases Flash's great interactivity and video features. A great advert for Macromedia Flash!
This looks like a very interesting tool for DWMX 2004 and DW8 from RNSoft. RSSDreamFeeder lets you generate RSS feeds for your site's content automatically, even for static sites! The product integrates with Dreamweaver and searches your site for changed content and generates an RSS XML feed from that list of changes.
August 31, 2005
Geoff Bowers has announced the dates for MXDU 2006 - March 2nd & 3rd with a workshop on March 1st.
My wife may be doing her first solo judging in Florida that weekend (4th/5th) so it's unlikely that I'll go to MXDU. Unless the mothership insists on sending me, of course...
It's been a great conference the last two years - a lot of leading edge stuff getting showcased. Definitely worth attending, even if you're not normally in that part of the world!
August 12, 2005
The Server Side has an unusually positive mention of Flash in this piece about WebORB from Midnight Coders that supports a variety of clients - including both AJAX and Flash - and a variety of server technologies including ColdFusion Components.
August 11, 2005
Jen Taylor, Product Manager for Dreamweaver, talks about the new features and benefits (in an article on the Macromedia Developer Center). Jen talks about the focus for each of the last few releases of DW and then goes into some depth about what drove DW8. The rest of the article outlines all of the major new features, including improved support for ColdFusion MX 7, a tabbed document interface for Mac users (probably my second favorite new feature, behind background file transfer!), integration with the Macromedia Web Publishing System (notification and logging)...
As I noted yesterday, one of my favorite new features in Dreamweaver 8 is that it performs ftp operations in the background. Scott Fegette goes into detail about the new background file transfer feature.
August 10, 2005
Scott is running a "Feature Of The Day" series about Studio 8 and he kicks off with Dreamweaver 8's 'code collapse'. One of my favorite features is the background file transfer which allows you to carry on working on files while DW8 is busy uploading / downloading files to your ftp server - a great productivity boost! I'm sure Scott will be covering that in due course.
Mike Downey has already written an article on the Macromedia Developer Center about the major new features in Flash Professional 8 but on his blog he covers a lot of the cool but lower profile new features in this new release.
Seen on Mike Nimer's CFFORM blog, the folks at ASFusion have provided a kit that let's you upload files using Flash form controls. The technique requires Flash Player 8 (because earlier players do not support file I/O).
August 8, 2005
By now many of you will have noticed that the Studio 8 release is featured center stage on the macromedia.com home page. Full product information is now available for Dreamweaver 8, Fireworks 8 and Flash Professional 8. There are some great presentations explaining the new features and why you will want to upgrade. There are also extensive FAQs to answer any questions you might have (yes, HomeSite+ and ColdFusion MX 7 are part of Studio 8).
August 7, 2005
The Macromedia Online Store is taking preorders for Studio 8! It will contain Dreamweaver 8, Flash Professional 8, Fireworks 8 as well as Contribute and Flash Paper. Order now and get a limited edition Studio 8 backpack and free shipping.
July 21, 2005
Bob Regan talks about the recently re-launched J. K. Rowling website and says that it sets the standard for accessibility.
The previous version was an impressive and engaging interactive experience so it's good to know that you can have great experiences that reach a broader audience by catering for accessibility as well.
Read Bob's blog for the full details.
July 19, 2005
Ted Patrick has posted a nice later view of how the Flash Player balances ActionScript execution and graphics rendering.
July 12, 2005
Go get it while it's hot!
To quote that page:
The purpose of this beta is to gather your feedback so that Macromedia can verify that:
- The new Macromedia Flash Player is compatible with existing content.
- Developers have an opportunity to test their content and applications prior to the product release to help identify bugs on a variety of machines and configurations.
- New installation mechanisms provide a smooth end-user installation experience.
June 21, 2005
Mark Anders, co-lead of the Zorn product team with Sho, has starting blogging and he points out that the Zorn team is hiring!
June 6, 2005
Lots of news coverage this morning about the Macromedia Flash Platform. A lot of people have talked about Flash as a "platform" (small 'p') in the past so it's nice to see it officially talked about with a Big 'P' now.
Just been browsing through all the associated press releases and wanted to highlight this one about Macromedia joining the Eclipse Foundation to work on a Flex IDE based on Eclipse, code-named "Zorn". More information about "Zorn" can be found in the updated Flex FAQ.
May 12, 2005
With my Architect's View Breeze room now upgraded to the recently released version 5, several people have been asking me "So, what is new in this release?". Here's a Tech Note that talks about migrating from Breeze 4.1 to Breeze 5 and includes a link to a FlashPaper document that describes Breeze 5 in detail, highlighting all of the new functionality as well as explaining the new architecture underpinning the four facets of Breeze 5 (Breeze Meeting, Breeze Presenter, Breeze Training, Breeze Events) as well as the core Breeze Communication Server. There's a lot of good stuff in that document (it's 37 pages!).
May 7, 2005
The BBC have a nice interactive Flash map of the political landscape in England. Not surprisingly, my old district went true blue Conservative but the Lib Dems made some good gains. If you know England, it's interesting to drill into the map and see how various districts went. Northern Ireland is also very interesting, split fairly evenly between Sinn Fein and the Democratic Unionist Party... two total opposites! I'm sorry to see Tony's majority reduced but I'm glad he's won a record third term...
May 2, 2005
As you've no doubt read by now, Breeze 5 has been launched and it really is an amazing upgrade! For me, the absolute #1 fabulous feature about the new release is that it now allows Mac users to present! Yay! I can screen share now. Yes, I know, that means that my (admittedly feeble) excuse for not doing any remote CFUG presentations has been taken away from me...
Check out my Breeze Meeting. I'm going to start using it quite a bit more from now on!
April 20, 2005
Amazon is running the Tribeca Film Festival Short Film Competition using Flash video. Very slick experience: watch a film, get shown a commercial then vote on the film - all within a Flash movie.
April 12, 2005
I've been asked to remind y'all to go and vote for the Readers' Choice Awards. I've done my duty by going and voting. Some strange nominations in a few categories (and a lot of stuff I'd never heard of!) as well as quite a few high-profile omissions I think. Anyone know how the nomination process works / worked? Just curious...
The Southeast Ohio Macromedia User Group (and several other groups) are putting on Spring <br> 2005 Info Tech Conference at the end of May. It's a one day conference for just $25 with four tracks and some well-known names speaking. Register early because they only have a 350 attendee capacity!
And the conference name still isn't XHTML compliant :)
A nice article in USA Today about Macromedia Flash for mobile devices. The article mentions the ubiquity of Macromedia Flash and points to the political parodies such as Jib Jab's "This Land is Your Land" and Warner Bros' Looney Tunes online cartoons as examples that the public might be familiar with. My wife grumbled that it didn't mention her favorite: Mucha Lucha which is also made with Macromedia Flash according to the show's credits!
As Grant Skinner says in the USA Today article, it's early days yet with cell phones but the potential is huge for some great applications of Macromedia Flash!
April 6, 2005
As soon as Tony Blair announced the date of the General Election (May 5th), the BBC posted a run Rich Internet Application that lets you explore the effect of voting swings as well as analyzing polls. The "swingometer" has been a fixture of British elections for years so it's great to see a high tech version we can all play with!
April 5, 2005
Mike Chambers posted about the new version of MXNA, the Macromedia News Aggregator, that has just started public beta. It is a complete, ground-up rewrite and has a lot of new features, including smart categories (that effectively filter posts by keyword rather than by the standard MXNA RSS categories).
Updated: The pod has been updated to use the new web service API. It no longer shows the author since that is not available now, so I show the number of click-throughs. I also cache the categories and languages for a day and the actual posts for an hour which will speed up rendering of my blog.
Christian Cantrell's blog has a more detailed list of new features.
I'll be updating my "Top ColdFusion Posts" pod (bottom right here) to use the new web service API shortly.
Updated: The pod has been updated to use the new web service API. It no longer shows the author since that is not available now, so I show the number of click-throughs. I also cache the categories and languages for a day and the actual posts for an hour which will speed up rendering of my blog.
March 28, 2005
Bob Regan, Macromedia's resident accessibility guru, has posted a list of sites that use Flash that are also accessible, i.e., they work with assistive browsing technology etc.
March 23, 2005
Michael Hazard of the University of Rochester Medical Center talks about the new features and options in Contribute 3.1. Overlapping sites, deployment (staging / live) and publishing files directly from your local computer are some of the things he covers. The deployment system uses a ColdFusion web application that ships with the Contribute Publishing Services!
January 26, 2005
Just saw this announcement that the army are using Breeze Live to collaborate in the field. If you haven't used Breeze yet, you should try it out - it really is a great way to communicate and collaborate with remote resources. Of course, if you have used it, you know that already!
November 24, 2004
Mark Stanton explains how to use ColdFusion to hook into Contribute Publishing Services so that you can execute CF code on various Contribute actions. In his example, he kicks off a Verity index update whenever a user publishes a file to the website using Contribute, thus ensuring searches always have up to date content. You can hook into pretty much any action in Contribute so this is a very powerful mechanism!
November 18, 2004
REST stands for REpresentational State Transfer and that's how browsers generally work, with simple HTTP requests and responses and the current request being shown in the browser address bar. When you work with an interactive Flash application, the browser address bar generally shows the request that loaded the page containing the Flash application regardless of what you do in the application itself - in other words the state of the Flash application is not represented by the browser.
Kevin Lynch shares a simple technique for exposing the state of a Flash application into the browser. This allows you to bookmark a Flash application and its state as well as enabling a history trail in the browser. Kevin has source code for download.
November 17, 2004
Macromedia Breeze Add-in for Microsoft Outlook: an extension to Outlook that lets you schedule, start or join Macromedia Breeze Live meetings. Very cool!
November 12, 2004
It seems that if no one is there in a Breeze meeting, it kind of shuts itself down. I was offline for quite a while this evening and everyone left the meeting... and the polls reset themselves to zero votes.
November 10, 2004
Overall, most people who've dropped by to chat have been very positive about the Breeze Live experience. Some folks offered up suggestions for enhancements, most of which centered on making the Breeze chat pod more like a regular IM client (e.g., adding time stamps to messages, providing a visual and/or audible notification of new messages). Please send all of your suggestions through the Breeze wish form so that the Breeze product team can read and evaluate them!
At one point, I opened up the collaborative white board to allow four or five people to draw simultaneously. Everyone seemed to pick it up very quickly and Joe Rinehart gets a gold star for his artistic bunny rabbit! Eh, what's up Joe?
November 8, 2004
I figured it might be a nice experiment to have a permanent Breeze meeting running and have a link on my site to let people find the meeting.
I won't always be around but I'll try to be in the meeting as much as possible...
November 3, 2004
Macromedia's website has official coverage of MAX 2004, including what was shown in the general session.
October 29, 2004
A couple of stories in The Register show just how much the mobile space is expanding: World mobile phone shipments up 25%, Global smart phone sales soar. That's a huge consumer market which says that Flash on cell phones will be huge, too, so Flash developers have a lot of opportunities on the horizon.
October 11, 2004
I was recently pointed to an excellent presentation on web standards - Redesigning Sydney Morning Herald (WARNING: 1Mb PDF!). I sent that link to a bunch of my colleagues. Several of them complained that it crashed their browser - either before it loaded or after clicking through a couple of pages. I didn't have a problem with it but then I was using the Schubert PDF plugin on Safari and they were all using the Adobe Acrobat Reader plugin-in on Windows Internet Explorer. So I "printed" the PDF to FlashPaper and put it up on a local server. The result was only 400Kb - 2.5 times smaller! - and a perfect viewing experience for my colleagues with no browser lock-ups or crashes. I was pretty surprised at the difference in size - definitely something I'll bear in mind in future!
September 7, 2004
Macromedia - Breeze : Purchase Options - you can now buy Breeze Live in monthly and pay-per-use versions as well as the previous annual and software licensed versions.
It's another Mach II ColdFusion application on the front end and sales information is also processed by ColdFusion on the back end as part of the integration with the Oracle ERP system. The front end and the back end communicate using JMS - yes, the back end uses my JMS event gateway and runs on Blackstone. So I'm very pleased to see this new product offering go live!
It's another Mach II ColdFusion application on the front end and sales information is also processed by ColdFusion on the back end as part of the integration with the Oracle ERP system. The front end and the back end communicate using JMS - yes, the back end uses my JMS event gateway and runs on Blackstone. So I'm very pleased to see this new product offering go live!
August 31, 2004
Matt Voerman asks that question on the RocketBoots blog. Pop along and give him some comments. I'm not a Flash expert and I've never been able to build anything useful with Flash until the screens feature appeared in Flash MX Pro. I've managed to build a couple of small but useful apps with it so it's definitely helped me.
July 26, 2004
Macromedia - Developer Center : What Is the Significance of Ellipsis? Ellipsis is the Flash 7.2 Updater. Read what Mike Chambers has to say about it and update your copy of Flash MX 2004 today.
July 14, 2004
Macromedia - Developer Center : iShop: Flash Lite Enabled Comparison Shopping to Go. Oh boy, do I want one of those phones! Articles like this make me very excited about where Flash is going - with Flash Lite on cell phones and Breeze Live and seeing one of the first production Flex apps (Ofoto - via Christophe Coenraets blog).
July 12, 2004
Robin Debreuil's C# to SWF compiler - early development work at the moment but very interesting nonetheless. Download it and give the guy some feedback - the more ways to produce Flash movies, the better in my opinion!
June 10, 2004
OK, they're finally available - Flash Remoting components for ActionScript 2.0. I say 'finally' because a lot of people have been complaining about the delays in releasing these updated components. Hopefully, folks will think they are worth the wait...
June 3, 2004
"Something Wicked This Way Comes" tomorrow (Friday June 4th). Check out the "wicked" J. K. Rowling website powered by ColdFusion and Flash! Reminds me a little of "Myst"... as a rich 'world' that you can explore and interact with in random ways...
May 27, 2004
Macromedia today announced Flash Player 7 is available for Linux. This brings increased performance, CSS support and native SOAP support to browsers on the Linux platform and continues Macromedia's tradition of supporting Linux as an important platform.
April 30, 2004
The most fascinating takeaway from Jon Gay's History Of Flash for me was that he write Intellidraw for Aldus. I loved that program - I used to use it for visual design and documentation of software before I settled on OMT (later Booch and even later UML) CASE tools for that purpose. It was an awesome program, revolutionary in its simplicity and in its smartness. It's an interesting read!
April 20, 2004
I just received notification this morning that the DENG project has now been open sourced under the GPL. Visit the SourceForge DENG project website for more details.
April 19, 2004
Daemon have made a pre-release version of Certifiable available - a Central client that helps you prepare for your Flash MX and ColdFusion MX certification exams.
April 5, 2004
Seen on Darron Schall's blog, a Rich Internet Application version of the well-known MySQL administrator written in PHP. Very slick! As Darron points out, it's not free but for $5 it's worth having.
March 12, 2004
An updater for Dreamweaver is now available. This updater provides major performance and stability boosts according to the press release. I updated my Mac version and can confirm that this new updater is awesome - download it today and you'll love what it does for your productivity!
March 10, 2004
Guy Watson has put his MXDU and FlashForward presentations online. I missed his talk in Sydney and didn't get to FlashForward in the end so it's great see his slides on JSFL and read his notes (both online as FlashPaper - nice touch!). He talks about how you can automate tasks in Flash and how you can script access to the timeline and the panels and so on. It really opens your eyes to the power of the new extensibility API. He's also started publishing things to the new JSFL Extensions category on the Macromedia Flash Exchange.
March 3, 2004
The South East Ohio Macromedia User Group are host to the Spring <br> 2004 Info Tech Conference featuring both a keynote and a "lunch'n'learn" session by Ben Forta, as well as sessions by John Cummings and Michael Hamilton (both of Macromedia). Four tracks cover a broad range of topics so it'll be an information-packed one day conference! Only three weeks away so register now to ensure your place - and it's only $15!
(But shouldn't it be Spring <br /> 2004...?)
(But shouldn't it be Spring <br /> 2004...?)
March 1, 2004
Macromedia is offering free trials of Breeze Live (to the first 500 customers who sign up in North America). If you haven't used Breeze Live yet, you don't know what you're missing - it really is a great, hassle-free system!
According to that page, a new version of Breeze is coming in the Spring which adds a lot of new features, including interactive whiteboarding, file transfers, polls and custom application pods!
According to that page, a new version of Breeze is coming in the Spring which adds a lot of new features, including interactive whiteboarding, file transfers, polls and custom application pods!
February 25, 2004
The final session of MXDU - the speaker panel - saw a large number of folks on stage facing a grilling from various audience members. Some interesting questions were asked as well as some of the "standard" concerns being aired (e.g., "Is Director dead?", "Is Flash Remoting dead?", "Is HomeSite+ dead?" - No on all of these - the response was something like "Macromedia continues to make releases and enhancements to these techologies and is committed to providing the best tools for developers.")
Quite a few questions about the Flashosphere and direction - "Flash is going in six directions at once... can we have a roadmap?" was one question. Mike answered that so I won't attempt to paraphrase (I'm sure he'll be happy to blog the answers to these questions).
Some interesting questions about Flex and its position in the marketplace - "Won't it eat into the existing Flash developer market?". My sense is that there's a whole sector of developers (often called enterprise developers, i.e., folks who write Java and other text-based languages without visual tools) who will never master the Flash authoring environment but will 'grok' Flex immediately - for them, Flex represents a way into the RIA space. The existing Flash developer space will be effectively untouched by Flex (except perhaps to increase demand for their skills to create components for the new enterprise Flex / RIA space!). That's my feeling anyway.
One question was right up my street: "As we build more complex apps with components, it gets harder and harder to debug - what about some tools for this?" This is one of those 'moving to enterprise development' growing pains and it isn't really about components per se. My answer was that you need to start adopting other enterprise development practices such as building test harnesses for components, either as you build the components or - even better - before you build the components. Enterprise software requires enterprise testing.
Another related question was about the compile times for complex Flash applications. Mike talked about using command-line compilers and build systems and I said this is another 'moving to enterprise development' situation where we're building complex enough applications that we're beginning to hit the same compile time stuff that many Java / C++ enterprise developers have been used to for years: edit, compile-wait-link-wait, test. It's pretty much a natural consequence of building complex software and one that many scripting languages manage to hide from us by being very lazy about compiling code (on demand).
And that was it. MXDU 2004 is over. And what a great conference it's been! Incredibly passionate developers building astonishing applications with the latest versions of the Macromedia MX products. I'm looking forward to next year's MXDU already (if I get invited to speak again).
Tonight is the bloggers' dinner. Tomorrow is the partner conference. More later!
Quite a few questions about the Flashosphere and direction - "Flash is going in six directions at once... can we have a roadmap?" was one question. Mike answered that so I won't attempt to paraphrase (I'm sure he'll be happy to blog the answers to these questions).
Some interesting questions about Flex and its position in the marketplace - "Won't it eat into the existing Flash developer market?". My sense is that there's a whole sector of developers (often called enterprise developers, i.e., folks who write Java and other text-based languages without visual tools) who will never master the Flash authoring environment but will 'grok' Flex immediately - for them, Flex represents a way into the RIA space. The existing Flash developer space will be effectively untouched by Flex (except perhaps to increase demand for their skills to create components for the new enterprise Flex / RIA space!). That's my feeling anyway.
One question was right up my street: "As we build more complex apps with components, it gets harder and harder to debug - what about some tools for this?" This is one of those 'moving to enterprise development' growing pains and it isn't really about components per se. My answer was that you need to start adopting other enterprise development practices such as building test harnesses for components, either as you build the components or - even better - before you build the components. Enterprise software requires enterprise testing.
Another related question was about the compile times for complex Flash applications. Mike talked about using command-line compilers and build systems and I said this is another 'moving to enterprise development' situation where we're building complex enough applications that we're beginning to hit the same compile time stuff that many Java / C++ enterprise developers have been used to for years: edit, compile-wait-link-wait, test. It's pretty much a natural consequence of building complex software and one that many scripting languages manage to hide from us by being very lazy about compiling code (on demand).
And that was it. MXDU 2004 is over. And what a great conference it's been! Incredibly passionate developers building astonishing applications with the latest versions of the Macromedia MX products. I'm looking forward to next year's MXDU already (if I get invited to speak again).
Tonight is the bloggers' dinner. Tomorrow is the partner conference. More later!
February 24, 2004
Scott gave a great overview of the MXDU Central application. He explained the MVC-based architecture behind the typical Central app (Model - Web Services / Shared Object data; View - Shell / Pod; Controller - Agent). He explained how to simplify online / offline code paths by using same internal representation of data as you use in the (local) Shared Object - and how to work with just the new / changed data from the server by passing a timestamp back and forth (which can also act as the seed for alerts). He also warned developers to be careful to alert users only for 'important' changes (in MXDU, that's session deletion, room change or time change - other changes are ignored).
The more I learn about Central, the more I like it (and the more I want to try building some apps myself!).
The more I learn about Central, the more I like it (and the more I want to try building some apps myself!).
Although this was a session for experienced Flash developers - and therefore way over my head for the most part - it was very interesting to hear Branden talk about making pragmatic choices when developing applications (or even just small interactive Flash movies). He had a lot of good advice like: use OOP if it benefits you (and don't use it if it doesn't); break the rules when you need to... He also mentioned that using get/set property methods ("key-value coding") allows you to wrap object state changes in a way that makes it easy to build listeners and controllers that communicate state changes across your application. His overall message was that there is no one "true" way to build things (and don't believe anyone who says otherwise!).
John Treloar opened MXDU 2004, showing some great RIAs created by ANZ software developers - excellent examples of single-page Flash applications that bring improved interactivity and responsiveness. My favorite was Hell Pizza from New Zealand - anywhere that lets you put apricot sauce and anchovies side-by-side gets my vote!
Mike Chambers stepped up and talked about Macromedia Central and what's coming down the line. He demo'd the Intel Hotspot (wifi) Finder and an AOL chat client built in Central. Daemon have created a Central application for MXDU attendees that lets folks select their sessions as well as providing news about the conference. The application makes use of the alert feature to notify attendees of room changes (one of the sessions just moved into a bigger room). Central is already very cool and looks set to become even cooler!
Next up, Peter Ryce in San Francisco helped John demo the forthcoming Breeze 4.0 system live, including whiteboarding, Flash Video, file sharing and a number of other interactive features, including recording and a powerful search system. Finally, Peter showed the new extensibility API in Breeze 4.0 - "pods" - including examples of a Google search pod and a stock market pod.
Next on the agenda was Flash on devices, where John showcased the new Leapster educational device from LeapFrog with a full Flash UI and learning games (I think we needed some 4-8 year olds to demonstrate it properly!). The next demo was Flash on a Nokia cellphone - in fact a Flash 4 movie that was written long before cellphones could run Flash! - and then John looked at the i-mode phones from Japan that have very rich user interfaces and interactive content and applications... all written in Flash, including the forthcoming FlashCast system with information channels providing news, sports information, stock quotes, cartoons, traffic information etc.
In closing, John showed yet another great Macromedia-powered experience: Virtual Byron Bay. You can see more examples on the Macromedia Flash Video Gallery.
Mike Chambers stepped up and talked about Macromedia Central and what's coming down the line. He demo'd the Intel Hotspot (wifi) Finder and an AOL chat client built in Central. Daemon have created a Central application for MXDU attendees that lets folks select their sessions as well as providing news about the conference. The application makes use of the alert feature to notify attendees of room changes (one of the sessions just moved into a bigger room). Central is already very cool and looks set to become even cooler!
Next up, Peter Ryce in San Francisco helped John demo the forthcoming Breeze 4.0 system live, including whiteboarding, Flash Video, file sharing and a number of other interactive features, including recording and a powerful search system. Finally, Peter showed the new extensibility API in Breeze 4.0 - "pods" - including examples of a Google search pod and a stock market pod.
Next on the agenda was Flash on devices, where John showcased the new Leapster educational device from LeapFrog with a full Flash UI and learning games (I think we needed some 4-8 year olds to demonstrate it properly!). The next demo was Flash on a Nokia cellphone - in fact a Flash 4 movie that was written long before cellphones could run Flash! - and then John looked at the i-mode phones from Japan that have very rich user interfaces and interactive content and applications... all written in Flash, including the forthcoming FlashCast system with information channels providing news, sports information, stock quotes, cartoons, traffic information etc.
In closing, John showed yet another great Macromedia-powered experience: Virtual Byron Bay. You can see more examples on the Macromedia Flash Video Gallery.
February 19, 2004
I fly out Friday night and arrive Sunday morning so Sunday is my one day as a tourist in Sydney! Here's my itinerary:
I've filled in the blanks - it's a busy week!
- Monday: working breakfast with Geoff Bowers of Daemon; spend time in our Sydney office; WSG/NMUG presentation and panel (Quarry Room, 6pm for 7pm start).
- Tuesday: MXDU Day 1: I'll be attending various sessions, mostly on Flash since that's my weak spot then I'll be speaking about Mach II at Macromedia (Ballroom 1, 3pm) and moderating the CFCs / Design Patterns Birds of a Feather (Ballroom 2, 5:30pm-ish); in the evening, it's dinner with "the team".
- Wednesday: MXDU Day 2: I'll mostly be attending integration and new technology sessions (I want to see and hear people's reactions to Flex and Blackstone) then it's the speaker roundtable (Plenary, 4:30pm); in the evening, it's the bloggers' dinner probably at Chinta Ria if they can accommodate a big group!
- Thursday: spend time talking with MM partners; speakers' dinner at Daemon HQ.
- Friday: probably customer visits; fly home at 3:15pm, arrive San Francisco that morning and work from home!
I've filled in the blanks - it's a busy week!
Ben has just published a great article showing how to build a client-server data management application using Macromedia Flash MX 2004 Professional, the Data Connection Wizard and Web Services built with ColdFusion. It's a ten page tutorial, with all the code available for download, that walks you through every step of creating a basic, useful application, complete with hints and tips at the end on what needs to be done to make it production-ready.
February 17, 2004
The CommunityMX website has now made the entire source code of their CMXtra Central Application available as part of a great free article Anatomy of a Central Application. This is Part 1 but provides all the source code and lots of information about the application, how it was built, what all the code does etc. There will be a Part 2 with tips and tricks on customizing components. This might be the catalyst for me actually writing my first Central app!
February 5, 2004
My week in Sydney is getting fuller by the day. Here's the schedule so far:
- Monday 23rd: National Macromedia User Group & Web Standards Group meeting at the Star City. I'll be giving a brief presentation on accessibility and web standards compliance in the context of macromedia.com. Tim Buntel and Mike Chambers will also be in attendance (and, I'm sure, speaking about something cool).
- Tuesday 24th: MXDU 2004 Day One. I'm speaking about the use of Mach II at Macromedia in the afternoon and I'm probably going to run a BoF session on ColdFusion Components (and Design Patterns and Mach II).
- Wednesday 25th: MXDU 2004 Day Two. Post-conference Speaker Roundtable. Bloggers' Dinner in the evening.
- Thursday 26th: Partner Conference followed by the MXDU Speakers' BBQ.
January 27, 2004
Community MX has the first part of an article about building your first Central application. I use Central daily but haven't quite found the time yet to build an application. I really want to because that's when people say you really 'get' the whole Central concept! Anyway, the article explains the elements of Central and how to set up an efficient development environment, including debugging tools. Part 2 will walk you through the actual development of the application itself - I can't wait!
If you install Community MXtra for Macromedia Central you can easily keep up with the latest articles on the Community MX website!
The second part of this article has now been published. Unfortunately, part 2 is not free content. I think that is a bit low - publishing part 1 of an article as a freebie but making part 2 of the same article paid content!
If you install Community MXtra for Macromedia Central you can easily keep up with the latest articles on the Community MX website!
The second part of this article has now been published. Unfortunately, part 2 is not free content. I think that is a bit low - publishing part 1 of an article as a freebie but making part 2 of the same article paid content!
January 19, 2004
The latest version of the Mkulu QA Proxy is now in beta. This useful Windows application acts as a web server proxy so that you can log and debug Flash Remoting calls - it decodes the AMF requests and responses so you can verify the correct data is being sent over the wire.
January 15, 2004
Check out Ben's article in the CFDJ entitled I Don't Hate Dreamweaver where he talks about his favorite four features in Dreamweaver MX 2004 and why he's beginning to like Dreamweaver for ColdFusion development!
January 12, 2004
A while back I reported on Christophe showing how to mix MXML and JSP. One of the comments on his blog was that yes, you could do the same with CFML. Ben Forta shows you how to mix MXML and CFML.
January 5, 2004
Last week I got the chance to redesign a website for some friends in the cat show world (ICAT - International Cat Agility Tournaments). I wanted something slick and colorful but didn't want to have to slave away creating the entire thing from scratch using CSS. I started with the CSS page designs that ship with DWMX2004 - two of them are based on Halo and four more are derivative of that style, providing simpler two- and three-column layouts.
I built a mockup of one page of the site using the default Halo Left Nav template (with the global navigation removed since I didn't need that) and then I created two simpler design treatments involving colors from the original website logo. The ICAT folks liked the slick Halo look but wanted something more colorful so I quickly created a fourth design treatment that added some blue and red into the basic Halo look'n'feel. They approved that so I rebuilt their former site (which used tables for layout, had a cascading DHTML menu that didn't work very well in any browser but Internet Explorer and wouldn't validate as any version of HTML!) as a pure CSS layout, based on Macromedia's Halo template with added color: http://www.catagility.com/
This exercise showed me just how valuable CSS can be - all four design treatments I created for review used the same HTML structure, just different CSS. The result is a site that is almost entirely valid XHTML (a couple of pages are still invalid since the HTML copy came from the original site - I'll fix those shortly) and is easily usable in Lynx and, I hope, fairly accessible (I haven't fully tested that part yet).
I built a mockup of one page of the site using the default Halo Left Nav template (with the global navigation removed since I didn't need that) and then I created two simpler design treatments involving colors from the original website logo. The ICAT folks liked the slick Halo look but wanted something more colorful so I quickly created a fourth design treatment that added some blue and red into the basic Halo look'n'feel. They approved that so I rebuilt their former site (which used tables for layout, had a cascading DHTML menu that didn't work very well in any browser but Internet Explorer and wouldn't validate as any version of HTML!) as a pure CSS layout, based on Macromedia's Halo template with added color: http://www.catagility.com/
This exercise showed me just how valuable CSS can be - all four design treatments I created for review used the same HTML structure, just different CSS. The result is a site that is almost entirely valid XHTML (a couple of pages are still invalid since the HTML copy came from the original site - I'll fix those shortly) and is easily usable in Lynx and, I hope, fairly accessible (I haven't fully tested that part yet).
December 16, 2003
Video in Flash is heavily featured on macromedia.com at the moment: read the article by Forest Key (Senior Flash Product Manager) on creating a video showcase for your website and watch Forest talk about the video features in Flash Pro. There's also a cool video gallery showing how twenty five companies have taken advantage of the video functionality in Flash!
The Flash Player Product Manager, Waleed Anbar, talks about the new update to Flash Player 7 (7.0.r19). This update adds some new features (including auto-update notification for Netscape and Mozilla-based browsers on Windows) as well as several bug fixes and enhancements. Update your Flash Player now!
December 6, 2003
Matt Liotta posted an excellent summary of his approach to Rich Internet Application design on the CFCDev mailing list today. He points out that traditional three-tier applications (presentation / business / data) don't really adapt well to Rich Internet Applications because you really need the logic from the business tier spread between your Flash front end and your ColdFusion (or other) back end. He uses a four-tier approach: presentation / business (both in Flash) / services / data (both on the server). His services tier is a generic but high-level set of APIs providing access to data and other, integration-level, services. He says that the service and data tier can be reused between Flash and HTML applications so that you only have to rewrite the presentation and business tiers.
You can refine this architecture somewhat further by splitting the business tier into three more tiers, which I would call: business-presentation, business-facade and business-model. The business-model tier contains the generic business logic for your application (that does not depend in any way on the presentation technology). The business-facade tier provides a Web Services or Flash Remoting interface that exposes key business methods from the business-model tier. The business-presentation tier is in Flash and provides a controller / manager layer for the UI (presentation tier) to use, wrapping the calls to the business-facade tier.
If you need both a Flash version and an HTML version of your application, you can write two presentation tiers (one Flash, one .cfm ColdFusion pages) and two business-presentation tiers (one ActionScript, one Mach II / CFCs) and then reuse the business-facade (CFCs), business-model (CFCs) and lower tiers. If you don't need the RIA, you can collapse the business-presentation tier (Mach II / CFCs) and the business-facade tier (CFCs). It's still worth keeping the business-model tier separate tho' (as discussed in the Mach II Development Guide).
For more information on n-tier architectures, you can read these articles:
You can refine this architecture somewhat further by splitting the business tier into three more tiers, which I would call: business-presentation, business-facade and business-model. The business-model tier contains the generic business logic for your application (that does not depend in any way on the presentation technology). The business-facade tier provides a Web Services or Flash Remoting interface that exposes key business methods from the business-model tier. The business-presentation tier is in Flash and provides a controller / manager layer for the UI (presentation tier) to use, wrapping the calls to the business-facade tier.
If you need both a Flash version and an HTML version of your application, you can write two presentation tiers (one Flash, one .cfm ColdFusion pages) and two business-presentation tiers (one ActionScript, one Mach II / CFCs) and then reuse the business-facade (CFCs), business-model (CFCs) and lower tiers. If you don't need the RIA, you can collapse the business-presentation tier (Mach II / CFCs) and the business-facade tier (CFCs). It's still worth keeping the business-model tier separate tho' (as discussed in the Mach II Development Guide).
For more information on n-tier architectures, you can read these articles:
- Application Architecture: An N-Tier Approach - Part 1
- Benefits of Using the N-tiered Approach for Web Applications (about ColdFusion)
- Extending Design Patterns into RIA (about Macromedia Flex)
- Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX Application Model
November 20, 2003
Mike Chambers blogged case studies for two of the new Central applications - the Movie Finder and the Active Content Resources application. The Movie Finder is very impressive and very useful. The Active Content Resources application is much simpler but it is dearer to my heart because I wrote the back end!
It's a ColdFusion application, in two parts: a web service CFC that is called by the Central application and a content administrator. The content administrator is a Mach II application that manages "articles" and "categories" (the article CFC, DAO and gateway are featured in the Mach II Development Guide as example code). The web service CFC calls the article gateway CFC to return recently published articles. The Mach II application has two listeners, one to manage interactions with the article-related CFCs and one to manage interactions with the category-related CFCs. It allows Mike, Diana and others to quickly add and edit summaries and links for breaking news about Active Content issues, so the information can be delivered directly to developers via the Central application!
It's a ColdFusion application, in two parts: a web service CFC that is called by the Central application and a content administrator. The content administrator is a Mach II application that manages "articles" and "categories" (the article CFC, DAO and gateway are featured in the Mach II Development Guide as example code). The web service CFC calls the article gateway CFC to return recently published articles. The Mach II application has two listeners, one to manage interactions with the article-related CFCs and one to manage interactions with the category-related CFCs. It allows Mike, Diana and others to quickly add and edit summaries and links for breaking news about Active Content issues, so the information can be delivered directly to developers via the Central application!
The agenda for MXDU is shaping up nicely now with three tracks covering client, server and experience themes. I'll be speaking in the server theme (of course!), talking about Macromedia's use of Mach II.
November 12, 2003
Next week is the week for conferences... Las Vegas is host to both COMDEX and ApacheCon, Phoenix is host to SuperComputing 2003 and Salt Lake City is host to Macromedia's own MAX!
I'm not going to any of them but I look forward to reading reports of these conferences in various blogs. Last year, I attended - and blogged - Macromedia DevCon 2002 in Orlando, Florida. It was an interesting experience and it was great to meet and talk to so many customers. MAX 2003 promises some very exciting sessions and announcements.
This year, I attended - and blogged - JavaOne which was also extremely interesting but, since I was attending sessions, it was a very different experience to DevCon. Early next year, I'll be attending MXDU - I'll be speaking and, of course, blogging as much as I can. It'll be the first conference I've spoken at in quite a few years so that, combined with the general Antipodean nature of the event, will likely make it yet another very different experience!
I'm not going to any of them but I look forward to reading reports of these conferences in various blogs. Last year, I attended - and blogged - Macromedia DevCon 2002 in Orlando, Florida. It was an interesting experience and it was great to meet and talk to so many customers. MAX 2003 promises some very exciting sessions and announcements.
This year, I attended - and blogged - JavaOne which was also extremely interesting but, since I was attending sessions, it was a very different experience to DevCon. Early next year, I'll be attending MXDU - I'll be speaking and, of course, blogging as much as I can. It'll be the first conference I've spoken at in quite a few years so that, combined with the general Antipodean nature of the event, will likely make it yet another very different experience!
November 6, 2003
Simon Horwith - a long-time CFer (and former CF Studio user) - talks about Server Behaviors in DWMX 2004 and how they can make you more productive when writing ColdFusion code! I must admit, I didn't realize how powerful the behaviors feature was until I read this. I can see a lot of uses for this, especially for writing Mach II applications - server behaviors would be useful for building the Mach II XML file as well as certain things like filters that have predefined structure with some variables in them!
The Dreamweaver API Reference and Extending Dreamweaver just joined the ranks of LiveDocs so that customers can comment on them.
WTG's CFMX Coding Guidelines and the Mach II Development Guide are also available although they are not linked from the LiveDocs home page.
WTG's CFMX Coding Guidelines and the Mach II Development Guide are also available although they are not linked from the LiveDocs home page.
October 31, 2003
Christian Cantrell asks a very interesting question about the pros and cons of writing a single back end code base that is used by both an HTML and a Flash front end. He's thinking of building an application that is essentially a collection of web services and then building a Flash UI (using Flash Remoting) and an HTML UI (using CFMX to
cfinvoke the same web services). Share your thoughts with him by commenting on his blog!
October 30, 2003
It's been a while since I blogged anything about wireless networks but this is too cool to pass up. Intel have produced a Macromedia Central version of their HotSpot Finder. The really cool thing is that Central caches results so that when you're offline, you can open Central and access the HotSpot database locally!
It confirmed the HotSpots I already knew about in the various local McDonald's and also showed that my local Starbucks has WiFi. Near work, I was surprised to see that the CalTrain station has WiFi!
It confirmed the HotSpots I already knew about in the various local McDonald's and also showed that my local Starbucks has WiFi. Near work, I was surprised to see that the CalTrain station has WiFi!
October 24, 2003
If anyone is interested, I'm prototyping a small extension to Mach II that will allow it to act as a back end for Rich Internet Applications. So far I have a core base component (FlashRemoting.cfc) that you extend for your application (as index.cfc or whatever) and then your Flash movie simply does this:
gwConn = NetServices.createGatewayConnection(
"http://{server}/flashservices/gateway/");
myService = gwConn.getService("myApp.index", this);
myService.handleRequest({event:"eventName"});
I'd be interested in feedback on what sort of API Flash developers would like to see... "http://{server}/flashservices/gateway/");
myService = gwConn.getService("myApp.index", this);
myService.handleRequest({event:"eventName"});
October 23, 2003
Ever wanted to put an interactive Flash movie on your desktop? Or, better still, build a Flash application and distribute it as interactive desktop wallpaper to your clients? Check out ScreenTime Media's SWF Desktop! I just downloaded the demo for Mac and very quickly had two SWFs installed as desktops - a slideshow created with Flash MX 2004 Professional and my favorite "singing kitten" animation. The slideshow was fully functional with back / forward buttons and the transitions operating as expected. The singing kitten loaded and ran, with sound, perfectly! What a wonderful product!
Well, it seems to be official now... I'm speaking at MXDU 2004 about my current favorite topic - Mach II. According to current plans, I'll also be previewing a version of the talk to BACFUG in December (on the 18th) - for those Bay Area folks who can't make the trip to Sydney.
Since I was on the schedule for last year's MXDU but had to drop out at the last minute, I'm very excited to be asked back this year and I'm really looking forward to the event, as well as meeting several of the cfaussie mailing list denizens!
Since I was on the schedule for last year's MXDU but had to drop out at the last minute, I'm very excited to be asked back this year and I'm really looking forward to the event, as well as meeting several of the cfaussie mailing list denizens!
After the recent talk about certification exams, I was interested to see this great Central application from Andrew Muller (of Daemon) that provides a neat way of searching for Macromedia Certified developers worldwide.
A background task runs on the Daemon server that screen scrapes macromedia.com to get the data into a SQL Server database, then the Central app queries that database via CFMX. Very nice!
A background task runs on the Daemon server that screen scrapes macromedia.com to get the data into a SQL Server database, then the Central app queries that database via CFMX. Very nice!
October 12, 2003
Nice to hear Jesse saying something nice about Macromedia technology. It'll be nice once Royale gets a little further down the line and we can start talking more about it!
September 25, 2003
Finally, everyone else can get their hands on what a few of us have been very excited about for a while: Macromedia Central is now in public beta! Mike Chambers has more to say about this in his blog but I'd urge you to install it and take it for a spin. Bear in mind that it's beta software so go and read the FAQ and other product information first!
September 19, 2003