The Adobe Connect team has announced the availability of Acrobat Connect Pro Mobile. I just downloaded (iTunes link) and installed the app and it's pretty cool. For me, it's cool because it was built using betas of CS5 and the new compile to native iPhone app functionality. But, it is hard for me to see how the app will be used to attend presentations. I created a new room using the Nashville ColdFusion User Group Connect Pro account and then logged into the meeting with my iPhone 3GS. When I shared my screen from my MacBook Pro I was able to see the screen on my iPhone but there was no detail and the resolution was so small I could barely see what was going on. As I moved windows around on my desktop it took a good 10-15 seconds before the change showed up on my iPhone. Admittedly, this delay could be due to the poor Internet connection I was connected to. In short, the app works but I'm not sure how practical it is. Hit the link below to continue reading what the Adobe Connect team has to say about this new application. Or, you can click here to watch a quick demo video of the application in use on iPhone.

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A few hours ago Liz Frederick, manager of the Adobe Community Expert program, announced the program name has been changed to Adobe Community Professionals. The history behind the original name and why it has been changed might not be interesting to you, but I'm proud that I was part of the process to help choose a new name. In fact, the entire Adobe Community Experts group was responsible with coming up with candidate program names that were ultimately submitted to Adobe for final approval. I'm quite happy with the new name as I believe it reflects more on what we are tasked to do. Which is...

The Adobe Community Experts Professionals Program is a community based program made up of Adobe customers who share their product expertise with the world-wide Adobe community. The Adobe Community Experts' Professional mission is to provide high caliber peer-to-peer communication educating and improving the product skills of Adobe customers worldwide.

Being an expert in anything is immensely tough to do. In fact, I often argue that there aren't any experts, there are simply people at different stages of understanding and learning. At the moment you consider yourself an expert you're likely to stop working hard, stop investigating, learning, and growing in your field, and ultimately stop being an expert. Being an Adobe Community Professional on the other hand still means you work hard at what you do, you serve as a leader in your online community, and you help others learn and become more skilled by sharing your expertise.

I welcome the switch from expert to professional and am extremely happy to report that my request to stay with the program in 2010 has been accepted. This marks my eighth consecutive year in a program that has gone from Team Macromedia, to Adobe Community Experts, to Adobe Community Professionals. A big "shout out" and thanks to Liz Frederick (Adobe Community Professional Manager), Adam Lehman (ColdFusion Product Manager), Rachel Luxemburg, and the entire ColdFusion team for allowing me to serve the ColdFusion, Flash, and Flex communities yet again.

I also want to send out a hearty welcome to new members of the program! I went through Liz's list and picked out names I a) recognized and b) were new to the program.

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Are you a programmer? Do you ever work as a consultant? If you answered yes to both of these questions I highly encourage you to read Jesse Warden's latest consulting chronicles blog post. Jesse provides some nice insights on how to be successful at your new consulting gig, how to build trust with other team members and managers, and how to solve difficult problems with good tools and a positive attitude. It's really a great read. If you're busy, e-mail this link to yourself. Otherwise, click over to Jesse's blog now.

Ben Forta is now on stage talking about how incredible yesterday was (I agree). He's asking how cool people thought the different parts of the keynote were. The Flash announcements seemed to get the most applause.

Ben is now demo-ing an iPhone application that is going to allow him to control parts of the stage/screens.

Now on stage, Adobe Director of Product Management for Interactive Media, Jen Taylor and David Yu from MLB.com. They're talking about how they are running the site on the Flash Platform.

David Yu is talking about how they acquire, encode and deliver the Flash video streams. Tomorrow is the first game of MLB preseason baseball and they'll have a new Flash tool you can use to watch the games online. Apparently it won't be free. Bah.

Jen is talking about advancements in the Flash Platform and Flash Player including. RTMP Streaming, HTTP Streaming (just announced), and content protection with the new 10.1 version of the Flash Player.

Showing a demo of the Open Source Media Framework doing progressive download, RTMP Streaming, and Dynamic Streaming. It's impossible to see any difference (on screen) between the three.

Now showing integration with Omniture in Flash using OSMF. You do this by importing some classes that give you access to analytics APIs.

Ben Forta back on stage now...

Ben's talking about how he lives in airports and intro's FedEx, who has a group doing a lot of work with enterprise applications. Strategic Technologist, Adam Moollenkopf.

Adam runs FedEx Custom Critical who manages things like shipping paintings and cryogenics. He's show an application using ESRI mapping APIs in a Flex Application. It's showing were all the FedEx vehicles are and where vehicles are available. It runs in real time using continuous feeds and GPS devices on the vehicles.

Showing proximity maps that indicate how long it will take vehicles to move around. GPS auto notifies the system that it has delivered packages so the system gets updated without the driver intervening. There are temp control units in the vehicles tracking whether refrigeration is turned on or not.

Everything is powered by RTMP on the backend, so they're using LCDS.

A "controller" take watch routes live and reroute trucks using the application. Drivers get the route updates on their GPS.

This application has to the most comprehensive example of Flex + LCDS I've seen publicly. It's really insane how much the app will do. Apparently they tried to use Ajax first to deliver this app but it wouldn't scale and the performance wasn't great. So they switched to LCDS. Great stuff!

Ben is now introducing Adobe Senior Engineering Manager Heidi Williams. Heidi is demonstrating how to build a MAX session finder using Flash Catalyst. The designer started from Photoshop or Illustrator, moved to Flash Catalyst and that's where she is starting.

Heidi's showing the different views inside of Catalyst and how you can connect to different backends like ColdFusion. She's now in ColdFusion Builder demoing some of the finer points of the interface.

Cool, Heidi's showing how you can build entire CFC's in scripts. I wouldn't expect that to be demo'd really. Ha, she's quickly getting into the ORM functions in ColdFusion Builder.

She's back in Catalyst showing how you connect your Catalyst project to your ColdFusion backend and hence the CFC she created. This gives her some available functions she can configure inside of Flash Catalyst. No coding necessary whatsoever.

In 10 minutes - with a lot of canned snippets - she was able to build a demo session finder application.

Ben's now introducing Electronic Arts' Director of Senior Producer of Pogo.com, Daniel Fiden. Pogo is an online casual gaming server that uses a ton of Flash. 14 million uniques per month. They also have a subscription service ($40/year) and have over a million subscribers.

They're using Flash in lots of ways. The team makes prototypes using Flash to try out certain game designs. They iterate until they get something they want to put full development resources into.

Ben is now talking about the MAX Widget and intro's Serge Jespers, Senior Platform Evangelist, the creator. Serge is demoing how to write distribution part of widgets, which is simply adding a "Flex Shareable Application" project in Flex Builder. This uses Adobe's shareable model to create a widget that lets you get the code needed to drop the widget into different social networking sites or blogs.

Any developer can use the Distribution Manager (for free) to distribute the app and look at analytics about the apps usage across the Internet. I wasn't even aware this stuff existed so I have no idea how new it is if at all.

Showing how you can use Adobe's try/buy service in three lines of code to add this model to your app. Adobe takes care of everything. They're giving away $5 cards at the Adobe booth today. Attendees can use these cards to buy apps in the AIR Marketplace. So I suppose you can only distribute the buy portion of your apps through the AIR Marketplace and not your own site. ??

Inviting one last guest up to the stage. Ben is really playing this up. Oh, it's just Kevin Lynch, CTO of Adobe. =)

Kevin's talking about the 3D framework that's been developed around Flash. Specifically the PaperVision 3D stuff. He also mentioned the augmented reality toolkit FLARtoolkit.

Now showing a postal service demo using augmented reality. Put a piece of paper on your desk and a virtual box shows up allowing you to see what will fit into the box. REALLY cool.

Holy crap, John Mayer was just introduced as a surprise guest. He's now talking about how he uses media and what it means to him and his fans. Quite awesome.

John Mayer has exited the stage and the keynote is now over.

Did you know any member of an Adobe user group can get 20% off all products sold in the Adobe store? This promotion has been running for a little while and has been extended through May 31, 2009. If you are a member of a user group and want to make use of this offer simply contact your user group manager for details. Or, you can also contact me using the Contact Blog Owner link in the footer. The 20% discount will be applied to one online order and can only be used one time per member. Thanks to Adobe for making this offer available!

We've launched a new dealerskins.com Web site and I'm curious what you think! The new site has been live for about two weeks after a few select folks in the office slaved over building it for a month or so. Personally, I really like the new site. During my four and half years at Dealerskins I've seen five different versions of our site (four of which are shown below). It's always difficult to get the right mix of marketing, content, and design that demonstrates the skills of our staff. The latest iteration of our site does a good job communicating our message and detailing features of our product offering. Kudos to our marketing team, designers and developers who put together the best Dealerskins site yet! Check it out and leave a comment letting me know what you think.

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RIAdventure 2009 has been over for a few weeks now and I'm missing the sun and relaxation already. It was great to get away from the office and shut off the phone and laptops for a full five days. I enjoyed hanging out with those that came along and I want to give HUGE props to Joshua Cyr for arranging the trip. He was like a travel guide making sure everyone knew what was going on, where we were supposed to meet to not miss the shuttle ride to the ship and as always was a joy to hang out with. I'm definitely looking forward to the possibility of a second RIAdventure in 2010 but in the meantime I have some photos to help make the weight a little more bearable.

For those curious what RIAdventure was all about you can view all the Flickr group photos here. I've also posted my photos to Flickr as well as three videos (of a super awesome Segway tour!) in my RIAdventure Cruise 2009 set.

Here's a slideshow for those that don't want to manually click through photos on Flickr.

I've blogged before about embedding fonts in Flex applications by first creating an embedded font in a Flash movie. The process is pretty simple and works well with one large caveat, your final SWF is larger based on the file size of any embedded fonts. Why is this bad? If you've embedded four of your favorite fonts and your app is one big Flash movie or Flex application your overall app size is increased to include the font resources.

Wouldn't it be better if you could load the fonts at runtime only when they're needed? Well, you can! Lee Brimelow recorded a fifteen minute tutorial showing you how to use Flash CS4 and Flex SDK metadata to create runtime loaded fonts. He walks through the entire process including selecting a font, writing the ActionScript 3 code to embed a font, restricting the font to certain glyphs, and then embedding the external font movie into a new, separate movie at runtime.

As Lee points out towards the end of the tutorial, using runtime loaded fonts should be considered a best practice if you're using Flash CS4. You can do what we've always been able to do and embed a font directly in the Flash CS4 library, but why tax your entire application this way and why include all the glyphs if you don't need them?

A co-worker of mine, Andy Matthews, has released a new AIR application I think everyone should check out. Shrinkadoo, an HTML/Ajax/ColdFusion powered AIR application integrates with a slew of URL shortening services to bring the functionality to your desktop. Andy's app is super small and lightweight and makes it really easy to quickly shorten those nasty URLs you want to put in e-mail, blogposts, or on Twitter. Other than the URL shortening itself my favorite features so far are the integrated feedback form and the auto application updates. Andy has a ton of ideas on where he wants to take the application but be sure and let him know what you think after you install it. Simply hover over the minimize/close buttons to see a slide out menu of extra features (nice!). Press the envelope icon, type up your comments and press submit!

From time to time folks contact me about job openings wondering if I know anyone looking for work. Given todays economy I'm surprised I don't know more folks who are looking! I received another job opening today and wanted to blog it since I don't know of anyone who's immediately available. If you are interested in this senior designer / developer job that requires skills in planning, conceptualizing, and creating interactive projects please contact Chris Spintzyk at cspintzyk [AT] everestusa [DOT] com. In the interest of full disclosure, Everest is a recruiting firm and other than phone calls here and there I have no direct experience with them.

Basic information about this opportunity:

• Flash and Web site design skills are necessary
  
• A strong eye and skill for design for the Web is a plus
• A high level of object-oriented ActionScripting, HTML, CSS, XML
  
• Experience in design implementation into interactive projects with an eye for detail.
  
• Looking for a real problem solver, nothing is impossible attitude.
  
• Any additional technical skills will be a major consideration for this job role.
  
• Key Performance Areas include ActionScript, Flash IDE, HTML, CSS, Client satisfaction, commercial procedures

This time next week my wife and I will be somewhere in the North Atlantic on our way to the Bahamas. It's been a couple of years since our last cruise so we're pretty excited for the chance to hit the seas again. The particular cruise we're going on is part of the RIAdventure social/tech gathering. I've always enjoyed hanging out with other programmers and tech folks at conferences, but the conference always occupies most of our time. This cruise is all about the social aspects but I'm sure there will be loads of conversations on ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, and rich Internet applications in general. When you get a bunch of geeks together you can be there will be lots of tech talk.

I believe there are upwards of 30 people going including Joshua Cyr, Dan Skaggs, Dan Wilson, Yancy Wharton, Jared Rypka-Hauer, and Todd Sharp. Since I'll be arriving a day before the ship sets sail, I thought it'd be nice to have dinner with anyone else that's already in Miami. If you're going to be in Miami on Sunday the 8th and you want to have dinner, give me a ring (just press the "Call Me" button in the right margin). Or, you can always leave a comment on this post or e-mail me.

Mike Chambers has created his first iPhone application and it's been approved by Apple. If you have an iPhone or an iPod Touch and you write ActionScript 3 for Flash CS3 or Flex 3, you need to cruise on over to iTunes and download (iTunes link) his ActionScript 3 API reference guide!! It includes documentation on AS3 for Flash Player 10, Flex 3.2 and AIR 1.5.

Thanks for putting this together Mike.

I was reading through the latest blog posts aggregated by ColdFusion Bloggers and noticed someone writing about the oldest file they had in their home directory. I switch laptops every three years, but thought it'd be an interesting exercise even if I don't typically respond to memes.

I thought it would be pretty easy to determine my oldest file using OS X's Spotlight. After a minute or two I realized Spotlight wasn't going to be much help so I dipped into my ninja command-line skills and attempted to use *nix's find, and ls commands. I was able to make some headway but wasn't too sure of my results so I followed links from Jehiah's post to Craig Rhodes' blog. Craig provides a Python script that seemed to do the trick (code and instructions on how to do this yourself are below). The absolute oldest file on my Macbook Pro is a font called Optim which was created on June 25, 1987. Yikes! Scrolling through the list of files (ordered by oldest first) there were tons of fonts which have probably been forgotten for ages.

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The brand new Nashville ColdFusion User Group Web site has launched! Here's an excerpt from my official announcement...

I am completely, unbelievably, indubitably, fantastically excited to announce and SHOW you the brand-spanking new Nashville ColdFusion User Group Web site!!

Launching a new Web site has been "in the works" in one way or another for over two years. Not long after I took over the group from Tony Bradshaw (January 2005) we all decided it was time for a new Web site and thus started a journey that took much longer than anyone anticipated. In some ways it's embarrassing how we didn't buckle down and just get the job done. But when I think of all the things that have taken place over the last three years, from the babies, job changes, contract and consultant work many of us do etc., I'm not too surprised. And after spending most of my waking hours over the last week working on the new site with J.J., I'm even less surprised.

Read the full announcement here:
http://www.ncfug.com/go/newsdetail/newsID/07876921-9A0A-C748-B5F4C4D2771267BA/

As of 23 minutes ago Adobe has officially released Flash Player 10. It's great to see the new player finally get released after being available in one alpha/beta form or another for over a year. Go get it while it's hot and read more on the release while you're at it.