Monthly Archives: July 2009

Public Betas of ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder

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The evangelists have been busy the past month showing off the new features of ColdFusion 9 “Centaur” and ColdFusion Builder during the user group tour and I’m happy to be able to tell everyone that both are now available in public beta on labs. Terry Ryan, Ben, and Adam Lehman all have good writeups of things so I’ll run down a few of my favorite features.

coldfusion_server_logoColdFusion 9 “Centaur”

  • Microsoft Office Integration – With CF 9 you can generate and read from native Office formats like Excel, PowerPoint and Word. The best part? We’ve now got a cfshareportint that is as easy to use as our hooks into Exchange and Active Directory. Making Flex front ends for SharePoint has never been so easy.
  • Scripting Support – As more of a “scripter” than a “tagger” I’m happy to be able to say that you can now use CFSCRIPT for anything in the ColdFusion language. If you don’t want to use tags, you don’t have to.
  • ColdFusion as a Service – My favorite feature bar none, and one I did an AdobeTV episode on (below). You can take some of the great CF tags like cfmail, cfpop, and cfdocument and use them right inside of your Flex application without writing any ColdFusion code.

cf_builder_logoColdFusion Builder “Bolt”

  • Extendable extensions – The CF Builder team has made it really easy to add code generation and other features to the IDE just by writing some CFML. So you can make additions to the IDE just by using some ColdFusion.
  • Server Management – You can manage your servers right from within the IDE. Kind of a handy feature.

So enjoy the new features! ColdFusion Builder plugs nicely in with Flash Builder 4, so you can get your full public beta on with some great Flex/ColdFusion integration.

Are you getMicrophone()ing?

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getmicrophone_logoThis is long, long overdue but the venerable Chuck Freedman has started a site called getMicrophone() for all things related to Flash and the microphone as an input device. This goes really nicely with Chuck’s work at Ribbit and I think it comes at a time when the Microphone is going to become more important to Flash developers. For one, it’s another area that the Flash Player leads Silverlight. Also, as Adobe pushes for more support for gaming as well as tools like Adobe Flash Collaboration Service, the microphone is as important as the mic and the keyboard. Not to mention other things that may be coming down the pipeline.

So if you haven’t seen it, it’s worth checking out. And make sure to bug Chuck to update it some more. Or even better, offer to contribute some tips and tricks!

Google’s Chrome OS, Netbooks, and Rich Internet Applications

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The big news of the night is that Google is building an operating system (no, not Android) that’s based on Chrome. I’m not entirely sure of all of the details but I think it’s cool at first glance. It sounds like it’s going to be designed initially for netbooks and I like how they describe the OS:

Speed, simplicity and security are the key aspects of Google Chrome OS. We’re designing the OS to be fast and lightweight, to start up and get you onto the web in a few seconds. The user interface is minimal to stay out of your way, and most of the user experience takes place on the web. And as we did for the Google Chrome browser, we are going back to the basics and completely redesigning the underlying security architecture of the OS so that users don’t have to deal with viruses, malware and security updates. It should just work.

I think Google gets it: Netbooks are going to be huge and they’re going to be a place where the web can “beat” the desktop. In a lot of ways they’re the perfect combination for the next generation of the web. The devices are small, portable, probably going to be connected most of the time, and have memory and resource requirements that require an optimized experience. I love Windows 7 and think it’s beautiful, but I do wonder how well it will run on netbooks. Microsoft seems tepid in how much it’s going to support or encourage netbook use.

Netbooks: A Boon for Rich Internet Applications
But people moving to the web-centric netbook experience are going to want a close approximation to the desktop environment. User experience is still going to be important on these small devices. We’ve seen how important a great user experience is (and how much of a selling point it is) with the iPhone. Google is a lot of good things but they aren’t user experience gurus and they don’t get design.

So what fills the gap? If only we had a good, lightweight layer for this new operating system that could play video, support games, enable real time communication, and let developers create beautiful user interfaces that felt like desktop applications with a much smaller footprint. Oh wait, we do, it’s the next generation of rich Internet application technologies like Flash and Silverlight.

Isn’t the netbook: a hybrid mobile and PC device, the perfect fit for RIAs: hybrid web and desktop technologies? You get the audio/video aspect, a framework for building very rich user interfaces, real-time web connectivity, and an existing ecosystem of developers and designers. All in a small package that’s meant to run with less resources than a full operating system requires.

I think netbooks are going to be a big deal for RIA developers. I think it’s a large addressable market and things like Adobe’s work with ARM to optimize Flash for their chipset are going to pay performance dividends in a big way. Throw in the cross-platform aspect and you’ve got the perfect way to build applications for a hybrid web-desktop-mobile device like the netbook.

Pooneekay Vatsoom Ahdtuih

Adobe’s Week Off Was Great

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As some people saw (and commented way too much on) Adobe was on break last week. Some people did construction work and some of us did less productive but more relaxing things. We’ve got 4 of these scheduled, so there are 2 down and 2 more to go. At first I was bummed at having a “forced” vacation but it turns out that having everyone at the company gone is a great way to really disconnect. My email load was way down and I took the week to myself. I ended up doing some hiking and climbing Mt. Hood for my second mountaineering trip of the summer (hopefully Baker and Sahale later). It was a great week and if you’re waiting for an email from me, I apologize. I’m getting up to speed this week but may still be a bit slow. Below are a couple of videos from the Hood trip. If any of you are in Seattle and want to go for a hike or a trip, make sure to let me know you’re in town. I’m happy to drive and tag along.

Pooneekay Vatsoom Ahdtuih

The “Flashy” future of TV

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Robert Scoble stopped by Adobe and talked to Anup Murarka about our Flash on TV initiative. It’s a pretty good video and it’s nice to be able to see the demo working. Aside from the video implication for anyone using Flash Media Server and Flash video, this is also going to be fun for developers who want to create games, content, or widgets for the living room.

Some of the cool technical stuff is that the digital living room player is smart enough to offload the graphical processing to chips inside of the TV that are specifically meant to handle high definition video so the footprint of the player itself is smaller and you’re not trying to push a bunch of HD video through the software.

Tweetdeck One Year Later

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There’s a good interview with Iain Dodsworth, the creator of TweetDeck, over on Louis Gray’s blog. Louis was one of the first people to discover and talk about TweetDeck and decided to chat with Iain a year later about how things are going. TweetDeck is still the Twitter client I use the most and provides me the most flexibility in searches and groups. During the interview there were a couple of AIR-related thoughts from Iain that I thought were worth sharing:

Louis: What made you decide to develop TweetDeck? You certainly went a different way with your product than others did, using the multi-column format, integrating Summize, groups, etc? What drove its initial feature set and had you choose the AIR platform?

Iain: …. AIR was an easy decision at the time – I had already been developing applications in Flex for financial institutions in London and there was no quicker way for a one man team to develop an application cross-platform.

Louis: TweetDeck, while popular, has also highlighted issues on Twitter’s end, especially around the service’s API limits. Also, the product has been a notorious memory hog and can take a good share of processing power. How are you working to reduce the demands taken on power users’ desktops, and how have you found working with Twitter and their API team, as they recently upped the API accesses users could hit per hour from 100 to 150?

Iain: I have worked very closely with Adobe to make improvements to the TweetDeck codebase and to work around various AIR/Flex issues. CPU & memory usage is an ongoing area for improvement and can sometimes be a bit of an art-form but we are getting there and the current version is a marked improvement over previous versions.

We’re always working (both on the actual runtime and with developers) to make sure that the AIR experience is better. I know the AIR team has been helped tremendously by Iain and all of the TweetDeck users. So congrats on a year Iain and thanks for helping make AIR a success.