Category Archives: MAX

Here Early for MAX? Check Out the Bus!

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The final stop of the North American on AIR Bus Tour is tonight in Chicago in the shadow of the MAX conference tomorrow. If you’ve flow in early for MAX, it’s worth checking out. We’re all pretty relaxed now that the tour is over and so tonight is going to be a fun nostalgic celebration of the entire trip. There will be a few good AIR sessions and I’m even giving the keynote. We’ll have beer, video games and the team will be up for talking about anything (especially college football). It’s a great way to kick off MAX, so swing by and feel free to give me a call after I finish the keynote (267.250.9422). Brutally honest feedback is appreciated :) .

[tags]On AIR Bus Tour, MAX, Chicago, max2007[/tags]

MAX Birds of a Feather and Meet the Team Sessions (and Beer!)

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Ted has lined up some pretty cool Birds of a Feather (BOF) and Meet the Team (MTT) sessions at MAX. These are always great and the only downside is that we have a ton of sessions in each timeslot. I’ll probably try to bump between a few of them to meet people and see what’s going on. When I wasn’t working for Adobe, these were the best way to get in front of people and network. The added bonus this year is that there is an open bar and food for the whole thing so from 7:30 to 10:30 you can network, learn and drink. Rock on!

[tags]MAX2007[/tags]

MAX Session Breakdown

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There were some grumblings a little while back about there only 20 ColdFusion sessions offered at this years MAX in Las Vegas. I think MAX is a pretty good barometer of what the company thinks is important, and what they’re going to focus on in the near future. With that in mind, I wanted to see a break down of all the sessions by product and I’ve graphed the results for you here. Note that Flex Data Services and Flex are rolled into the same category, as are Acrobat 3D and Acrobat. I also didn’t pull Flash Video out of Flash. Here’s the result:

As you can see, Flex has a big, big showing. The number of LiveCycle sessions surprised me (I

Update:Damon Cooper has a list of CF sessions here

Here’s a text version in case the Graph is too hard to read:

  • Acrobat – 11 – 5.85%
  • Acrobat Reader – 2 – 1.06%
  • After Effects – 3 – 1.60%
  • Apollo – 4 – 2.13%
  • Authorware – 2 – 1.06%
  • Breeze – 11 – 5.85%
  • Captivate – 5 – 2.66%
  • ColdFusion – 29 – 15.43%
  • Contribute – 1 – 0.53%
  • Director – 1 – 0.53%
  • Dreamweaver – 9 – 4.79%
  • Fireworks – 3 – 1.06%
  • Flash – 19 – 10.11%
  • Flash Media Server – 5 – 2.66%
  • FlashLite – 12 – 6.38%
  • Flex – 34 – 18.09%
  • FrameMaker – 3 – 1.60%
  • Illustrator – 1 – 0.53%
  • InDesign Server – 1 – 0.53%
  • LiveCycle – 11 – 5.85%
  • Photoshop – 1 – 0.53%
  • Production Studio – 1 – 0.53%

Which ColdFusion Team Member Would Make the Best House Guest?

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Today during alternate happy hour Dan, Terry and I were talking about the prospect of MAX being in Philadelphia this year (under the auspice that they switch east/west). Because alternate happy hour consists of significant drinking and because the three of us rate pretty high on the geek scale, we ended up wondering which person on the ColdFusion team would make the best house guest.

The official question over at Terry’s blog is:

Which ColdFusion personality would you invite to sleep on your guest bed?

Head over and vote on the comments at his blog.

My vote goes to Mike Nimer. Mike seems like he can party pretty hard which is really the most important trait for a house guest.

MAX Wrapup: Flex, Flex, Flex

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Well, MAX is over and I’m sure that many, many people are going to be posting about their final thoughts on the conference. Luckily, this is a Flex blog, and Macromedia said a couple of things about Flex (sarcasm just doesn’t travel over the internet). In all seriousness, this was a fantastic conference for Flex developers. Macromedia has put a lot of their eggs in the Flex basket, and I think it’s going to pay off big time.

They started off the conference by announcing labs.macromedia.com which contained a public alpha for the Flex Builder. Everyone who was excited about Flex before but couldn’t afford the high price tag can now download the alpha and know that when the final version comes out, for less than $1000 they will be able to deploy Flex applications to anyone who has the Flash Player. As Kevin showed us, that is a significant population.

There were tons of Flex sessions including ActionScript 3, Layout and UI, Skinning , and my favorite, Enterprise Services. Christophe Coenraets was the presenter and in my mind he stole the show. When you buy the Flex Enterprise edition, you are going to be on the cutting edge of application development. The collaboration and data sharing features that will be built into the product are going to dramatically change how you think about building RIAs and the kinds of things you will want to accomplish.

I think it’s the beginning of a new era where collaboration will become a standard part of RIAs and where Flex 1.5 applications will look static and dated. Flex is well positioned to be the development tool of anyone who wants to create Web 2.0 applications. I can’t wait until next year.

I really enjoyed talking with all of the people who are creating Flex. I had a chance to talk to a lot of them during the “Meet the Zorn/Flex Team BOF” last night and they all seem very excited about the direction that Flex is going and how excited the people at the conference are.

If you haven’t tried out Flex, download it, work through the examples, and see how easy it is to build powerful RIAs.

Debugging Flex Applications

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I am sitting in the Debugging Flex Applications session with Dirk Eismann of richinternet.de fame. I really, really enjoyed the class and Dirk did a great job of going through the debugging tools in both Flex 1.5 and Flex 2.0. One of the places I don’t do a good job is debugging, and part of the reason is that I simply didn’t know what kinds of options were available for Flex debugging.

One of the cool things he showed us was his trace panel, which allows object introspection and unlike the FAST tool by Macromedia, runs as a standalone application.

My Revised MAX Schedule

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This MAX Schedule is really killing me. After Sho posted about the new sessions at MAX, I went ahead and redid my schedule. I wanted to take the Flex Security class, but the next generation Flash Communications Server class is one of the most important I plan on taking at MAX and so it came down to Flex Security or Next Generation Flex: UI and Layout. My job is all about UI and Layout, so that won the day. Sho also speaks pretty highly of NJ Jaramillo. I think it’s hard to beat “a combination UI designer / programming god” as a compliment so hopefully I can catch him after class and run some of our Learning Lab apps by him.

Day Start Time End Time Session Name
Mon 08:00 AM 09:00 AM Flex Frameworks: Cairngorm and More
Mon 09:15 AM 10:15 AM Architecting Flex Applications
Mon 01:30 PM 04:30 PM XD: Design Techniques and Best Practices for Building World-Class RIAs
Tue 08:00 AM 09:00 AM Debugging Flex Applications
Tue 09:15 AM 10:15 AM Next Generation ActionScript
Tue 01:30 PM 02:30 PM RIA Design Best Practices: Theory for Developers
Tue 02:45 PM 03:45 PM Next Generation Flex:UI and Layout
Tue 04:00 PM 05:00 PM RIA Design Best Practices: Implementation with Flex
Wed 09:00 AM 10:00 AM Integrating Flex and Flash Content with AJAX
Wed 10:15 AM 11:15 AM Using Next Generation Flash Communication Server
Wed 11:30 AM 12:30 PM Migrating Flex Applications from AS2 to Next Generation ActionScript
Wed 01:30 PM 02:30 PM Customizing Flex Applications: Styling, Skinning, and Beyond
Wed 02:45 PM 03:45 PM FINANCIAL: Using Flex to Develop an RIA for a UK Retail Bank