This years Adobe MAX conference is happening in Chicago, September 30th - October 3th. Interesting to note is that there will finally be a European MAX conference this year in Barcelona, Spain.
With all the exciting technologies Adobe has lined up for this year I really look forward to attending!
(via Matt Chotin)
Flex Data Services is an interesting product slowly finding its way into the market place though I have to admit I haven’t gotten many project proposals in that want to go down this route yet.
There are obvious benefits to the technology particularly for those coming from a Java background and starting to use Flex (just look at the support for the Hibernate and Spring frameworks). We’re probably seeing the most Flex adoption coming from that side of the spectrum now, where a lot of Flash developers were already sold to the concept early on but had financial constraints prior to Flex 2 to work within.
This is just too good not to blog, Phillipe Geubels in Comedy Casino Cup. This guy is an absolute comedy genius! Probably won’t make all that much sense for those of you that don’t understand any Dutch though 
I’d be interested to hear what people have in mind when they get their hands on Apollo — over the last few weeks and months have been planning out some things I would like to do with it.
Roughly speaking I see Apollo apps break down into one of the following three categories.
I’ve had one of the Jaxtr engineers contact me a little while back but unfortunately lost their contact details so thought I’d blog some of my thoughts on a Jaxtr API that would allow you to use the voice mail service as a means for audio commenting on a blog.
Gotta love the idea! 
(via mattie)
I just got back from seeing Ben Forta’s sneak peek session on Scorpio in Brussels — and I can honestly say it rocks! Believe we were the first over in Europe to publicly see the demo’s and there’s some very very exciting stuff in there. I won’t spoil the fun by revealing everything we saw because Ben still has an upcoming user group tour in the US. Suffice to say there are really cool things happening with PDF, image manipulation and some other areas which you might not have expected ColdFusion to get into.
There is apparently going to be a public beta at some point and you can get signed up to be considered for the private beta via the Scorpio page on labs.adobe.com.
Twitter has rapidly become my new addiction — its a really cool way to stay in touch with friends and if you turn off text message notification and use something like twitterific I’ve found it is actually quite usable.
One thing I just don’t get is the AS2 and AS3 libraries they released, instead of simply parsing your RSS feed for messages it uses a JSON parser class. Talk about overhead — that doesn’t make any sense to me. This is one of those situations where they try to shoehorn an AJAX approach onto Flash. The example FLA that comes with the library also has code embedding your twitter username and password to get hold of your friends timeline.
While I understand they want to keep the example easy to read and understand, that’s not a smart move! How easy is it to decompile a SWF, get hold of account details and start spamming away?
If you need to do anything other than what the RSS feeds can get you, I’d really recommend using a server-side script to proxy the calls rather than running the risk of exposing your account details client-side.
Eric Dolecki has an interesting post up with his thoughts on Apollo and a perspective on developers coming from different backgrounds. It prompted me to share my thoughts on this evolution and how I see this new type of application impacting the end user.
In a way its been the constraints web developers have had to deal with for years that sparked innovation and forced us to look at alternative means of interacting with the user. AJAX is a good example of this, working around the page-refresh stateless model that is traditional HTTP in the browser, it has shaped people’s expectations of how to interact with web applications.
The guys over at BLITZ have a great tutorial up on Papervision3D — if you haven’t heard about this project before (where have you been?) its an open source high performance Flash 3D rendering engine currently supporting ASE and Collada formats, texture mapping and many more goodies.
Be sure to check out the demo’s and be amazed whats possible with Flash these days. Been getting my head around using Blender and doing some cool experiments with the Papervision3D beta which I’ll hopefully blog about soon.
I’ll also be sure to talk some more about Flash and 3D in the next episode of Skip Intro!
Read the tutorial: http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=93
(via Ivan Todorov)
