David Tucker purchased a copy of ColdFusion for personal use with his own funds. He look at the alternatives, even free/cheap alternatives, and bought ColdFusion. And over on InsideRIA he tells why.

Occasionally, there are times when you need to give the user the heads up that closing the application could cause issues as there are processes currently running. This example shows an easy way to do this via the FABridge. Click the link below to run the sample. Warn On Close So, how does it work? Here are the [...]

ColdFusion 8 includes LiveCycle Data Services 2.5, and the instructions we've provided on getting CF to use the about-to-be-released LCDS 2.6 leave much to be desired. Joshua Rodgers has written a superb step-by-step post on getting this all working. [Via Ryan Stewart].

I previously mentioned the BBC adopting AIR for widgets, but this little nugget in the paidContent story is worth highlighting: "In October [the BBC] signed a technology deal with Adobe to adopt its Flash [for video]... finally axing Microsoft's WMV and Real's video formats in favour of embedded [Flash] video, causing video views to double."

Over the months I have tried numerous Twitter clients and few have survived my wrath. Twitter has for me largely taken over from email and IM for staying in touch with colleagues, family and friends. Working with the constraint of 140 characters also tends to make sure people get to the point which you don’t [...]

The BBC has been using Microsoft technologies for widgets that are used by "hundreds of thousands of users". And they have just publicly stated that they have dumped the Microsoft solution for an Adobe AIR one. paidContent has posted details, too.

The Flex 3 is already released but the guys at Adobe don’t waste their time. They already started to work on Flex 4 - codename Gumbo. The final release is planned for 2009 and the first beta for late 2008. The promises are: easy skinning improved states, effects and layout backward compatibility inline states For more see these links: http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+4 http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Enhanced+States+Syntax

Build, steal, buy, or borrow… These would be the four basic ways you can make your applications a reality, pretty much regardless of the language you develop in. Flash and Flex development is no different in this regard. Building will get you what you want, provided you have the skills to do it, but could take [...]

Here some of the best tutorials in the web about creating awesome product ads. If you works help your clients to get profit, you are ensuring that your work will be profitable too. Now let’s take a look the the tutorials: Read Tutorial Read Tutorial Read Tutorial Read Tutorial Read Tutorial

I woke up inside the echo chamber this morning with 1800 blog posts and news stories about google now being able to search swfs. My first reaction was a big yawwwn, I stopped putting my content in swfs almost a decade ago. Reading more about what’s going on, I see that they’ve developed [...]

Fantastic news for all users of Flash technology! Today Adobe announced that they are teaming up with major search engines such as Google and Yahoo to make Flash search-able. Adobe is providing Yahoo and Google with optimized Adobe® Flash® Player technology to enhance their ability to search the SWF file format and uncover information that [...]

Yahoo! Astra Flash / Flex Components are a very cool extra for the available sets of Flash and Flex components. They are easy to skin and lot’s of documentation is available too, so any developer can be able to extend the features of the ASTRA Components. So if you want to learn how to work [...]

Now that the source for the Flex SDK has been available for 3 months I've already seen plenty of folks taking advantage and building cool projects. But I believe there are probably plenty of people who would like to make some contributions and don't know where to start. JIRA to the rescue! We've set up a list of bugs that we think are perfect candidates for folks from the community to look into, just go find a bug that looks interesting and start fixing (put a comment in the bug to say you're looking into it).

Additionally we've got a little incentive program going! For every 3 patches that we accept, we'll buy an Adobe-related book for you off of your Amazon wish list. And for the first two people who submit 10 patches that we accept, we're going to pay for their MAX ticket!

Please check out the Flex 3 Contributions page for more information.

Adobe Reader 9 is now available!   You’ll want to grab this so you can take advantage of the very cool features that Acrobat 9 created PDFs contain (see my previous article) and to take advantage of the faster load time. Steve Gottwals, Sr. Product Manager at Adobe details the new features here. As I mentioned in [...]

There is a critical lack of understanding about the implications of different source code licenses in the Flash and Flex world. I've devoted quite a lot of time and energy to research and synthesize information on some of the most popular source code licenses being used in the Flash community today

The Flex SDK is open source, and the community is encouraged to submit code and fix bugs. And as an extra incentive to contribute bug fixes, the Flex SDK team is offering to buy books from your Amazon.com wish list, a book for each 3 bugs fixed. Details posted online.

For the first time in my professional history I’m blessed with co-workers that also know Flex (and Flash of course).

I’m thinking about a workable system to collaborate together with Flex Builder. It is possible to just edit together in the same Flex project (like we do with PHP projects), but Flex will build every time a file is saved (I know this can be turned off) which tells me there must be a better way.

 

It's my pleasure to welcome ace Flash developer and author of SE|PY, Alessandro Crugnola and his site sephiroth.it, to the Pistach.io Flash Pack in July. Buying an ad on the Pistach.io Flash Pack puts your ad on all of the following web sites: Alessandro Crugnola (sephiroth.it), Andre Michelle, Aral Balkan, Chad Udell, Flash Magazine, Grant [...]

It’s been a while since I’ve posted, but it’s not because I haven’t had anything new to write about. We’ve been working hard on Thermo and I had the pleasure of showing off a recent build at Flashbelt in Minneapolis a few weeks ago. One of the challenges I’ve had with blogging is that many of my projects can’t be talked about while they’re under development. Fortunately, these things don’t stay hidden forever!

One of the projects I worked on a while ago that I can now talk about is a new approach to more effectively search Flash based applications and content. We developed it in collaboration with Google and Yahoo. Google is in the process of rolling it out and Yahoo is committed to doing so in the near future.

To understand why a new approach is needed, let’s take a step back and examine how search engines work with basic web content today. During the indexing process, HTML and other well defined file formats are retrieved, parsed, and analyzed for content such as text, graphics, metadata, and most importantly links to other content. By traversing the set of links, the indexer can crawl the site and discover all of its content.

This works because HTML is a simple, declarative format that is easy to parse and understand. Or at least, that’s how HTML used to be! The declarative nature of HTML is important, because it means that you can look at a tag such as a link or heading and the format "declares" what it is. You don't have to run any code to understand it – you can tell just by looking at it.

The fact that SWF files are binary has led some people to conclude that this is why Flash is hard to index. However, this isn’t really the reason. Search engines can and index SWF files today.

What actually makes Flash hard to index is the same thing that makes AJAX applications hard to search, and that is that they don’t work like simple, easy to interpret HTML. You can't tell what they do just by looking at them. Rather, they are complex bodies of code that execute in the browser and do non-discoverable things such as calling out to web services and dynamically generating what the user sees.

In fact, this morning I was reading a report about what we’ve done on news.com, and some of the comments illustrated how pervasive the problem is even though they thought they were doing otherwise. The issue brought up was a simple one – how can Google and Yahoo even figure out what SWF file to load, since it's done with complex JavaScript? One commenter wrote: “Will Google and Yahoo parse everyone's different javascript technique to reveal where the .swf file (is)?”

This gets to the heart of the problem. Search engines can no longer figure out what’s happening simply by looking at the source code – they have to run it, whether it’s complex JavaScript to load a SWF, some XML, or other content, or the Flash application itself.

So what we’ve done is to enable the search engines to actually run the app just as an end user would. They can not only run it and see the information that’s displayed, including data dynamically loaded from the network, but can interact with it as well, pressing on buttons and links to interact with the app and explore all of is content.

To enable this we have created a special version of the Flash player that is designed to run on the server as part of the indexing process. As the code executes, there are special API that notify the search engine when something changes and that allow inspection of the textual and other data that would be displayed to the user.

There are other API that enumerate links and allow the indexer to instruct the player to simulate a “click” on various objects that are displayed. In this way, the indexer can navigate the running app.

What’s especially cool about this is that it doesn’t require any changes to the application code to enable it to be searched. It just works.

Of course, adding things such as deep-linking – exposing URL for distinct parts of a running app, will make searching content more effective, but it’s not required. This and other techniques will undoubtedly become important tools for optimizing how to most effectively expose Flash-based information to search engines.

I'm happy to announce that Adobe is sponsoring the Singularity web conference as a platinum sponsor. Our sponsorship agreement also gives Adobe global rights for venue sponsorship. A big thank-you to Kevin Lynch, David Mendels, Michelle Turner, and Ted Patrick who kindly gave me their support and encouragement from the earliest days. As global venue [...]