Can you believe it? Here we go, MAX 2008 is only 8 months away 
Let’s get a good jump on things and have you suggest sessions and speakers that you would like to see this year in any of our 3 locations (North America, Europe, Japan).
I’m hoping my role will be a little scaled down this year, but I already know that we’re planning some structure changes that I think will help the conference be even better than last year, and last year was great!
A little birdie has provided us a discount code for 360Flex Europe. Go register and use the code “adobelove” and you’ll get 10% off!
I’ve attended all 360Flex conferences in the US and they just keep getting better. There’s a ton of great things going on in Milan, so if you’re able to I’d go check it out!
We’re trying to get some substantial statistical data about Flex and ColdFusion developers and how you use our products. This helps us prioritize future development, understand our demographics, and highlight our strengths and shortcomings. We’d really appreciate it if you could take a few moments and fill out the survey (I think it will take you maybe 10 mins).
Note that for US and Canada (excluding Quebec) there is an optional sweepstakes you can join. I’m not actively promoting it as the reason to fill out the survey because it’s admittedly unfair to our many international developers, some of us actually voted against a sweepstakes to begin with, but since it exists, don’t want to hide from it.
You can take the survey here.
One application that we put out around the same time AIR launched is the Developer Desktop that’s part of the Adobe Developer Connection. It’s a great app that has different modules of functionality including a personalized view of of our JIRA bug system, a component exchange, and RSS reader.
We’re hoping to continue adding cool things to it, but it’s got some pretty exciting stuff now. Check out the ADC and go get the Developer Desktop!
Sprout is one of the companies that came out of stealth at DEMO recently and they have now introduced their public beta. Check out their site and you’ll see all sorts of cool examples of the kinds of widgets (or Sprouts) that folks are building. What’s especially cool to me is that the Builder is built in Flex and the Sprouts also are Flex-based (though I’m not sure how much of the framework the Sprouts themselves use).
And with Flex 3 being free and open source, Sprout is able to build this kind of hosted service that generates tons of Flex apps for free (though I think they chose to buy a few Flex Builder licenses to make it easier). Pretty sweet!
I was informed about a cool contest being run by the folks over at StrikeIron where they will provide a ton of real-time data about NCAA Men’s Basketball and you can provide cool applications using that data. All sorts of things like live scores, standings and schedules, stats, etc. are available.
The Adobe Technology Platform provides the ultimate set of tools for building cool apps that leverage data like this. I hope some folks will rise to the challenge!
Sorry non-U.S. folks, looks like a standard U.S. only contest 
Does your Flex app rely on a crossdomain file anywhere? Are you using sockets? Do you call out to JavaScript? If any of these hold, please make sure to review the Player 9 Security Update article which explains some upcoming changes that you may need to take into consideration. We try not to break existing content, but in this case there may be some changes you’ll need to make, primarily in your crossdomain settings.
Read the article for more info.
We are constantly on the lookout for developers who can contribute to the ever-growing product line at Adobe, especially folks who are experts at building on top of our own platforms like the Flash Player, Flex, Flash Media Server, etc. Make sure to keep an eye our on jobs site, and check out one current opening we have looking for help developing media components (e.g., super-cool video playback).
