Mike Potter

September 27, 2005

LiveCycle User Group - Chicago

Well, the first LiveCycle user group meeting is set to go in Chicago, in October. Topics will include the LiveCycle roadmap and a presentation by CNA Insurance. Praveen Moturo, an Enterprise Architect in CNA's IT department will discuss the LiveCycle platform from a technical perspective, and discuss some of the challenges involved in deploying a LiveCycle solution. Afterwards, Adobe is opening up the office for a bit of an open house, and providing food and drinks to those attending. If you're in the Chicago area on October 20th, and want to find out more about LiveCycle, then you should register now.

I just finished the registration form for that event, and am happy to finally say that we're eating our own dogfood, or as I've heard others say, drinking our own champagne. The registration form is a PDF form created in LiveCycle Designer. For now, it simply emails dev_info the XML information from the form, but in the future it will submit the information directly into a database, using LiveCycle Forms. We're working on getting LC Forms rolled out for other forms that visitors fill out (like when downloading trial enterprise software), and will extend it with other forms as time goes on.

Finally, if you're interested in starting a user group meeting in your area for LiveCycle, then please contact dev_info@adobe.com. We have resources available to help you setup the event, and can provide food, drinks, software, speakers and prizes for you.

September 19, 2005

Adobe Enterprise Developer Program - Now Live

Well, the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program is now live. Individual developers can now subscribe to the AEDP for $1495 US per year, providing access to developer licenses of Adobe enterprise software (mainly LiveCycle and Acrobat) as well as one year of email developer support. This is the culmination of months of work, that included a list of Adobe employees that would probably fill up an Excel sheet. I'm sure we'll have a few hickups in the next day or so, but I'm really excited that the program I've been helping to build over the last 6 months is finally live.

As well, today I'm happy to announce the launch of the Adobe LiveCycle Developer portal at DevX.com. Mac, Darlene, Cyndy, Brian, Rosalind and all the others there have been really great to work with, and the articles and resources now give a great intro to LiveCycle. Its exciting to see the community of LiveCycle sites start to build out. We're not close to the size of other Adobe communities, but we're growing quickly and interest is certainly building.

The launch of the enterprise developer program finalizes a major aspect of our developer community. Last week I sent out the first email newsletter for enterprise developers (contact dev_info@adobe.com to subscribe), the forums are seeing more traffic now than ever before, and sites like the one at DevX.com will help us spread the word about LiveCycle to a larger developer audience than ever possible.

If you're interested in LiveCycle, or are working with it and want to contribute to the community, please contact us (the developer relations team) by email at dev_info@adobe.com. We're looking for developers to write articles, share code and give impressions of their experiences developing solutions with LiveCycle.

September 14, 2005

Legal Terms and Beta Software

In a follow up to John Nack's post about Google speaking plainly, I came across some surprising text on Microsoft.com today, when downloading their new Microsoft Codename Max program.

"Because this is beta software*, you might be wondering if it will destroy your computer, erase your data, or cause unnecessary stress. It won't, and here's why:"

"Can you just tell me the system requirements so I can decide for myself? Sure. Here they are:"

It sure is a refreshing change from the traditional two page EULA agreements that people need to read before downloading software (the EULA is still in the install). However, it does seem strange to come from a company that is hitting a mid-life crisis.

Having said that, I do think its better than the 2 1/2 screen legal agreement we have for people downloading Adobe LiveCycle samples.

I did really like the "We are not robots" and photo of the team on the page though. I think that Adobe would start doing more of that: showing off the people who are involved in the programs / software. It gives it more of a personal feeling, and you realize that in fact there are actual people helping develop software and programs, not just developers in front of computer screens all day.

As for the software, I found it pretty unimpressive. I don't know a lot of people in the Microsoft world, and others need to run Windows and Max in order to view your shared pictures. I'll sharing my photos over the web, where others only need a browser to view them.

There's probably a whole other post to be made about the expansion of distributing beta software, but I'll save that for another day.

September 06, 2005

About the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program

As I'm sure everyone noticed, today we announced the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, a yearly subscription program targetted at enterprise developers. If by chance you missed it (its 2 whole sentences in paragraph 8 on this press release, so I don't know how you didn't see it), I'm here to give you more details on what we're offering.

First, the date. You can order this subscription starting September 19th, 2005. You can't pre-order it.

Second, the cost. $1495 US per year. Per developer.

Third, the software. Access to individual developer licenses of all LiveCycle software. Access to pre-release software. Access to developer tools, like the Adobe LiveCycle Workflow SDK.

Fourth, the support. Unlimited e-mail or web based developer support for 1 year.

Finally, the community. We're still building it out, but we're growing. We've got developer centers for each product, where you can get technical information, forums for each product where you can interact with other developers and some Adobe employees, and we're building out events that we're attending, where you can meet us in person and learn more about LiveCycle.

If you've got any questions about the EDP, I'm happy to answer them. Simply post your questions as comments to this blog post.

September 01, 2005

Plug Designer into your favourite IDE

A very useful download was posted to the LiveCycle Developer Center the other day that I thought I should highlight. If you're doing LiveCycle development, specifically with LiveCycle Designer, you'll be happy to know that we've created 3 plug-ins for popular IDEs that will help you get your job done quicker.

The first plugin is for Rational Application Developer. It has been tested against RAD 6.0.0 and also works for RSA 6.0.0, and RWD 6.0.0.

The second plugin is for Eclipse. The plugin should work for version 3.0 and 3.1 of Eclipse.

And finally, the good people over at Ensemble Systems have created a LiveCycle Designer plugin for Visual Studio .NET.

The first two are available free of charge, the last one you'll need to buy from Ensemble, though they do have a free 30 day trial avialable. [Updated: With the launch of the developer program, we've now made these plugins available to members of the Enterprise Developer Program only.]

So, no matter which of those three IDEs you're using, you won't have to switch from Designer and back again. We'll do our best to continue to help build useful tools like this for enterprise developers.

Here are the links for downloading:

1. You can get the .zip files for the Eclipse and Rational plugin from the LiveCycle Designer Developer Center.

2. Visual Studio .NET Plugin (must buy from Ensemble)

I'm watching comments here, so post back if you have any problems with any of the plugins.