Mike Potter

March 31, 2006

Want to know more about LiveCycle? Mark your calendar for May 3rd

Three LiveCycle Product Managers and myself are planning to do an online Breeze presentation showing three pieces of LiveCycle 7.1: Adobe LiveCycle Designer, Adobe LiveCycle Forms and Adobe LiveCycle Print, a new product to the LiveCycle family. The online Breeze presentation is scheduled for 3 hours, starting at 12:00 Noon ET, on May 3rd. If you develop software with LiveCycle, or are interested in learning more about the products, this is a great chance to meet the team. The Breeze presentation will be available online here, and will be recorded so you can view it later at your leisure. We are planning to spend 1/2 hour on each product, discussing what each does and what the changes are for LiveCycle 7.1, and then spend 1/2 hour answering any questions from visitors.

If you have other LiveCycle products that you're interested in, please let me know. I am also hoping to post a few introductions to LiveCycle Designer. I finished up my first one today, and am working with the web team to post it online.

Forms Fixed Now

I believe that we've fixed the problem that we had for some LiveCycle Forums now, so you should be able to post your questions there again. Sorry about that. BTW: We do have Adobe LiveCycle engineers in those forums, answering your questions, so if you've got questions, we've got people ready to answer them.

Some LiveCycle Forums Are Broken

I appear to have broken some of the LiveCycle forums at http://www.adobeforums.com/cgi-bin/webx?14@428.hsL0g1cSfwg.56@.3bbeda8d. Some forums allow posting new topics, but most do not. I'm working on getting this fixed today, sorry for the problems. Thanks to those of you who have notified me via postings in those forums or emails directly. Hopefully I'll have this solved sometime today. The forums do not appear to be respecting the permissions that are in them.

March 29, 2006

LiveCycle Designer Plugins Now Free

If you develop software with Adobe LiveCycle, you'll be interested to know that the LiveCycle Designer Plugins for Eclipse and Rational are now available for free. Yes, free, as in beer. Previously they were closed to members of the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program. If you read this blog regularly, you'll know that Ensemble made their Designer plugin for Visual Studio .NET available for free a few weeks ago. We committed to making our plugins available for free, its just taken this long to get the website up to date (they're super busy with redesigning the website for the next major version). If you're looking to get started with LiveCycle, the AEDP is still the best way to get started. You get unlimited support by email as well as access to individual developer licenses of LiveCycle software. The cost is $1495 per year per developer.

March 24, 2006

Some ideas for our Flex Developer Derby...

By now, you've probably heard about our Flex Developer Derby, which allows you to win a new Plasma TV and an XBox. But, you may be thinking to yourself, what can I possibly build? Well, this might be a good starting point... I've built a small HTML editor that saves the data locally. It uses the flash.net.ShareObject package, which allows you to save data to the users hard drive, similar to a cookie. Extending this to include the ability to save a number of "documents", as well as searching through those "documents" might be a good idea.

Also, feel free to use this sample to help with other saving of data. How about saving data from a Flickr search locally, so that I can see the photos without having to be online? Or an Amazon search, so I can add items to a shopping cart without having to be online? Or saving blog entries off-line, so I don't need to be online to read things. Just a few ideas for you.

Anyone out there, who isn't a developer, have a good idea for applications that people can build?

March 21, 2006

Flex 2 Released, Win a Plasma TV

Flex 2 was released to the Adobe labs website yesterday. Get it now and start building some cool applications. Yes, I said you should do that 2 months ago, but now you've got a reason... How does a new Plasma TV and an XBox 360 sound? Well, build something cool in one of the 6 categories for our Flex Developer Derby and you could win a new plasma TV, an XBox 360, and have your application showcased in our (big) booth at Java One in San Francisco.

Now, I'm pretty sure that's everything you need to build a compelling application right? Easy to use development software? Check. Software to develop a kick [butt] UI. Check, check, check and check. An incentive to develop. Check (note may not be the exact model)and check. Integration with AJAX and Flash / Flex? Check. Samples with code? Check.

The contest is only open to US and Canadian residents.

March 20, 2006

Mixing it up this week?

Microsoft is hosting some developers at Mix 06 this week, apparently most of them are loyal to Adobe products, at least according to his article. Something really bothered me, and it shows up later in said article: "Ovum's Rotibi said that Adobe is "not standing still" and is improving the interoperability between its products, although Microsoft, with its still-unreleased products, remains "one step ahead."" Can someone *please* explain to me how a company that has yet to release an actual product can be one step ahead of a company that has released Photoshop for 16 years now, Flash for 10 years and Flex for 2 or 3 years? Come on!

Shakespeare and ActionScript

Shall I compare this ActionScript code to this poem? Thou art more interesting and more structured. Rough code does shake the darling buds of May.

OK, I can't go on like that. Just check out the link. :)

Adobe MAX Conference

If you're developing solutions with Adobe software, then you should probably book off October 22nd to the 26th... That's when the first Adobe MAX conference will be taking place, in Las Vegas. MAX was the name of Macromedia's largest show, and it will be continuing this year in October. More details should be coming in the next little while.

Adobe LiveCycle Forums

I'm working on fixing up the LiveCycle Forums at http://www.adobeforums.com... We've now got a container that shows you all the LiveCycle forums, which really helps see what forums are available. I still think that we've got too many forums, and need your help.

Here's what I think we should have: 1 forum for general LiveCycle questions. Under that, one forum for each of the following products: LiveCycle Designer, LiveCycle Forms, LiveCycle Reader Extensions and LiveCycle Workflow. The other products would be handled in the overall LIveCycle forums, until they got to a number of posts per day and it became unmanageable.

What do you think of this? Something that needs to be done, or am I just looking for trouble in reorganizing the forums at this point?

March 17, 2006

Are you a student looking for a co-op position?

Are you a university student looking for a co-op job for the summer? Have you got great experience with Java, Flash and / or server technologies. If so, then Adobe Developer Relations is looking to hire you. Check out this job description, and then send your resume in. Feel free to post a comment to this blog if you send your resume in. I'll get your email from there, and then I'll be on the lookout for you.

Hey, is that an engineer in the Adobe forum?

If you've been following the Adobe forums lately, you've probably noticed something new... Namely more posts, a faster response, and higher quality answers. If you're wondering why, then the answer lies in the fact that Adobe LiveCycle engineers are now monitoring the forums on a regular basis, and contributing posts to them. You'll find most of them in forums such as Adobe LiveCycle Designer, Adobe LiveCycle Form Manager, Adobe LiveCycle Workflow, Adobe LiveCycle Workflow Designer. If you've got questions about LiveCycle, AdobeForums.com and start posting your questions. You should notice a quick response to your questions, which will help you develop better software with LiveCycle.

March 07, 2006

Ensemble's Designer Plugin for Visual Studio .NET Now Free

If you're working in a .NET environment and building applicaitons using Adobe LiveCycle, then today is your lucky day. Go out and buy a lottery ticket*. Seriously. And don't worry about the time off, because you'll save that time in development now that Ensemble Systems has made their .NET plugin for LiveCycle Designer available for free. No more switching between Designer and Visual Studio. One application can now be used to develop the forms and the services around your forms.

If you're just getting started with LiveCycle, you'd probably want to check out Ensemble's samples page as well, where they show you how to store comments to PDF documents using web services, as well as a .NET sample DVD store.

Finally, if you're developing LiveCycle solutions using J2EE and you haven't checked out Ensemble's Glider product, then you should. From their page, "With Glider you can now code, compile and debug J2EE applications like a regular Java program. This means that you can incrementally edit, build and test your enterprise applications, in a matter of seconds." No more deploying to an app server, reloading and waiting. Its a pretty amazing product, and a huge time saver for Java developers.

* Playing the lottery is a game of random chance. Getting Ensemble's plugin will not increase your chances of winning, but it will cut down the time for software development.

March 01, 2006

Curling and Flash Together?

As some of you know, I'm a big curling fan... Yes, the sport where people of all ages throw rocks down a sheet of ice and then use brooms to control the rock. In fact, I've even got a great website dedicated to curling that I run in my spare time. In any event, I love curling, and I'm loving Flash based applications, so what could be better than a Flash application that updates scores automatically so users don't have to constantly refresh the webpage. Thanks to the great people at the Canadian Curling Association, its now live. I bet they're saving a ton of money on bandwidth, sending only small XML files back and forth as opposed to entire page layouts.

Combining Adobe LiveCycle and Adobe ColdFusion

Yesterday we posted an interview with Allen Levine, to the LiveCycle Developer Center. In it, we talk to Allen about his work on integrating Adobe LiveCycle software with Adobe ColdFusion. There's also some sample files available that show how to call Adobe LiveCycle using ColdFusion components.

If you're unfamiliar with LiveCycle, then a Breeze presentation that I gave a few weeks ago may be of interest to you. You can get started with LiveCycle by joining the Adobe Enterprise Developer Program, at a cost of $1495 per year. Membership in that program includes 1 year of unlimited email support for developers, as well as access to the LiveCycle software.