Mike Potter

September 29, 2006

Free Online eSeminars for Flex

There are a number of online seminars coming up relating to Flex. If you're new to Flex, you'll want to check out at least one of these sessions.  I believe they will be recorded, but if you catch it live you can get your questions answered immediately.

There are three sessions, with multiple dates and times available.  The sessions are:

Introduction to Flex 2
Tuesday, October 31, 2 - 3 PM ET

Introduction to Flex Builder 2
Tuesday, October 3, 2 - 3 PM ET and
Tuesday, November 14, 2 - 3 PM ET

Introduction to Flex Data Services
Tuesday, October 17, 2 - 3 PM ET and
Tuesday, November 28, 2 - 3 PM ET.

You can register online today, and registration is free.

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12:38 PM | Permalink | Comments [2]

September 26, 2006

We're looking for a University Student in Canada

Are you currently enrolled in a computer science or engineering program at a university in Canada? We're looking for volunteers to help co-ordinate events that we are planning at universities across Canada. The ideal candidate should have the following qualifications:

  • Is an active member of student population with strong communication skills
  • Is involved in extra-curricular university programs and / or be a member of student associations / committees
  • Understands technical concepts and stays current with emerging technologies
  • Proven experience and ability to create, maintain, and manage a blog
  • Demonstrates good time management skills and ability to work independently
  • Experience in planning and managing events is highly desirable
We're calling these positions "Adobe Ambassadors".  Here's a list of expected responsibilities:
  • Organizing student events that are open to all students and members of the faculty. The purpose of each event would be to educate and provide information to the attendees on Adobe’s current and emerging technologies. A budget will be provided to pay for costs associated with the event. One event per study term is expected, and the Ambassador will be responsible for all stages of planning and managing the event with collaboration from the Adobe Enterprise and Developer team.
  • The Ambassador will be given opportunities to present at the planned events, sometimes in conjunction with Adobe technical evangelists.
  • Become an Ambassador for Adobe’s products within the student body and provide valued feedback to the Adobe on how students and faculty use their technology in studies, and the user experience of using Adobe technology.
  • The Ambassador will work closely with the school’s student organization and be responsible for preparing and aid in advertising for any Adobe on-campus events.
  • The Adobe Ambassador will be the conduit of information between the university’s student population and Adobe. Regular on-going communication and feedback on the program in general is expected.
  • The Adobe Ambassador will maintain a blog, and will publish information on Adobe technologies, news and articles, information regarding upcoming events, and more.

The positions are currently open and available to students at the following universities in Canada. They are not available at any other university. We'll be expanding the program in the future, but we're limiting it to the following schools: University of British Columbia, Simon Frasier University, BC Institute of Technology (BCIT), University of Western Ontario, Waterloo University, University of Ottawa, Queen's University, University of Toronto, McMaster University and McGill University.

If you have any questions about the position, please post them in this blog.  If you would like to apply, please send your resume to adoberep@adobe.com.

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04:12 PM | Permalink | Comments [4]

September 22, 2006

LIveCycle Sessions at MAX

Are you a LiveCycle developer, looking for hands on sessions for LiveCycle, a preview of the upcoming LiveCycle 8 release, or wanting to meet Adobe employees on the LiveCycle team?

Or, are you someone who doesn't know much about LiveCycle and are wondering what all the excitement's about.

Either way, I've compiled a list of all the LiveCycle sessions at MAX. There are 11 sessions focussing on LiveCycle, all at different times throughout the week. (This Google Calendar shows you the times and dates of the sessions.)

Adobe MAX continues the tradition of Macromedia MAX conference: providing technical information to developers building solutions with Adobe technologies. While new to LiveCycle developers, I'm sure you won't want to miss this year's event.

As a LiveCycle developer, here are some highlights that you won't want to miss:

1. Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server. The new Adobe LiveCycle Policy Server will be unveiled, showcasing the ability to policy protect Microsoft Word documents, as well as Adobe PDF documents.
2. Meet the team. Matt Butler will be presenting a 3 hour session on LiveCycle, including a 30 minute panel session to allow developers to directly access members of the LiveCycle team and other key people.
3. LiveCycle 8. We'll be previewing LiveCycle 8 and discussing its architecture, showing where technologies like Flex and ColdFusion can fit in.
4. Hands on training. Hands on training for products like Adobe LiveCycle Designer, LiveCycle Forms and LiveCycle Workflow, with members of the LiveCycle team there to answer any questions you may have.

As well, I've pulled out some of the highlights of all the LiveCycle sessions and provided you with links to more info on the sessions below.

Hands on Deployment - Adobe LiveCycle Architecture: Matt Butler from Adobe will discuss the LiveCycle platform, including the architecture for the upcoming LiveCycle 8 release.

Adobe Core Security Architecture:Duane Nickull and Christoph Rooms, both from Adobe, explore the security models in Adobe products.

Adobe LiveCycle Forms: Everything you want to know: Anthony Rumsey from Adobe shows how to use LiveCycle Forms, and also how you can use LiveCycle Forms and Adobe Flex 2 together.

LiveCycle 8: What's coming: Sanga Viswanathan from Adobe previews the next release of LiveCycle.

LiveCycle Core Products, SDKs and APIs: Howard Treisman from Avoka Technologiescovers the LiveCycle products and the SDKs that are available for each.

LiveCycle Designer: Becoming Fluent: Mike Potter from Adobe gives a hands on, introductory course to LiveCycle Designer.

LiveCycle Workflow: Aggregating Resources and Services into Workflows: Christoph Rooms goes into detail on how to take LiveCycle services and form them into workflows. There will also be a deep dive into creating custom QPACs.

Form Submission, Routing, and Retrieval Using Adobe Flex and LiveCycle: Venkata Adidam and Kevin Ku from Adobe discuss a real world implementation of LiveCycle Workflow and its integration with a Flex RIA.

LiveCycle and Flex: Creating Flexible Promotions: David Liao and Pierre van Aswegen from Ensemble Systems show how to use LiveCycle to route customer information from various data sources into a single Flex RIA.

Solutions for Intelligent Dynamic Document Generation and Presentation David Strauss shows how to use Flex and LiveCycle together with a business rules engine to generate cutomzed applications and documents for customers.

Unleashing Digital Assets: Automating Worldwide Franchise Marketing Collateral with ID Server, Flex, and LiveCycle Mark Walter shows how ad agencies use InDesign Server to help their clients worldwide sales channels, and explains the potential role of Adobe LiveCycle within ad agency and marcom applications.

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September 19, 2006

Running LiveCycle Designer on a Mac and Linux

One of the most requested features that we have in the LiveCycle community is to run LiveCycle Designer on a Mac. Well, good news. You can now run LiveCycle Designer 7.1 on Intel based Macs, using CrossOver Mac from CodeWeavers. The following instructions will work with CrossOver Mac, as well as CrossOver Linux, for those of you wanting to run LiveCycle Designer on Linux.

This is completely unsupported. If you need help, please visit the Adobe LiveCycle Designer on Mac forum on adobeforums.com.

Here's how to get LiveCycle Designer on a Mac or Linux. Remember, the machine must be Intel based.  No PowerPCs allowed.

Install Crossover

  • Download the latest version of CrossOver for Mac or Linux from the CodeWeavers site. (Free trials available for both).
  • Install CrossOver onto your machine following the instructions they provide.

Install Designer

  • Download LiveCycle Designer 7.1. Either the free trial, the standalone install CD or as part of Acrobat.
  • NOTE: These instructions will not work for Designer 8.0.
  • If CrossOver is properly installed, you should get a desktop icon or menu item available
  • Open up CrossOver and choose to “Install Windows Software”
  • Once the installation wizard opens up, check the “Install unsupported software” checkbox.
  • Click “Next”
  • Choose “Other *.exe file”, and browse to find the executable install file of Designer. This depends on what you are installing: trial, standalone or as part of Acrobat, but the file should be called setup.exe. It may be in designer/AutoPlay/cdimage/install/setup.exe
  • Create a new bottle using a “win2000” template
  • Follow the windows installation wizard for Designer

Install Reader

  • Download Adobe Reader (free)
  • As with installing Designer, open up CrossOver and choose to “Install Windows Software”
  • Select “Install unsupported software”
  • Navigate to executable install file of Reader
  • Do NOT create a new bottle; choose to install into “Other bottle” and select the bottle where you have previously installed Designer
  • Follow the windows installation wizard for Reader

Install CrossOver HTML Engine

  • Open up CrossOver as before, and choose to “Install Windows Software”
  • When the wizard opens up, do not choose to “Install unsupported software”; this time, choose to install “CrossOver HTML engine” from the list Install in the same bottle that you installed Designer and Reader
There are a few known bugs, such as the help not working properly, but it should work.  Please provide feedback in the LiveCycle Designer for Mac forum.

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02:39 PM | Permalink | Comments [7]

September 18, 2006

Adobe and developers... We're getting there

Over the last several months, Adobe has made enormous progress with software developers. In the few short months since the Macromedia acquisition, we have released new products, opened access to SDKs and continued to create communities of open source software.

With today's announcement of Acrobat 8, you may have missed the fact that the Acrobat SDK is now free.  Previously available for a $99 membership, the Acrobat 8 SDK will be free (as in beer) when its released.  As well, all previous versions of the Acrobat SDK, including the existing Acrobat 7 SDK, are available for free.  Email Request_A7SDK@adobe.com for access to the Acobat 7.0.5 SDK or download the other SDKs.

Here are some other key developer activities in the past few months:
We released the Flex 2 product line, and the Flex 2 SDK, which is also free (as in beer).

We released two RIA SDKs: one for PHP developers and one for Ruby on Rails developers.  Both of those are free, as in speech.  Head to Google Code for the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe or the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK by Adobe.  Join the mailing list for either of them (PHP, Ruby), they're fairly active.

Free and open source ActionScript 3 libraries prodiving easy APIs to Flickr, Mappr, Odeo, YouTube and more.

The Flex / Ajax bridge is free and open source, allowing you to connect Flex and Ajax applications.

The Spry framework for Ajax was released on Labs with a BSD license, prodiving an early look at our Ajax framework.

opensource.adobe.com continued to release version of the Adobe Source Libraries, which are available to developers building cross platform applications.

We opened up access to XPAAJ so that ColdFusion and Flex developers can build PDF Forms based on LiveCycle technologies.  This removed a $1495 Adobe Enterprise Developer Program membership.

We expanded Adobe developer support to cover both LiveCycle and Flex developers.  Now, if you need support for either of those two products, a $1495 membership will give you one year of unlimited email support for Flex or LiveCycle. Get Flex developer support via the Adobe store or purchase LiveCycle developer support via the Adobe store.

I'd say that's not bad for our 9 months or so as a combined company.  Did I miss anything?

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01:43 PM | Permalink | Comments [6]

LiveCycle Barcoded Forms eSeminars Next Week

All next week, Lee Sutton from Adobe will be hosting free eseminars that discuss Adobe LiveCycle Barcoded Forms.  If you've seen any of my presentations on LiveCycle, you'll know that I think that Barcoded Forms is one of the coolest products in the LiveCycle family.  What Barcoded Forms (and 2-D barcodes in general) allow you to do is to encode all the information in a PDF form into an industry standard, 2-D barcode (the standard is named PDF417, but its not related to Adobe PDF documents), so that when the user snail mails their form back to your organization, the organization only needs to scan the barcode, rather than re-key the data by hand.

If your organization is manually re-keying data sent to you from customers, then you'll want to attend as many of these sessions as possible.

There are 5 sessions next week.  Click on the links to register for the session, as space is limited.

  1. Monday, 12:00 Noon ET:  Introduction to LiveCycle Barcoded Forms
  2. Tuesday, 12:00 Noon ET: Introduction to Adobe Acrobat and Barcoded Forms
  3. Wednesday, 12:00 Noon ET: Introduction to Adobe LiveCycle Designer and Barcoded Forms
  4. Thursday, 12:00 Noon ET: Best Practices of Barcoded Forms and PDF417 Barcodes
  5. Friday, 12:00 Noon ET: Adobe LiveCycle Barocded Forms and Adobe LiveCycle Reader Extensions

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10:05 AM | Permalink | Comments [1]

September 14, 2006

Cool and useful MAX resources

The excitement is starting to build for the MAX conference.  Here are a few that I've found most useful.

Of course, the registration and event page have more details on the event itself.  Feel free to add other useful URLs in the comments.

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10:19 AM | Permalink | No Comments

September 13, 2006

Adobe Gold Sponsor of Zend / PHP Conference

I'm happy to announce that Adobe will be sponsoring the Zend / PHP Conference and Expo in San Jose in late October.  I have a speaking session there on Rich Internet Applications, and we'll have a booth where we'll be showing off integrating Adobe Flex with PHP, using open source tools such as AMFPHP or WebORB from the Midnight Coders.

If you're planning on being in the San Jose area in October, you should consider attending the PHP conference.  There are only 2 days left to take advantage of the early-bird discount and save $200.


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11:30 AM | Permalink | Comments [3]

September 12, 2006

Attention PHP and Ruby on Rails Fans attending MAX

If you're developing a solution with Flex and either Ruby or PHP, I'd love to meet you at the MAX conference.  On Monday, October 23rd, Adobe is hosting MAXUP, a community based "unconference" at MAX in Las Vegas.  I think this would be a perfect time for these groups of people to get together, showcase what you're working on, and talk about the problems that you're facing.  We're working out the details of MAXUP, but if you're going to MAX, plan on arriving on the Sunday so that on Monday we can get together and showcase and talk about the work that's going on with Flex and languages other than Java and ColdFusion.

Use this blog entry to create an agenda for the day... Provide comments on speakers you'd like to hear from, topics you'd like to cover etc...

P.S.  Less than 2 weeks remain for you to register and get the early bird discount for MAX.  If you haven't registered yet, do so quickly (and book your plane trip soon as well!)

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12:54 PM | Permalink | Comments [4]

LiveCycle 7.2 Documentation

The Adobe documentation team today posted some PDF documentation files for the LiveCycle 7.2 release.  There is product documentation available for installing and configuring LiveCycle as well as LiveCycle Security products for JBoss, WebLogic and WebSphere.  I know that the documentation team is hard at work getting more documentation up on the web for LiveCycle, but this is likely a great help if you're building solutions with LiveCycle software.

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September 11, 2006

Create PDF from Flex Application using XPAAJ

Zee has just published a new tutorial (using Captivate) showing you how to take data from a Flex application, and then merge this with a PDF template to create a PDF document. This tutorial, part of his series on combining LiveCycle and Flex, uses the XPAAJ library (prounounced "xpage") that is available for use by existing Flex, ColdFusion and LiveCycle customers. The complete source code to his sample is available.

His great tutorial shows how to create a PDF form that will grow or shrink in size, depending on the amount of data that is attached to the form.  You can do this using Adobe LiveCycle Designer (free trial available), which allows you to create dynamic forms that will change based on the amount of data that is bound to the form.

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10:56 AM | Permalink | No Comments

Flex and Rails - Destined to be together?

Sometimes you go away on vacation for two days, and nothing big happens, and then other times you go away and things pile on, like last week.  I was away on Thursday and Friday, but work continued in the Flex and Ruby on Rails community.

First, Peter Armstrong released the first edition of a book he's working on called "Flexible Rails", which you can buy for $20 USD for individual users up to $200 USD for a 30 copy enterprise edition.  His blog post gives a look at the entire table of contents, and the code for all the samples in the book is also available.

While Peter was working on that, Derek Wischusen was updating the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK to include a new sample: Flex Paint.  Using a Flex interface, you can upload an image and draw simple lines on it.  Then, using a Ruby on Rails backend, you can save that image out to a .jpg file.  This builds on the that James Ward built, using a Java backend to save the image.  The code to that sample is available from the Subversion repository of the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK.  I will be updating the .zip download in the near future.  Join the RoR RIA SDK mailing list to keep up to date with all the discussions about Ruby on Rails and Flex working together.

Finally, word from the Midnight Coders that they've added support for native serialization of associations within active record models in WebORB on Rails. Very cool.

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10:02 AM | Permalink | No Comments

Adobe Consulting on Flex and LiveCycle

Steven Webster has a great post up on the combination of Flex and LiveCycle.  A worthwhile read for those LiveCycle developers wondering about the value of Flex, and for the Flex developers wondering what LiveCycle is all about. 


This introduction to LiveCycle (Breeze presentation) may be of interest if you're part of that group.  This introduction to developing with Flex (Breeze presentation) may be useful if you're wondering what Flex is all about.


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09:16 AM | Permalink | No Comments

September 05, 2006

Adobe LiveCycle at MAX - Google Calendar

I have added all the events for LiveCycle technologies at the MAX conference in this Google Calendar. Use this to plan out your LiveCycle Week at MAX. You can also download the calendar information in XML format or iCal format. Use this button to subscribe to the calendar using Google Calendar: .  If you haven't signed up for the MAX Conference and develop solutions with Adobe technologies, including LiveCycle or Flex, then what are you waiting for?  The LiveCycle line-up includes a ton of great content, including a sneak peak at LiveCycle 8, hands on sessions for LiveCycle Designer, Forms and Workflow, and several sessions from talented developers who have implemented LiveCycle in production environments. 

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03:03 PM | Permalink | No Comments

Announcing the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK by Adobe

Following a similar release to the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe that I announced last month, today I'm happy to announce that I'm releasing a similar project for those of you interested in Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex.  With the help of Derek Wischusen, who has written all the samples in the SDK, today I'm announcing the creation of an open source project to help Ruby on Rails developers get started with Adobe Flex.  The initial release of the SDK contains four samples, each with various degrees of complexity. 


The most complex sample makes use of the WebORB for Ruby on Rails software that the Midnight Coders released a few weeks ago.

If you're interested in Ruby on Rails and Adobe Flex, you can participate in our small but growing community by joining the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK mailing list and / or contributing to the project, currently hosted on Google Code. 

You can download the Ruby on Rails RIA SDK by Adobe (~4 MB) or you can check out the project on Google Code via Subversion.



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01:56 PM | Permalink | Comments [10]

XPAAJ for Intel Based Macs

Duane Nickull has a great blog post on using XPAAJ with Intel based Macs.  If you're interested in XPAAJ or LiveCycle and work on a Mac, this is a great tutorial for you.

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