Mike Potter

October 24, 2006

Morning Keynote at MAX

Tuesday morning in Las Vegas brought a great keyonte presentation from Kevin Lynch, Shantanu and others.  First off, the Blue Man Group performed for 15 minutes or so, getting the crowd pumped up.  Shantanu then gave an overview of the past year, showing some video of Adobe and Macromedia customers talking about the two companies joining.  The show then continued on, with Adobe employees showing off new features in Photoshop, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Flash and more. Ben Forta showed new features in ColdFusion, and also new features in LiveCycle Designer and Acrobat, as well as some new features for the LiveCycle server products.

Kevin finished the demo by showing some Apollo demos, including some work that my group has been doing lately with eBay.  An eBay Apollo application was shown, and this was built using the open source eBay libraries that we've been working on lately.  We'll be working on making those libraries available in the next few days or so.

After that it was off to my first session teaching users LiveCycle Designer. A few problems getting started, but for the most part thing went fairly smoothly.  One more session today, then one on Wednesday and another on Thursday.

Photos and videos from the keynote to come, as soon as I get a chance to download the photos.

technorati tags:adobemax06, max06, adobemax, adobe, lasvegas, apollo, ebay

October 23, 2006

Hello from Max in Las Vegas

Adobe MAX is well underway here in Las Vegas. Day 1 brought a few surprises with the ActionScript and Flex posters, but we managed to find them and hand out a few dozen throughout the day. I've been practicing my session for the next few days, working on my presentations and walking through the tutorial to make sure it still works with the latest version of LiveCycle Designer (no worries, it does).

I'm looking forward to the keynote presentation tomorrow. Ben Forta told me that the first 10 minutes of the keynote are going to be something that you won't want to miss. If you're in Vegas, then you may want to take it easy tonight... Head to bed around 5 AM so that you can make the keynote without any problems. :)

Its great to meet so many people here, people who I've been working with over the past few months yet never met, and others who I've worked with for a while and haven't seen in a few months, including some team.

I'll post more tomorrow, including some photos, after the keynotes, my presentation and a few hours at the MAXUP unconference.

October 19, 2006

IE 7 Uninstalling Debug Version of Flash Player?

I've heard reports that Internet Explorer 7 is overwriting the debug version of the Flash Player that comes with Adobe Flex Builder. To re-install the debug version of Flash Player 9, do the following.
1. Uninstall Flash Player. Read this technote entry on how to do that.
2. Re-install the debug version of Flash Player, by running the appropriate file in C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 2\Player\debug\
If you installed the plugin version of Flex Builder, the above directory will be C:\Progarm Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 2 Plug-in\Player\debug\
The ActiveX control gets installed from Install Flash Player 9 AX.exe. Install Flash Player 9.exe will re-install the plugin for other browsers.

MAXUP Reminder

Ted Patrick is continuing planning work for the MAXUP get together next week in Las Vegas.  If you're attending MAX and have some spare time, or just want to hang out, showcase some demos, talk to other developers who are working on similar projects, then check out the MAXUP barcamp page, add yourself as an attendee (its a wiki, you can edit the page yourself), let Ted know via the Yahoo Group that he's setup, and then think about how you're going to participate.

MAXUP is what's known as an "unconference" or a community get together.  The one rule is that you must participate: there's no sitting around and listening.  Showcase your work, demo things that you're working on, ask questions, argue about Mac vs. Windows etc...

You can get more details on MAXUP here, here and here.

technorati tags:adobe, adobemax06, maxup

My MAX Schedule

I've seen a few posts about this from others... Here's my MAX schedule:

Arrive Sunday, 2:30 PM or so. Check out Casinos.
Monday: MAXUP for most of the day, and working on my presentation from 9:30 to 10:30. Monday evening, welcome reception.
Tuesday: Hands on Designer Course, presenting. 10:30 - Noon. Check out the Flex and LiveCycle booth in the afternoon. Hands on Designer Course, 3:30 - 5. MAXUP during break time.
Wednesday: Hands on Designer Course, 10:30 - Noon. Work in the Flex booth, 2:30 - 4 PM.
Thursday: Work in the Flex booth, 7:00 AM - 9:00 AM (is anyone really going to be at the booth at 7 AM?) MAXUP during the day, present Hands on Designer Course, 3:30 - 5 PM.

October 18, 2006

Flex and Ajax Working Together

The team over at Nitobi, world leaders in enterprise Ajax components, have put together a great demo showing Flex working side by side with their Ajax components.  Dave Johnson blogs about the demo, which shows a Flex graph being populated with data using the Flex / Ajax bridge.  Under the hood, they're using PHP and MySQL to provide the data for the grids and the charts.  They've also got a nice article up on how they built the demo.

technorati tags:flex, ajax, fabridge

October 13, 2006

Try Adobe LiveCycle Software for Free

Today we have opened up access to two major parts of the LiveCycle family. First of all, we have removed a lengthy form that was required to download Adobe LiveCycle Designer. Instead, you can now login with your Adobe ID and download LiveCycle Designer, without having to fill out any form at all.

Secondly, we've opened up access to the Adobe LiveCycle Toolbox, which runs on Windows only, using MySQL as the database and JBoss as the application server. This single download allows you to try Adobe LiveCycle without committing to the $1495 Adobe Enterprise Developer Program (which is still your best bet if you want access to unlimited email based support!). Do you have a business process that you'd like to automate with PDF documents? You've now got free access to the tools that you require to build your solution. When you're ready to move to a staging environment or production, you can contact Adobe for the appropriate licenses required.

In the future we'll be creating more tutorials and getting started guides that will be posted on the Adobe LiveCycle developer center. For now, I think developers pretty well off, with free access to the LiveCycle Toolbox, LiveCycle Designer (trial), XPAAJ, Flex Builder (trial), Flex Data Services, Flex SDK, Flash Media Server (oh, you missed that news?), the Acrobat SDK, and ColdFusion. If I've missed anything, you can probably download it here.

technorati tags:livecycle, adobe, livecycledesigner

October 04, 2006

Using Flex to browse a MySQL database using PHP - Updated PHP SDK

I have created a sample Flex application that lets you browse your MySQL databases and allows you to do simple filtering on that data. The application is part of the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe that I've updated today. It also includes some new samples and libraries, mostly done by community members. Pete Mackie contributed a sample using the WebORB for PHP library which is in the samples/flex/simple_weborb_php directory. The Weborb for PHP library is now also included in the SDK, under the libraries/weborb directory.

The Flex MySQL browser is not meant to be a replacement for PHPMyAdmin, but I find it faster for browsing data. PHPMyAdmin does much more than this simple application, but if you're looking for a piece of information in a database, you may find it faster to use tthis Flex application.

If you would like to extend the Flex MySQL browser, you can join the Google Code group for the PHP RIA SDK by Adobe and / or the Flex / PHP mailing list at Google Groups.

I'll be showing off this and more at the Zend / PHP Conference later this month in October.

Please post issues with the SDK in this blog.

October 03, 2006

Adobe XPAAJ SDK updated to include ColdFusion samples

Great news for all you ColdFusion developers.  We have added ColdFusion samples to the XPAAJ SDK.  The work was done by Sterling Ledet, who runs a Adobe training centers across the United States.  Check out his company's site if you're interested in hands-on training for Adobe products, including historical Macromedia products.

What's XPAAJ?  From the developer center page, "its a Java API that helps Java developers to build applications that work with PDF documents and forms. It can extract data from a PDF file programmatically and combine XML data with blank PDF forms. You can incorporate XPAAJ into standalone Java applications or deploy it into either a Web container or an application server container."  We need to add the ColdFusion connection in there now.

Here's the updated .zip file that includes the CFM samples and here's the developer center page that outlines what's included in the .zip file.

Ben Forta has done some preliminary work with XPAAJ as well, you should check out his blog entry on XPAAJ here.

Duane Nickull has XPAAJ working on a MacBook Pro, if you're interested in running XPAAJ on an Intel Mac.

Be aware that in order to use XPAAJ, you need to have an enterprise license of ColdFusion, Flex Data Services or Adobe LiveCycle.  Be sure to read the EULA before downloading the software.

technorati tags:adobe, livecycle, xpaaj, coldfusion