Just a reminder that our June meeting on "Audio Editing Techniques" will be tomorrow, Thursday, June 25 from 12:30-1:30pm. Charles Jamison is back to cover more audio production techniques using both Adobe and non-Adobe tools for quick and quality audio production. There will be the usual Adobe swag, books, and maybe something extra!

Ben Forta has posted some simple, great examples of the new spreadsheet manipulation functionality in ColdFusion 9. There have always been workarounds to creating and manipulating Excel files in CF, but the new <cfspreadsheet> tag makes it really easy to work with data from Excel and export data to Excel.  There's a lot more to the tag than what is in Ben's post, but it's a fine example to get you started!

Adobe has been really busy this past week! In addition to the launch of the Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst betas, and the launch of Adobe Presentations beta, Adobe yesterday announced the availability of the beta of BrowserLab (code-named "Meer Meer").

BrowserLab lets you see what your Web pages look like in a variety of browsers on both the Mac and Windows platforms. Everything is done inside of your Web browser and everything is rendered as part of a Flex application. BrowserLab currently only supports Firefox 2 and 3 on Windows, IE 6 and 7 on Windows, Firefox 3 on the Mac and Safari 3 on the Mac. One would expect that additional browsers (eg; IE 8) will be supported soon.

BrowserLab currently supports previewing of public Web pages only. That is, if the page requires a login, BrowserLab can't access it. Additionally, if you develop on your desktop, you need to be using Dreamweaver CS4 (and a couple add-ins provided by Adobe) to see your locally developed content in BrowserLab. That's kind of a bummer for those of us who don't use Dreamweaver CS4 (or Dreamweaver at all).

BrowserLab is currently free, but the expectation is that once it comes out of beta, a fee will be required for the service.

On Monday, Adobe posted betas of both Flash Builder 4 (formerly Flex Builder) and Flash Catalyst to labs.adobe.com. There are tons of new features in Flash Builder 4 (including support for the entirely new component model of Flex 4), and Catalyst is Adobe's new designer tool for rapidly creating Flex-based front ends. If you haven't tried out Catalyst, it's definitely worth checking out!

Inside RIA has an under-the-hood look at Strobe, the new framework from Adobe and quite a few industry partners for standardizing the way Flash video players are built and request content to play back. The official Adobe page for Strobe can be found here.

If Strobe gets wide adoption (and it probably will, at least from content distribution networks and anyone who's following the Open Video Player project), implementing Strobe will become the de facto way that Flash video players are expected to be built.

A few months ago, when we demoed some of the new features in Creative Suite 4, there were a lot of questions about InContext -- the in-page editing service from Adobe. Adobe today released a new version of the InContext service. InContext lets you set locked and editable regions of a Web page, and clients (or others authorized to update the pages) can update the content of those pages right within the Web browser. A Flex app launches which reads the Dreamweaver-based templates and determines what's editable and what is not.

For designers building small-to-medium sites, InContext looks like a really slick way to let clients update pages all on their own. The service is currently free, but I'm sure we'll eventually see a subscription fee attached to the service.

If you happen to use InContext, please let me know! I'm very interested in hearing your experiences with it.

The Flex team released the Flex SDK 3.3 yesterday, which is largely a bug-fix release for the SDK (and really doesn't have much to do with Flex Builder). The full release notes are here, including the list of known bugs that persist in the SDK.

The new 3.3 SDK does require a new version of the Data Visualization Components. Complete instructions for updating the components are on the release notes page.

Adobe is delighted to offer JHAUG members special pricing on Adobe software. Place your order before March 2, 2009, in order to save 20% on all Adobe products in the North America online Adobe Store.

Here are the simple steps required to get your discount:
1) Visit http://www.adobe.com/go/cspartners and fill out the form. You must enter the Association Name AUG and the Member Number 72360 when filling out the form.
2) A custom Adobe Store URL with an embedded coupon code will be e-mailed to you.
3) The custom URL can be used only one time, and only by the requester. Additional program terms and conditions are detailed at the URL referenced above.

If you have additional questions or would prefer to place your order by phone, contact Adobe at 800-585-0774.

Remember that you can also buy from the Adobe Education Store. However, you cannot combine discounts — you can use this discount or the education store discount, but not both at the same time. Keep in mind also that there are restrictions on purchases from the Adobe Education Store which do not apply in the regular North America online Adobe Store.

Ted Patrick and his team are getting ever closer to getting all the sessions from MAX 2008 online. They just added 50 more sessions, on a wide range of topics. All the sessions are available via Adobe TV.