Adobe is offering a free, full day of hands-on training for the new Flex 4 framework and Flex Builder 4 in Washington, D.C., on November 20. This training is designed to help experienced ColdFusion developers get started with building Flex 4 front ends to their ColdFusion applications, and will look at some of the new features in CF9 that make this easier. Twitter has it that our friend Adam Lehman will be TAing the DC session.

To sign up, go here: http://www.ce1.com/adobe/2009/flextrainingforcfdevelopers/

Just a reminder that our October meeting will be held on Wendesday, October 29 from Noon-1pm in W2205.

At this month's meeting, Nuri Cevik and I will go over some of the highlights from this year's Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles. From Flash and the iPhone to a peek in to some of Adobe's upcoming products (or what we expect will make it in to Adobe's upcoming products), we'll cover the keynotes, special sessions, and highlights from some of the more interesting conference sessions.

As promised, Adobe has posted recordings of all sessions from the just-completed MAX 2009 conference in Los Angeles online. It's not technically all sessions from the conference — hands-on and Bring Your Own Laptop labs weren't recorded (and having sat in a number of them, I'd say they'd make pretty bad recordings anyway).

If you follow the link above, and click on the "View Sessions" button, you'll be taken to the MAX 2009 Scheduler — the same app conference attendees used to schedule their sessions. All of the orange boxes in the scheduler are regular sessions which were recorded. Just click on the small filmstrip icon in any of the orange boxes to see the archive of that session.

Adobe announced today a really cool thing for the larger Adobe developer community: free, live, online access to the keynotes from Adobe MAX next week in Los Angeles. In addition to the keynotes, Adobe will also be posting the streams from three conference sessions each day. It's not quite clear how they'll be determining which are the "most popular" sessions, but whatever they decide, the point is that you get to see the two keynotes plus nine conference sessions for free.

After October 11, Adobe will post streams from all sessions at MAX. For free. (Well, all sessions except for the hands-on workshops, which wouldn't translate particularly well to a single camera video stream.)

Pretty good stuff, eh?

Adobe recently posted two new tools to their Labs Web site: Adobe Story, a tool for collaborative film/TV script editing, and Squiggly, a spell checking library for Flex 3-based applications (including AIR applications).

Story is interesting not just because it's built around the principle of collaboration during script development, but also because it appears to be the first in a new approach to end-to-end video production that Adobe is taking. Adobe has the tools to handle everything from "planning to playback," as they call it, but now they just need to figure out how to fit everything together. My guess is that the applications in the CS5 version of the Adobe Production collection is going to focus a lot on inter-app integration.

Squiggly will certainly be handy for anyone who does rich text editing in a Flex-based application, though there's no guarantee that this library will make it in to a production release. Adobe states that they are trying to guage the level of interest in such a library on the Labs page for the tool, so it may be that they don't ever take it beyond "Labs quality." There's a link to a demo of Squiggly on the Labs page for the tool, so you can see how it works without downloading a thing.

Extensions seemed to be a subject of particular interest at this month's user group meeting, so I thought I'd point out a new article that introduces you to building CF Builder extensions. "Building Extensions for Adobe ColdFusion Builder" is an article by Simon Free on Adobe's DevNet which walks you through the basics of an extension and, more specifically, how the IDE_config.xml is core to CF Builder extensions. There's coverage of UI elements and "wizards" within your extensions as well.

Just a reminder that our August meeting is tomorrow, August 21, from Noon-1pm in W2205. I'll be covering ColdFusion Builder, Adobe's new IDE for developing ColdFusion applications. All are welcome!

Hi Everyone,

Thanks for your participation to Today's meeting on ColdFusion ORM. Attached is the sample application that I presented and a copy of the presentation.

You can download a copy of CF 9 Public Beta @ http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion9/ .

Nuri

Just a reminder that our July meeting is tomorrow, July 22, from Noon-1pm in W2207. Nuri Cevik will be going over the new Object-Relational Mapping (ORM) features in ColdFusion 9. It's pretty powerful and handy stuff, with more features under the hood than you can shake a stick at! There will be handful of swag to give away as well.

As always, all are welcome!

The Online ColdFusion Meetup group will be hosting a two-hour presentation on ColdFusion 9 and ColdFusion Builder (aka "Bolt") on Monday, July 13 at noon Eastern.

While Adobe has been doing a CF9/CFBuilder user group tour event over the past few weeks, at each meeting they’ve shared more and different things. This event will be the capstone tour event, revealing all the features shared to this point, and more. Adobe ColdFusion Evangelist Terry Ryan says that he's going cover all the major new features of CF9 as well as the highlights of Bolt and that nothing about the products, still in development, will be held back.

http://www.meetup.com/coldfusionmeetup/calendar/10841349/

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!