New Flex Books Alert! May 25, 2007
Posted by therush in Adobe, Flex.2 comments
Hello World,
Within the past month two new Flex books were released; Programming Flex 2 and Professional Adobe Flex 2 .
I ordered and picked up the Programming Flex 2 book from my local Borders Books a few weeks back. I’ve been carrying it with me wherever I go. I have since read through the entire book and then some. I found it to be an excellent foundational book on Flex 2 programming. They went into topics that some of the other books just didn’t cover such as Skinning and Debugging. The book even covers the Runtime CSS that was released with version 2.01. My only complaint about the book is that I still am unable to find the source code for the examples in the book. Hey Chafic and Joey, if you’re reading this where can I find the download for the book’s examples?
The next book, Professional Adobe Flex 2, I just picked up this morning from my local Barnes and Noble. I haven’t had time to read through it but after scanning through the book I was very impressed. This book seems to be really for the Flex 2 professional. Again I saw topics covered in this book that wasn’t found in any of the other books such as Flex Printing, Advance Charting, and Using the Cairngorm Framework. I can’t wait until I get a chance to dive into this one.
I have a habit of judging the publics acceptance of a new technology by the number of books I can find about the technology in the bookstore. Whenever I visit the local bookstores (about twice a week) I always look in the Computers section to see what new technology books are out, which technology books are still on the shelves, which one are no longer being carried by the bookstore, and how up-to-date the books are. I’m glad to say that I can still find a bookstore that carries up-to-date books on Flex 2, ColdFusion 7, and Flash (I saw the first Flash CS3 book on the shelve).
Call me ol’ skool (or a geek) but I like to have professionally bound, soft cover copy of a book in my hand when I want to read. So guys, keep writing and putting out those books and I’ll keep buying them. I just plant a couple of trees for book I buy.
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“The highly anticipated upcoming release of the 8th version of ColdFusion” May 16, 2007
Posted by therush in Adobe, ColdFusion.add a comment
Hello World,
The title of this post is a quote from Tim Buntel, made at the UseAdobe User Group earlier tonight. It was a rather funny response to the fact that Scorpio is an internal beta name and ColdFusion 8 has not yet been released. So what do you call it?
Another successful stop of the What’s New in ColdFusion “Scorpio” Tour just wrapped up at the Adobe User Group hosted by Fig Leaf Software in Washington DC. The house was full and there were a lot of excited people in attendance.
I arrived just in time to get the last t-shirt waiting in the lobby. It was a white t-shirt with the Scorpio logo on the front. I found my seat towards the front of the room and looked around to see many familiar faces. At times it almost feels like a reunion of sorts. You see those you met at other meetings and you talk about what’s been going on since ” the last time”. As I looked to the front I was suprised to see none other than Tim Buntel in the presenters area. I though to myself, “where’s Ben” but soon decided that having Tim present was more than an acceptable substitute. We were later told that Ben was on his way, somewhere between PA and DC.
The presentation began with the usual disclaimer. It went in one ear and out the other as I waited patiently for Tim to get to the “meat and potatoes”. He ran through the usual slides. I say that because I’ve seen this presentation done earlier in an online presentation format. However there’s nothing quite like seeing it done live. He went into depth about a lot of really exiting new features of the product. In fact I haven’t been so excited about this new release since … well since I started using ColdFusion (version 4). Here are a few of my thoughts on some of the more exciting features:
“The Rich Text Editor uses the FCK Editor and it is completely extensible!”
“CFWindows are sooo cool. You can create multiple, draggable DHTML based windows containing …. whatever!”
“The CFAjaxProxy is got to be the easiest ColdFusion/Ajax implementation. It will support the sending and receiving of all the ColdFusion/Javascript data types! Good bye CFCAjax!”
“I can dynamically build Adobe Connect like presentations that communicate with the server at runtime! Online education has never been so cool!”
8:05pm … Ben Forta arrives … now the fun begins.
Tim and Ben, and let’s not forget Adam Lehman on demos, tag-teamed during the remainder of the presentation. It was like magic, only this was for real.
The meeting came to an end to quickly, prizes were awarded, and mugs were given out. People wandered up to the front to ask questions and say their good-byes. It was hard for me to leave as I stood by listening to the various conversations going on but at the same time I wanted to get back home as quickly as I can and explore some of those features talked about in the presentation.
Until next time (CFUnited, Adobe Max, etc) save some pizza for me.
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CS3 Product Trial Download Now Available May 13, 2007
Posted by therush in Adobe.6 comments
Hello World,
Adobe has finally made available several of their CS3 products as downloadable trials. You can now go to the following address,
http://www.adobe.com/downloads/
to select which products you would like to test for yourself. Currently you can download these three products separately;
- Dreamweaver CS3,
- Flash CS3 Professional,
- Photoshop CS3 Extended,
- Contribute CS3,
- Fireworks CS3,
- Illustrator CS3,
- and a few others not listed here.
In addition you may order trial DVDs of;
- CS3 Web Premium,
- CS3 Web Standard,
- and CS3 Design Premium
for $9.99 each. So if you’ve wanted to get your hands on some of the CS3 products to try for yourself, here’s your chance. Just a warning though … these are HUGE file downloads. So make sure you have a fast connection … or start the download and go for a walk.
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