RIA Development with Adobe Flex and Flash

ABOUT THE SESSION

When you build components for your own Flex applications, you are working in a controlled environment and can make a lot of assumptions about how your component will be used. However, if you want to release components out into the wild for others to use? It is inevitable that folks will use your component in ways you didn’t consider; and they’re going to blame you if it doesn’t work. This presentation will cover some tips and tricks to help you prepare and optimize your components for reuse.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Jeffry Houser is a technical entrepreneur that likes to share cool stuff with other people.
Jeffry is the Brains behind Flextras, a set of user interface Flex Components that save you time and help you create better Flex applications.  He has a Computer Science degree from the days before business met the Internet and has solved a problem or two in his programming career.  In 1999, Jeffry started DotComIt, an Adobe Solutions Partner specializing in Rich Internet Applications with Flex and ColdFusion.

Jeffry is an Adobe Community Professional and produces The Flex Show, a podcast that includes expert interviews and screencast tutorials. He also hosts the Flextras Friday Lunch Podcast, a weekly live Q&A session where you can get your questions answered, and also runs a site www.AskTheFlexpert.com where you can get your questions answered privately.  Jeffry has spoken at user groups and conferences all over the US, is the co-manager of the Hartford CT Adobe User Group, author of three technical books, and over 30 articles.

In his spare time Jeffry is a musician, old school adventure game aficionado, recording engineer, and he owns a Wii. Find more about Flextras at http://www.flextras.com, ask Jeffry Questions at www.asktheflexpert.com, or check out his podcast at http://www.theflexshow.com, or you can read his personal blog at http://www.jeffryhouser.com.

SESSION DATE, TIME, AND LOCATION

June 7th - 12:00 - 1:00pm Eastern EST - This session will be delivered online live with Adobe Acrobat Connect so you can join us from the convenience of your work office or home.

Click here to join our group: http://www.meetup.com/onlineflashplatform/

SESSION SKILL LEVEL

This session will be of interest to intermediate to advanced Flex developers that would like to learn more about building Flex components.

Innovation and the Adobe Flash Platform from michael chaize on Vimeo.

ONLINE FLASH PLATFORM MEETUP GROUP

Join us for a free Adobe Flex Training Seminar - ‘Your Flex App Looks Like Poo’ - with Garth Braithwaite
Monday - April 19th, 2010

ABOUT THE SESSION

Garth is a well informed and very entertaining guy - in this online session we will be discussing design roles and give you some good ideas on how to take your Rich Internet Applications to the next level. We will be exploring skinning Workflows, skin requirements, creating custom preloaders, and overhauling the application interface.

ABOUT THE SPEAKER

Garth Braithwaite is a Senior Flex Developer at Rain where he specializes in Interaction Design in HTML/CSS/JS and on the Flash Platform. Additionally Garth hosts RIA Radio, a weekly podcast for O’Reilly and InsideRIA; co-authored The Flex 4 Cookbook; speaks at conferences like Flash and the City, 360|Flex, and MAX; and teaches. Garth is an Adobe Community Professional (ACP), an Adobe Certified Instructor (ACI), and an Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) for: Flex, Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver, and InDesign. He can be found on twitter as GarthDB.

REGISTER FOR THIS EVENT
For more information and to register for this online event, please join the Online Flash Platform Group.

Bringing together Flex, Java and DBMS

The main goal of many enterprise applications is to provide a way to manipulate some data. Flex provides not only a rich library of UI components, but also a fast binary protocols that allow to efficiently move data between the server and the efficiently. In this presentation you’ll learn how to bring the data form a database using Java and BlazeDS in the middle tier. We’ll consider two use cases – manual coding and auto-generation of a CRUD application.

About the speaker

Yakov Fain is Managing Director at Farata Systems, a US-based company that provides consulting services in the field of development of enterprise Rich Internet applications. He authored several technical books, and dozens of articles on software development. Recently he co-authored the books “Rich Internet Applications with Adobe Flex and Java: Secrets of the Masters” and “Enterprise Development with Flex”. Sun Microsystems has nominated and awarded Mr. Fain with the title of Java Champion, which was presented to only a hundred people in the world. He leads the Princton Java Users Group. Yakov is Certified Adobe Flex Instructor.

Meeting Location and Time

Online meeting via Adobe Acrobat Connect
Meeting URL: http://www.meetup.com/atlantaflashplatform/calendar/12916291/
Monday, March 29, 12:30 - 1:30 ET

Please RSVP
Please RSVP for this event.

Continuing a long tradition of innovation, Adobe is pushing the boundaries of the Adobe Flash Platform with exciting new releases for Flash, Flex, and ColdFusion designers, developers, and administrators. Join us as Ben Forta, Adobe’s Director of Platform Evangelism, presents the future of ColdFusion, Flex, and more! On the ColdFusion side, Ben will talk about the upcoming releases of ColdFusion (currently known by the code name Centaur) and the highly anticipated first ColdFusion IDE from Adobe (currently known by the code name Bolt). You’ll learn about exciting new features and discover how Centaur and Bolt will accelerate your ColdFusion application development. On the Flex side, Ben will talk about the next release of Flex (currently known by the code name Gumbo). You’ll see product feature demos and learn how Gumbo breaks new ground for not only developers but also designers as it powers the design, development, and testing of rich Internet applications and content. And of course, Ben will explain and demonstrate the power of ColdFusion and the power of Adobe Flex working together!

If you have heard Ben present you already know how engaging and informative this presentation will be; if you haven’t ever had the pleasure of attending one of Ben’s presentations, trust us — you want to be there!

Who: Ben Forta
What: ColdFusion 9 and Flex 4 Pre-release Tour
When: Monday, June 8. 6:00 - 9:00PM
Where: EchoEleven - Adobe Software Training

Adobe® Flash® Builder™ 4 (formerly Flex Builder) public beta release is now available at Adobe Labs. The first thing that you may notice is that they are renaming Flex Builder to Flash Builder. This name change will create a clear distinction between the free open-source Flex framework and the commercial IDE.

Flash Builder 4 delivers a long list of new features, plus improvements to many existing features.There are three main themes to this release: developer productivity, designer-developer workflow, and data-centric application development. For an overview of the features included in this first public beta release, be sure to check out Tim Buntel’s What’s New in Flash Builder 4 article and watch the new feature videos. As always, the Flex 4 framework is included within Flash Builder, so be sure to check out Matt Chotin’s What’s New in the Flex 4 SDK article.

This past week I found myself in a position of indepentently working from my home office again. After years working with the same productivity software on a daily basis, I found myself scrambling to figure out what open source and free software tools are on the market these days. My first decision was to decide what I could use to keep track of my time and record every step of my daily work routine. Wether you are in sales, software development, or project management, every minute you spend working that goes unaccounted for is like dropping a penny on the ground and not picking it up. Tracking your time accurately is essential to staying ahead of your competition and benchmarking your success.

The problem I find with most of the time tracking software that I see is that they are way to complex. I just need something simple that can track my daily work by the hour. That’s it, … plain and simple. So, I stumbled upon this sweet little Adobe® AIR app that is simple but not really plain at all. In fact it is a super hot looking application that has just the right combo of feelgood and lookgood.

Klok - Personal Time Tracking Made Easy has all the capabilities you would look for in such an app including the ability to track your work by client and project as well as a seemingly unlimited level of sub-projects or tasks. Each project item is color coded and it’s a piece of cake to drag and drop items to the timesheet or to the built in timer to create your entries.

Adobe® MAX 2009 will be hosted in southern California at the Los Angeles Convention Center and Nokia theater location. MAX is a conference unlike any other — an opportunity to connect with thousands of designers, developers, partners, executives, and Adobe staff for education, inspiration, and community.

You can also take part in the pre-planning of the MAX by proposing a session or lab for MAX 2009. The Adobe® MAX team will be reviewing session and lab proposals ongoing during the Call for Sessions and Labs. Call for Sessions and Labs will end April 15, 2009.

Here are some of the latest software pre-release software that you can find at Adobe Labs. Most recently Adobe has released the XML Library for ActionScript preview. Adobe developed XMP to establish an industry-wide standard for sharing metadata across applications, file formats, and devices. XMP is open source and it is freely available to developers and system integrators.

XMP Library for ActionScript preview
Check out this preview of XMP Library for ActionScript v1.0, designed to read existing XMP metadata from Flash-based file formats via the Adobe Flash Player.

Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2.3
Improve your digital photography workflow and join the testing community for this 2.3 release candidate, now available.

Adobe Photoshop Camera Raw 5.3
Another great tool for photographers, this plug-in release provides access to the raw image formats produced by professional digital cameras.

The Adobe User Group of Atlanta February 2009 Meeting
Ann Fracas and Phil Lee present Adobe Acrobat Tips and Tricks

About This Meeting:

Feb. 19, 2009 - Learn how easy it is to streamline your paper-based business processes and transform piles of paperwork into secure, productive, interactive electronic forms. Some of the topics that will be covered include the following:

• Reduce Paper
• Reduce Travel
• Improve Processes
• Decrease risk
• Secure your Intellectual Property
• “I didn’t know Acrobat could do that!”

Who Should Attend:

• Adobe Creative Suite 3 and 4 Users
• Adobe Acrobat 9 Users
• People Who Create and Manage Documents
• InDesign Users Going Digital
• and anyone who uses Adobe Software

About The Presenters:

Ann Fracas:
Ann is an Acrobat Specialist for Adobe Systems, Inc. working with accounts to leverage existing Acrobat products, understanding the advantages of the new features, maximizing the licensing options, and strategically grow the footprint of Acrobat within the account to help businesses reduce risk, improve processes, react to market changes more quickly, and impact their bottom line.

Phil Lee:
Phil is an Acrobat Specialist for Adobe Systems, Inc. working with accounts to leverage existing Acrobat products, understanding the advantages of the new features, maximizing the licensing options, and strategically grow the footprint of Acrobat within the account to help businesses reduce risk, improve processes, react to market changes more quickly, and impact their bottom line.

More info at the Adobe User Group Atlanta Website