Let’s start this first blog post from Milan. Peter Elst and me were lucky enough to be able to attend the Nokia OpenLab event on time : we had to run a bit from Malpensa airport, to the convention center to get our MAX badge, then we did a quick check-in at our hotel to finally reach Sophia’s Restaurant at 6.30pm. We didn’t really know what to expect from this event but it turned to be a really great idea :

teams of 2 needed to think about a “new” mobile application concept and present the idea to the others. Sounds pretty simple, no ? After all presentations, attendees needed to vote for their favorites 3 concepts and the best team will win a MacBook Pro and a CS4 Design Premium (for each teammate). There was several really great ideas unveiled during the evening, and at our own surprise, Peter and me won (thanks to Peter for putting the original idea on the paper) ! Our idea :

A Mobile Emergency Alert Service

I won’t give you more details at the moment on this concept: it’s something that I still need to discuss with Peter to see if we will try to make it something real or not. Anyway, I really want to thanks Nokia for organizing such event and it’s somehting that I really to see more often, even in the non mobile world. Pictures available here.

The Adobe Flash Platform

Even if it has been already used during presentations for at least 2 years now, the branding is now official : under the name Flash Platform you will find “everything you need to create and deliver the most compelling applications, content, and video to the widest possible audience.”: CS4 suite, Flex framework, Flash player, AIR Runtime, ColdFusion, BlazeDS etc… That’s cool!:

It will be easier for me now to say that I’m a Flash Platform consultant than an AIR-Flex-CF [...] consultant

Thermo is now Flash Catalyst

Flash Catalyst enables designers to start from static compositions created in Adobe Photoshop CS4, Illustrator CS4, or Adobe Fireworks CS4 and convert the artwork into applications and interactive content. The output can be a finished Flash SWF or AIR application ready to be published or project files that you can import into Flex Builder.

I’m curious to get my hands on it - what I will do at MAX Europe. Now on a personal thought it’s easier for me to pronounce Catalyst then Thermo! Vdeos of the introduction session here.

public beta of Cocomo is available on labs

Codename “Cocomo” is a Platform as a Service that allows Flex developers to easily add real-time social capabilities such as collaboration apps, audio/video chat, Real-Time File Sharing into their RIA using a hosted services infrastructure (Acrobat.com).

Really, really interesting stuff. I greatly encourage you to try it and share your thoughts on the official forums (or here if you prefer). There’s no details yet on the pricing (free with limited features and a pro or enterprise version ?) but already interesting questions arose like:

The potential for Cocomo for corporate/enterprise applications is substantial, but many (most) corporations will want to host the infrastructure behind its firewall for performance, availability, and security reasons. Are there plans to provide a mechanism for hosting/license the server-side infrastructure for enterprise applications?

FlaCC is now Alchemy and is available on labs

Codename “Alchemy” is a research project that allows users to compile C and C++ code that is targeted to run on the open source ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2). The C/C++ code is compiled to ActionScript 3.0 as a SWF or SWC that runs on Adobe Flash Player 10 or Adobe AIR 1.5.

It won’t be the project that I will look into in priority, but I understand that it’s opening new doors to Fash Platform developers and I know some people who are really enthusiastic about it.

Wave is available in the pre-release program

Adobe Wave is an Adobe AIR application and Adobe hosted service that work together to enable desktop notifications. It allows consumers to opt-in to receive desktop notifications from their favorite publishers. Each notification carries a call-to-action: clicking directs users to a publisher-specified URL, driving traffic back to their site. Unlike e-mail, Adobe Wave has been architected to be a trusted communications channel and consequently minimizes spam and phishing concerns.

Of course, you can implement this in any of your AIR application, but if you don’t have a need for a n application and just want to give desktop notifications, Wave sounds cool. It seems that there’s a market for that (ie. Stitcho).
 

Tour de Flex

Tour de Flex is a desktop application for exploring Flex capabilities and resources, including the core Flex components, Adobe AIR and data integration, as well as a variety of third-party components, effects, skins, and more. It includes over 200 runnable samples, each with source code, links to documentation, and other details. There’s also an Eclipse plugin available that provides a search interface.

Tour de Flex is a really cool application, a mix of all existing “Flex explorers” with tons of extras. A must-have application on your machine! And the best part is that it could be updated, maybe with your own content because anyone can contribute. Nice work to Greg Wilson, Christophe Coenraets and James Ward.

AIR 1.5 launched

In this release, additional capabilities are available :

• Encrypted local database: the new encryption support offers better support for encrypted larger data files.
• Flash Player 10 capabilities: For example, it’s now possible to take advantage of custom filters, blend modes, and fills with Adobe Pixel Bender. AIR 1.5 also supports the new 3D effects, including perspective, correct transformation, and animation of 2D plans in a 3D space (also known as postcards in space). Rich media enhancements include dynamic streaming to improve the quality of video playback based on bandwidth availability as well as support for the Speex codec for delivering high-quality audio at lower download speeds.
• WebKit update:The version of WebKit included in AIR has been updated to a newer version. The updated version includes Squirrelfish, a new bytecode interpreter that improves the execution speed of JavaScript for common actions. Internal tests show that HTML-based AIR applications run as much as 35% faster for many types of operations.

I think that’s all for the products mentioned except maybe Flex 4/Gumbo. The first keynote focused on the mobile side with Flash Player 10 running on several mobile devices - including Android - and a version for the iPhone that just need a final approval from Apple.

My friend Neil Webb just started to record video tutorials tackling PHP remoting using Flex & AMFPHP. The first two are “Installing Apache, mySQL, PHP & AMFPHP” and ““Hello World!” PHP remoting example“. The next one will cover the Mate framework using php instead of ColdFusion. He is planning to do a complete series, so that a user can come to his site and have all the resources in one place

I always found video tutorials very valuable as an addition to an article or a course. So I wish him Good Luck! Go to his new Video Tutorials Page.

After 6 years without a major ColdFusion event in Germany it’s finally time again! Chris Schmitz just announced CF Camp Munich 2008.

When: 27.11.2008 from 09.00 to 18.00
Where:Conference Center Orbis, Oberschleißheim
Price: 35 €

What to expect exactly:

A full day packed with presentations and sessions around the development of Web applications with CFML by well known speakers from the international ColdFusion community, networking, giveaway and raffle. Here are the sessions already confirmed :

• Mark Drew, the man behind CFEclipse: Introduction to ModelGlue
• Luis Majano, the developer of ColdBox Frameworks: The Framework ColdBox
• Andy Allan, the maker of Scotch-on-the-Rocks: Advanced PDF workflow with ColdFusion
• Gert Franz(Railo Technologies): 3.1 Railo
• Darren Pywell(Intergral Ltd.): Announcing merger Analytics - “Seeing is Believing”
• Adobe Systems(speaker tba): Performance Tuning and clustering with ColdFusion
• Peter Haak (Euro Payment Group and others): Securing Your Web Application
• and more to be announced [...]

So if you are around Munich at that dates, you should not miss it (all presentations will be done in English)! More details at http://www.cfug.de. I encourage all European CFUG members to attend this event to prove that CF developers are not so slow to move !

After the huge success of FOTB08 in Brighton, Flash on the Beach is going to be rocking in South Beach!

Got the winter blues? Looking for inspiration? If you live in U.S., you should not miss it! The venue will be The Jackie Gleason Theater : it fits the South Beach vibe perfectly, and is a spectacular green and white Art Deco building only two blocks from the beach and one block from Lincoln Road where you will find plenty of bars and restaurants.

Don’t think that Flash on the Beach is only about Flash, it’s about Flash, Flex, AIR, Photoshop, After Effects, Processing and many more. If you are a designer, developer, coder, student, manager, game developer, artist, animator or a newbie, then this conference is for you! Don’t miss this opportunity to see nearly 50 of the best minds in the industry delivering 3 full days of awe-inspiring sessions. April 6-7-8 2009, you know where to go : FOTBM09

How long does this all take?

Each Caricature icon is completed in around 3 days, depending on complexity. However, because of the number of orders we get, most caricatures are delivered within a week or two of receipt of your picture/s by the artist, sometimes sooner.

One week after, this guy sent a 1st email to inquiry about the lack of communication - did the order arrive or not ? He got a really fast reply saying that they “really lament the delay in the delivery and communication lack [...]“. Well sometimes, “Shit happens“. He finally get the first sketch of the caricature on July 9th. And… and… nothing. He tried to get back in touch 3 times (July 17th, August 6th and September 26th) without much success. So he decided to introduce a ticket to 2checkout (the e-commerce solution used by Fast Icon) and, “Oh Miracle!” he got a reply the same day (October 9th) saying “We had a work overload that left us slower, but you will receive an update of your order today.”.

Who will guess how it will end ? Okay, let’s go to the conclusion : yesterday, after again no news from Fast Icon, the guy introduce a request to 2checkout to be refunded, what they have done immediately. It’s a bit sad to offer services on the web and not being able to communicate properly - a delay of 3 months deserves at least a decent explanation.

I wanted to share this story with my readers because I think that this is what a blog is made for, share experiences (bad or good). Of course, any similarity to anyone alive or dead is just a coincidence

I had some hope when I heard about the success of Scotch On The Rocks conference (sorry for not being able to attend it), but in the end nothing really changed - except maybe in UK and US ?

I think also that Adobe could do a better promotion of ColdFusion: this year at Flash on the Beach, there were those pins that you can grab for free at Adobe booth. But look at the picture, none of ColdFusion (btw if any exists, I’m interested ) ! The product was only mentionned twice during Adobe presentations. I think that it should have disserved few more words to describe how great the couple Flex/CF is to develop RIAs.

In Belgium, it seems that our CFUG is trying to get back from it’s grave (which I applaud), but the way it’s done doesn’t seems to be so efficient :

• they’re using facebook events to communicate !
• the Belgium AUG has not been informed on it - a few months ago I tried to ask AUG members if they would be interested in a CF session but got only one reaction.
• moreover it’s lead by someone from Adobe - which is, in my point of view, a bit strange.

I hope that I didn’t offend anyone here (Kristen, Ben, Raymond…) and please don’t misinterpret what I’m trying to tell : I still love ColdFusion (which is my main development platform), I greatly encourage Community events, but I think that Adobe could/need to do a lot better.

There are first those fantastic videos from Jesse Warden “Being Independent and Making Money Using Flex”. Then came Flash On the Beach and those “inspired session” where the main message was, in short terms: “Quit your job, go independent, do what you really want to do, make money and have fun!”. And finally there are my friends in the Flash/Flex community who are independent and happily living from it.

Since several days|weeks|months, I’m a bit torn between answering to those sirens and not moving at all. And I have always this question in my mind:

“Is there a right moment in a life and/or a right place to become a freelancer?”

Let me explain a bit: I mostly agree on all those encouragements for being a freelancer, but I think that it’s missing an important factor which is your familial situation (and maybe age).

Don’t you think that you’re seeing things differently when you are single rather than married, when you have kids or not, when you are 20 or 40 ? Don’t you think that it’s easier to be a freelancer when you reached a certain level of expertise than when you’re a noob? It’s not a question of being afraid, it’s more a question of responsibility.

Maybe an example will help you to understand my point of view: Imagine a 35 guy who is an IT consultant for 10 years, married with kids and a home loan ongoing (any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental). Do you really think that switching to freelancing at that particular moment of his life is right? Of course it will probably bring more money in the household [“Money, get away. Get a good job with good pay and youre okay. Money, its a gas. Grab that cash with both hands and make a stash. New car, caviar, four star daydream, Think Ill buy me a football team.” – Pink Floyd] but is it worth the sacrifice of your week-ends and family life? It doesn’t mean that this guy is not passionate about his job (Oh no!). I think being 20 (and gifted) or being 40 with no more kids at home is a better moment in a life for being a freelancer.

I first wanted to do a deeper analysis, but finally I decided to make the discussion more opened. So what’s your opinion? Please feel free to share your thoughts here.

It was my first time at Flash On the Beach (and in Brighton), and I haven’t been disappointed ! I think that it’s the best conference that I’ve ever attended so far : Brighton is a colorful city with a tremendous nightlife, the Dome is a wonderful venue and there was really top inspiring speakers.
 

I will not do a review of all sessions that I attended, but let’s have an overview of each days and see what I personally retain :

Day 1

Keynote
Marco Casario - Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR
Branden Hall - Brilliant Ideas that I’ve Blatantly Stolen
Mark Anders - A Preview of Flex 4 and “Thermo”
Tink (Stephen Downs) - Flex Effects: Transitions as Design Elements
Erik Natzke - Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play
James Paterson - Modulating a Lot

This first day was very emotional for me : I have never been before to a so huge event I think. I was very happy to meet familiar faces and people that I only knew from twitter or their blogs, all “mixed” together with well known speakers, FOTB team and anonymous developers or designers. I really <3 that community ! The first big announcement came from John Davey itself : in 2009 you will have a Flash on the Beach in Miami !

“[...] Party in the city where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
Welcome to miami
Buenvenidos a miami
Bouncin in the club where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
Im goin to miami
Welcome to miami [...]” Will Smith - Miami

Congrats to John, and I wish a big success to the FOTBM. Back to 2008 and Brighton, all sessions were really nice, with a whole different way to present their subject (I loved Tink’s slides !). I’m curious to have a look at the Flex MDI component built by Comtaste to compare it with FlexMDI. I was a bit excited by the new capabilities of Flex 4 “Gumbo” (FXG, new way to manage states…) but not so much by Thermo : not sure what to think about this product yet. Inspired sessions (Erik Natze and James Paterson) were really what they are meant for : INSPIRING ! I’ve never seen them before and I was really impressed by what they are doing programatically (look at my pictures on Flickr to have an idea).

Day 2

Mike Downey - The business side of AIR: how to sell your clients on AIR apps
Adobe - Town Hall Meeting
Grant Skinner - Things Every ActionScript Developer should know
Peter Elst - AIR Beyond the Basics - Taming the Desktop
Lee Brimelow - Platform Jiu-Jitsu
GMUNK (Bradley Grosh) - GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9
Robert Hodgin - The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life.

The second day was perfectly in line with the first one. I wrote down some nice ideas from Grant Skinner session. I loved the Adobe Town Hall Meeting which was in fact a full Q&A session. Nothing really new came out from here, they only confirm the development of the Flash Player for the iPhone (for those who care). Peter Elst made a nice demo using Merapi and a text to speech engine to pronounce swear words non allowed by the BBC in their Sport’s Desktop Monkey AIR application - lots of fun :-) Lee’s session was funny too, comparing a developer with an UFC fighter. Mike Downey’s session on Adobe AIR could have been more “intense” : why always showing us the same examples (ie. Anthropologie, eBay and Nickelodeon) instead of some new “wow” (enterprise) applications? I only learned that there was this lighthouse program which could be interesting in my current project (Mike if you’re reading this, get in touch…).

Day 3

Ben Stucki - Advanced Flexing for Flash Developers
Seb Lee-Delisle - Papervision3D Simplified
Andre Michelle - Adobe made some noise!
Koen de Weggheleire - Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3
Paul Betlem - The Ying and Yang of Flash
Jonathan Harris - Beyond Flash

I was expecting a bit more from Ben Stucki’s presentation on developing custom components (I don’t know exactly what but didn’t learn very much or I was too tired maybe). PV3D session from Seb Lee-Delisle took me by surprise : even if 3D is far from being part of my daily job, now I really want to give it a try! Thanks Seb :-) In a fully packed room, Koen played “The Fly Killer” with his webcam to entertain the whole audience. Cool ! The inspired session was really nice especially the first part where he talked about the human face of the internet and how he was able to gather information from newspapers, blog and other internet source to do social and demographic studies. The second was more “depressing” and a bit “mystical” in my point of view. Hopefully he ended with those beautiful ballons & wishes shoots. 

Conlusion

I really enjoyed my days in Brighton and at Flash on the Beach. The team there made a great job, speakers were really good and I was so happy to meet my [360|Flex] friends again. If you would be able to attend only one conference, Flash on the Beach is that one ! 

Maybe there was also some subliminal messages to decode : “Be on drugs to be more creative” (private joke), “Quit your job and do freelancing to be happier” (it will be the subject of another blog post) and… Iguanas seems to be one of my favorite place in Brighton - neverending happy hour

Demo (right click for the source code)

It’s pretty easy to achieve. Here is how to call the service

var srv:HTTPService = new HTTPService(); 
srv.url = 'http://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/services/language/detect'; 
srv.request.v = '1.0'; /*version - might change in the future*/ 
srv.request.q = /*the text to send*/; 
srv.addEventListener(ResultEvent.RESULT, /*a resultHandler function*/); 
srv.addEventListener(FaultEvent.FAULT, /*a faultHandler function*/); 
srv.send();

The JSON Response is the following :

{
  "responseData" : {
    "language" : the-detected-language,
    "isReliable" : the-reliability-of-the-detect,
    "confidence" : the-confidence-level-of-the-detect
  },
  "responseDetails" : null | string-on-error,
  "responseStatus" : 200 | error-code
}

Okay, nice but Why am I so enthusiast about that API ?

Those last years, many of my projects involved to deal with translations in the 22 (formally 23 with the Gaelic) official EU languages. When I was thinking about adding more automation, I was always facing the problem of being sure about the language used in the document - It’s something that I already discussed with some guys at 360|Flex Europe in April. Now I could achieve this quite easily :-)

 Demo (right click for the source code)

Maybe it deserves a better explanation To be able to detect the language in a document (a MS Word document only at the moment, but I will try to support more document types later), we need to send plain text to the Google API. To do this, I’m using the Apache POI project and their HWPF extractor wrapper to extract the text, and then I split it in several parts of 300 characters (500 is the maximum supported but it makes my code freezing) and send them to the Google detection API. After recovering all of them, I compile and display the language(s) found. 

My demo is not 100% perfect but it’s working pretty well and it’s really fast. I’m using ColdFusion to upload the texts and call the POI library, and I let Flex deal with the multiple calls to the Google API. For an easier implementation, I created (or at least tried) a component detectLanguage that manage all steps from extraction to language detection.

If you need some MS Word documents for testing, you can have a look here, most of the texts are available in 22 languages since 2007. I’m waiting for you feedback and suggestions. Enjoy !