I have to be honest with you guys. I have only recently started playing with ColdFusion 8 but I am rapidly falling in love with it. CF really does dramatically/extremely increase your productivity. The amount of code you have to write to do pretty complex things is amazingly small compared to other server-side code.

If you haven’t had a chance to dive in to CF8 yet, Kristen Schofield (ColdFusion product marketing manager) just published a list of free webinars starting on July 8th. This is a great opportunity for you to find out more about ColdFusion 8’s new features and powerful capabilities.

I know… I know… A desktop ticker is not really a new idea and the BBC has had one for quite some time but most of the desktop news tickers out there are Windows-based.

The BBC’s John O’Donovan explains:

Firstly, they only work on Windows and are built out of a variety of proprietary tools. We’d like these to work cross-platform but we need to build them differently to do so. They are also difficult to manage and expensive to maintain. We considered a few approaches, but decided to grow our new widget out of Adobe Flex and Adobe AIR. This is firstly because these tools met our requirements to work cross-platform and deliver the desktop experience we wanted, and also because they linked up with in-house skills in the team which manages them, making them simpler to manage.

Today, the BBC launched their first AIR-based desktop ticker that keeps you up to date on the latest news and sports news. You can completely customize which types of news articles you are interested in and it also caches the latest news so you can still catch up on today’s news when you’re offline. You can have it running as a small application or minimize it as a ticker.

I’d love to see some video in there as well but hey… it’s still an early beta and I’m sure video is on their radar. Being a beta application, I have to point out that there are still some bugs in the application but that’s exactly what public betas are for, so you can give feedback…

More info and download on the BBC Internet Blog.
Via PaidContent.co.uk

Update: Google also published a FAQ on this topic

Search engine optimization has always been sort of a nightmare for RIA developers. SEO is always the first things clients ask about these days. And it’s not just a problem with Flash-based rich Internet applications (RIAs). AJAX-based applications have the exact same issues. Just yesterday, I heard of an interactive agency having to really persuade a client that it’s Flash-based site would get picked up by search engines if they did it right. Workarounds like using SWFobject in combination with SWFaddress are pretty common. But you still don’t get the everything indexed. This method basically means creating a hidden HTML version of your site. While this also gives you additional benefits for accessibility and mobile browsers, this is pretty cumbersome to do.

Today we are teaming up with search industry leaders to dramatically improve search results of dynamic Web content and RIAs. Adobe is providing an optimized Flash Player to Google and Yahoo! to enhance search engine indexing of the Flash file format (SWF) and uncover information that is currently undiscoverable by search engines. This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in the Flash Player. Moving forward, RIA developers and rich Web content producers won’t need to amend existing and future content to make it searchable — they can be confident it can now be found by users around the globe.

Improved search of SWF content will provide immediate benefits to companies leveraging Adobe Flash software. Without additional changes to content, developers can continue to provide experiences that are only possible with Adobe Flash technology, without the trade-off of a loss in search indexing. It will also positively affect the Search Engine Optimization community who will develop best practices for building content and RIAs utilizing Adobe Flash technologies, and enhance the ability to find and monetize SWF content.

I’m sure most of you know that static text in SWF was already being indexed by search engines but with this new technology, all your content is being indexed — including dynamically loaded data and different states in your application — without having to change anything!

More info:
Adobe Devnet
Ted Patrick
Ryan Stewart
TechChrunch
InsideRIA

I’ve been meaning to blog about this for quite some time but for some reason never got around to it.

I remember someone asked me about Flex jobs in Europe when I showed this graph at the Flex pre-release tour last February. This graphs shows the increase in demand for Flex coders but is based on data from the US. I remember responding to the question saying that everywhere I go, people ask if I don’t know anyone that knows Flex or ActionScript. So I did a quick check with a few companies in Belgium and the demand is definitely there.
Boulevart is currently looking for Flash developers and Flex/AIR developers. LBi is looking for Flash/AS3 developers. iDa/MediaFoundry is looking for RIA developers. These Days is looking for Flashers/Flexers.

And I’m pretty sure there are more jobs out there if you look for them. And that seems to be the big problem right now. You’ll have to do a little bit of extra effort to actually find these jobs. You usually won’t find them in the newspapers…

Peter Elst is trying to make that a lot easier. He just launched RIAjobs.org, a job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight. As it only launched a few days ago, there aren’t that many jobs yet but I’m sure that will change soon. Usergroup meetings and conferences are also a great way of meeting companies who are hiring and obviously keeping an eye on your favorite company’s website is also a good way of finding out about job opportunities.

AIR 1.1 is out the door and even though this is a dot release, that doesn’t mean there’s not much new to tell. AIR 1.1 includes the following new capabilities:

• Installation and other runtime dialog boxes have been translated into:
  • Brazilian Portuguese, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Russian and Spanish
• Support for building internationalized applications, including keyboard input for double-byte languages
• Support for localizing the name and description attributes in the application descriptor file
• Support for localizing error messages, such as SQLError.detailID  and SQLError.detailArguments, in the SQLite database
• Addition of Capabilities.languages property to obtain an array of preferred UI languages as set by the operating system
• HTML button labels and default menus, such as context menus and the Mac menu bar,
  have been localized to all supported languages
• Support for certificate migration from a self-signed application to one that chains to a
  certificate of authority (CA)
• Support for Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition and support for 64-bit editions of Windows Vista® Home Premium, Business, Ultimate, or Enterprise.
• Addition of File.spaceAvailable : API to obtain the amount of disk space available on a disk
• Addition of NativeWindow.supportsTransparency property to determine whether a window can be drawn as transparent by the current operating system
• Bug fixes and memory improvements

To start working with these new capabilities and performance improvements, there are updates available for your favorite development environment.
For Flex Builder, see this Flex Builder Technote.
For Dreamweaver, download the updated version of the Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver.
For Flash, follow the instructions in this Flash Technote.

Additionally, Aptana Studio (for AJAX development) is also already updated to support AIR 1.1

Download the updated runtime from http://get.adobe.com/air/. Get more information here (PDF).

This is probably the most important step to take when you are building your application and it should probably be the first thing you do. Let’s say someone found a bug in your application and you fixed it in a newer version. How are you going to tell users about that bug-fix if you don’t have an update mechanism in place? AIR has everything on board to make updating applications a breeze, both for you and the user of your application.
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You created your AIR file… so now what? The easiest thing to do is to upload the file to your server and put a link to it on your website. But this is not very user-friendly for whoever is going to download and install your application. In some cases, when your server isn’t configured to handle AIR files, it may even fail altogether. That’s why we created the concept of install badges. Install badges are basically a small Flash application that handles download and install in such a way that it becomes very easy for the end user to install your application.
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First of all, why is signing an application important? Easy. When your application is unsigned or signed with a self-signed certificate, the user will get two red icons on the install screen. The first one is related to your code signing certificate. It’s telling you that the “publisher is unknown” which is very normal since we have no idea who actually signed this application.

When you do get a code signing certificate and sign the application with it, the icon will turn green or in some cases yellow. The yellow icon will appear when you are using the file I/O API.

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It’s all about user experience. I could just end this post right here because that’s what I think is the main reason the Open Screen project matters. The Flash platform has really revolutionized the user experience on the web and we have all gotten used to having this rich experience. With more and more devices being connected to the web, people expect these devices to have the same experience they are used to. Just the other day, I was witnessing a new high-end-phone user surfing the web. She could not understand why some parts of the sites she was browsing to, worked fine on a PC but not on that new, shiny and expensive high-end-phone. Things like little widgets on a page or even full sites would only show a little “missing plugin” icon. “That’s because this phone doesn’t have Flash”, I remember saying which she just couldn’t grasp.

We’ve all become accustomed to things just working without having to think about it and also to having rich interfaces on the web. We are used to seeing animated menus on DVD’s and are rapidly getting used to seeing interactive menus on Bluray discs. We’re used to animated rich menus on game consoles and its games. So why can’t we have this experience everywhere?

If I switch on my digital TV set-top box at home, it’s far from a rich ‘engaging’ user experience. The interface is dull and dead slow with no connectivity to online information and communities. I always think about what I could do with Flash to have a richer experience Flash only were available on this STB. The same thing goes for the menus in TV’s. How much more could you do if you could ask a Flash designer/developer to make the menu instead of having to write it in some obscure language that offers no richness whatsoever. How much more exciting would it be to control your TV/STB/PVR with a rich connected user interface that immediately gets online reviews, ratings and comments about the TV-shows you are programming?

This is why I think the Open Screen project matters. It’s not just about bringing Flash/AIR to mobile devices, I think it’s about bringing that rich experience that people are used to, everywhere.

Some 2000 kilometers (about 1300 miles), about 31 hours on 5 different trains and about 10 battery charges later, we arrived in Prague today. Well… Actually, I’m writing this on the train from Warsaw to Prague so we’re not actually there yet and we still have about 5 hours left on this train but I can’t actually post this until we do arrive in Prague. But anyway, I thought this would be a great time to look back at last week.
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