A short while back Adobe has announced Flash Player 10.1 and AIR for Android. This is expected to be out sometime in the first half of 2010. This release will be optimized for these devices and will take advantage of the capabilities of these devices.

This is a very exciting time for developing mobile applications when these technologies are released. This brings me to Apple, what are they going to do in the future? While Apple's app store is a huge success, with Flash and AIR coming to all of their competitors devices, it will be interesting to see what Apple does. I for one have been interested in developing mobile apps for some time. However I was not going to waste my time learning how build iPhone apps. My time is better spent focusing on Flex/Flash Builder, CF 9, AIR and so forth. I figured when this stuff comes out, I will start building apps using what I know and use every day.

There are more and more products on the market that integrate and can greatly help your Flex development. I stumbled across this page on Adobe.com that has a great list of products that you may find very interesting.

I really encourage you to take a look at this page, the list of products is too long to list here. However here are the areas that at covered.

Adobe AIR

Functional Testing

Performance and load testing

Components

Action Message Format (AMF) products

Security testing

Licensing and encryption

Frameworks

Microsoft Visual Studio Flex tooling plug-ins

Flex tooling extensions

Adobe Creative Suite integration

GO HERE TO CHECK THEM ALL OUT

Make sure to check out the new page on Adobe.com about ColdFusion 9 and all of its new features.

Hear from developers in the community about this new release.

For another good summary make sure to check out the SitePoint review of What's new in ColdFusion 9

Make sure to keep an eye on this. The previous name was "Cocomo" in case you are not aware of the new name.

If you ever had the need, or will have the need to build real-time social type applications, this service is for you. ACFS is a service based platform that allows Adobe Flex developers to easily add real time communication.

The solution is comprised of a set of Flex custom components, and hosted services provided by Adobe. Using these components and services you can build real-time multi-user RIA's. Using the Flex components and hosted services will allow a rapid platform for developing these applications. You can also have peace of mind knowing that server issues and tasks such as deployment, maintenance, and scalability are taken care of.

I'm very excited about this solution, and can't wait to start building apps with it.

Check it out on Adobe Labs

InfoWorld Best of Open Source Software Awards 2008 have been announced. The winner of the RIA category goes to Adobe Flex!

Congratulations to Adobe and the Flex Engineering team!

I'm sure many more awards are in the future.

Read the article here

Flex 3 is now out and it's an exciting time to be a ColdFusion developer. In this article I walk you step by step to using Flex 3 with ColdFusion and the integrated LiveCycle Data Services. There is also a section about using the ColdFusion wizard to quickly build the backend ColdFusion CFC's to get you up and running.

LiveCycle Data Services gives you the ability to create robust applications with very little work, I encourage all ColdFusion developers to get familiar with this technology as it's a great tool on your development belt.
Hope you enjoy the article, and if you have any questions or problems feel free to drop a comment here.

View the Article Here!

There is a call now for Flex 3 recipes that will be considered for the print version of the Flex 3 cookbook from O'Reilly Media.

Find out more here!

Even though AIR is still in Beta 2, developers are already starting to create applications. Here is one that is still in development, but allows you to try it out as the application itself is still in Beta.

Agile Agenda is project planning software. The developer of this application was getting fed up with Microsoft Project, so he decided to make his own project planning software!

Check out Agile Agenda Here

As the Adobe MAX conference has now kicked off, Adobe has released a whole bunch of new beta's on labs.

• Adobe AIR Beta 2
  
• Adobe Flex Builder 3 Beta 2
  
• Adobe Media Player

What are you waiting for! Go to labs and check out the new Adobe technology releases!

This week I saw an implementation using a DataGrid that was way overkill. I MEAN WAY WAY OVERKILL!

In short, I thought I would list when NOT to use a datagrid.

Per the Adobe Flex docs here is the use for a datagrid.

The DataGrid control is intended for viewing data, and not as a layout tool like an HTML table. The mx.containers package provides those layout tools.

In short, a developer was using a DataGrid as a way to list visual objects in vertical order. Basically they were using a DataGrid as a VBox.

It even increased the size of the SWF by 40k compared to using a VBox.