LiveCycle ES courses at MAX 2008

This year the Adobe MAX event will have the most comprehensive LiveCycle ES program of any event. In case you missed the previous announcements, MAX 2008 is going to take place November 16-19 in San Francisco. You can find out more at the MAX 2008 site here. It is the single focal point for LC ES training this year on our planet! Some of the top picks for LC ES training include these courses:

Adobe Roadmap: Enterprise

Hear about Adobe’s product and solutions roadmap and discuss Adobe’s vision so that together we can create the enterprise of the future.

Speakers:	Joel Heinke
Audience:	Web Developer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	Acrobat, ActionScript, Ajax, Blaze DS, ColdFusion, Contribute, Flex, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle ES, Open Source
When:	Monday, November 17, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

Agile Testing of Enterprise RIAs with Flex and LiveCycle ES

Hear how Adobe Consulting delivers complex rich Internet applications built on Flex and LiveCycle ES, while still employing agile engineering methods to assure quality. Learn about testing with FlexUnit; using Code Coverage tools, designing for testing, and improving test coverage; and how to extend these capabilities to unit-test LiveCycle ES applications "behind the glass."

Speakers:	Alex Uhlmann, Herve Dupriez
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Architectural Best Practices for Flex and LiveCycle ES Applications

Hear Adobe Consulting discuss their "Blueprint Architecture" for creating applications with Flex, Adobe AIR, LiveCycle Data Services ES, and LiveCycle ES. Learn how to integrate these technologies to create complex rich Internet applications with Adobe technology.

Speakers:	Tunde Turner, Steven Webster
Audience:	Architect
Skill:	Advanced
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Building Enterprise Applications Using Flex, Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle ES

See how Adobe's client and server technologies can be leveraged together to build engaging applications. See how Flex and AIR can be used as a front end to a complex back-end process deployed on LiveCycle ES.

Speakers:	Marcel Boucher
Audience:	Web Developer, IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

Building RIAs Using Form Guides

Learn how to build and deploy rich Internet applications using form guides, part of Adobe LiveCycle Designer. Form guides are an alternative view of a form based on Adobe Flash technology that guides users through the form-filling process step by step. Form authors build on an existing form design to provide a more visually appealing and streamlined method of capturing form data. The enhanced interface can help reduce data entry errors by simplifying the amount of information presented to a form filler at a given time.

Speakers:	Paul Guerette
Audience:	Web Developer, Web Designer, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm Monday, November 17, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Wednesday, November 19, 11:00 am - 12:30 pm

Building Service Clients with Flex and Adobe AIR

Learn how to build SOA clients with Flex and Adobe AIR. In this hands-on session, you will explore how to build various service clients using the WSDL Import Wizard, hand-coded ActionScript 3.0, and simple REST-based services. Flash Remoting and performance metrics will also be covered. This session is intended for those who build front-end service clients for business applications. Attendees should come prepared to write code or partner with someone else writing code. (This session complements "Deploying Services with BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES.")

Speakers:	Duane Nickull, James Ward
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Advanced
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm Tuesday, November 18, 8:30 am - 10:00 am Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

Building Your First Application Using LiveCycle ES

Build an end-to-end application from scratch using Adobe LiveCycle ES. The application will utilize forms, orchestration, and many of the Adobe LiveCycle platform features. Learn how to easily integrate with external systems and how to include people in business processes for approvals, reviews, and more.

Speakers:	Valerie Snider-Lynch
Audience:	Web Developer, IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Beginner
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Tuesday, November 18, 8:30 am - 10:00 am Wednesday, November 19, 9:00 am - 10:30 am Wednesday, November 19, 4:00 pm - 5:30 pm

Information Assurance: Rights Management and Digital Security

Explore the information assurance capabilities in Adobe LiveCycle. Learn how organizations use rights management and digital security features to protect sensitive information by enabling confidentiality, privacy, authentication, integrity, nonrepudiation, and availability.

Speakers:	Steve Forrest
Audience:	Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 9:30 am - 10:30 am

Inside the Adobe AIR Cook-off: The Best Show Off Their Winning Chops

See some of the best work being done in AIR application development today. Get insight from the authors of the Adobe AIR Cookbook, plus a group of the top contributors to the Adobe AIR Cookbook website. For the past six months, there's been an open call to the RIA developer community to show off their top tricks and best practices; in this session, you'll see their work in action and get a chance to exchange information with the panelists. There may be a bonus interactive feature or two in this session (hint: involving prizes and all comers).

Speakers:	Michael Koch, Rich Tretola , Marco Casario, Koen De Weggheleire
Audience:	Web Developer, Web Designer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	Spry, Open Source, LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, FlashCast, Flash Player, Flash Media Server, Flash Lite, Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, ColdFusion, Blaze DS, Ajax, AIR, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Device Central, ActionScript, Acrobat, "Thermo"
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

InsideRIA Outlook, 2009: What Every Developer Needs to Be Thinking About

Join top experts to hear how standards, the economy, emerging players, workflow, client expectations, and more are affecting the industry. InsideRIA regulars representing some of the top houses in the business discuss the top strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats in the industry. Panelists have five minutes to outline their top SWOT points; then the panel and audience have an open Q&A on what we can expect in the next 12 to 18 months.

Speakers:	Rich Tretola , Adam Flater, RJ Owen
Audience:	Web Developer, Web Designer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	Spry, Open Source, LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS, Flex Builder, Flex, FlashCast, Flash Player, Flash Media Server, Flash Lite, Flash, Fireworks, Dreamweaver, Connect, ColdFusion, Blaze DS, Ajax, AIR, Adobe XD, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Device Central, ActionScript, Acrobat 3D, Acrobat, "Thermo"
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 11:00 am - 12:00 pm

Introduction to LiveCycle ES

Peel back the marketing-speak and take a real look at what LiveCycle ES is all about from the platform to the tooling. Topics will include how LiveCycle ES fits into the enterprise and which types of applications are well suited for LiveCycle. This session will also include a product demo.

Speakers:	Greg Wilson, Christoph Rooms
Audience:	Web Developer, Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Beginner
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 11:30 am - 12:30 pm

LiveCycle ES and Adobe Solution Accelerators

Learn how Adobe Solution Accelerators can help LiveCycle ES customers reduce development time and increase the quality of their applications by leveraging prebuilt deployable code and best practice methodologies.

Speakers:	Valerie Snider-Lynch
Audience:	Partner Decision Maker, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 3:30 pm - 4:30 pm

LiveCycle ES Architecture Deep Dive

Deep dive into the LiveCycle ES platform architecture. Topics will include the service container, invocation layer, service orchestration, and events and techniques for extending and customizing the platform.

Speakers:	Shone Sadler
Audience:	Web Developer, IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Advanced
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

LiveCycle ES: Building Applications

Learn how to develop and deploy applications with Adobe LiveCycle ES (Enterprise Suite). By enabling service-oriented architecture (SOA) and business process management (BPM), LiveCycle ES allows both business and IT professionals to visually assemble end-to-end processes that unify systems, people, business rules, and web services quickly and flexibly. We'll develop a LiveCycle based application using LiveCycle solution components and determine how to implement business rules in a process. We'll also cover process deployment and the LiveCycle workspace and use the record and playback feature to debug an application.

Speakers:	Bob Bailey
Audience:	Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Sunday, November 16, 9:00 am - 5:00 pm

Rapid Enterprise RIA Development with Solution Accelerators

Find out how Adobe Solution Accelerators enable the rapid development of recurring industry solutions with Flex, Adobe AIR, and LiveCycle ES. In this presentation, Adobe Consulting will look at two problem spaces — customer enrollment and correspondence management — and show how to create innovative experiences with Flex, AIR, and LiveCycle ES by leveraging freely available Solution Accelerators.

Speakers:	Danny Saikaly, Steven Webster
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, Flex, AIR
When:	Wednesday, November 19, 5:00 pm - 6:00 pm

Service Component Architecture (SCA)

This session explores the SCA work at OASIS, including bindings to Java and similarities with LiveCycle ES in methodology. Those involved with enterprise architecture will find this session of particular interest.

Speakers:	Mike Edwards, Martin Chapman
Audience:	Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES, LiveCycle DS
When:	Tuesday, November 18, 1:30 pm - 2:30 pm

Service-Oriented Architecture for the Enterprise

Attend this session to hear an examination of the OASIS Reference Model for SOA and a discussion of concrete service architecture work. We will relate the concepts of the model to concrete implementations. LiveCycle ES will be used as a case study for implementing a full-blown services platform for facilitating automated business processes and working with human-centric business processes.

Speakers:	Matt Butler
Audience:	Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Intermediate
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Using LiveCycle Content Services ES

Explore LiveCycle Content Services ES, a fully integrated set of content services ranging from an enterprise content repository to social collaboration tools such as enterprise forums. LiveCycle Content Services ES is now part of the base LiveCycle ES platform, providing features such as check-in/checkout, version control, auditing, archiving/retention, and access rights management.

Speakers:	Paul Guerette
Audience:	IS/IT, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	Beginner
Products:	LiveCycle ES
When:	Monday, November 17, 11:30 am - 1:00 pm Tuesday, November 18, 3:30 pm - 5:00 pm Wednesday, November 19, 2:00 pm - 3:30 pm

What's New in LiveCycle ES Update 1

See the new features of LiveCycle ES Update 1. New features include content services, PDF Generator 3D, an improved development environment, improved deployment, expanded platform support, and much more.

Speakers:	Marcel Boucher
Audience:	Partner Decision Maker, IS/IT, Business Decision Maker, Architect, Application Developer
Skill:	General Audience
Products:	LiveCycle ES, Acrobat 3D
When:	Tuesday, November 18, 9:00 am - 10:00 am

Doug and Ben rock it with SpatialKey

I came across what might be the most efficient Flex mapping application on the web, launched by the Universal Mind geniuses and others like Ben Stucki, Andy Powell and Doug McCune. It's called SpatialKey and the technology preview release just came out. This is a product doing fully client-side heatmap renderings of thousands of data points and can do up to about 100k completely client-side. The architecture uses a hybrid approach and when client side loads exceed the 100K, processing moves to a server to do aggregation.



SpatialKey loads a ton of data into a Flex app and produces sweet visuals that tell a much better story about the data than looking at points on a map. They're only launching the client-side stuff as a "technology preview" while working on an enterprise offering that includes a database product. Potential use cases include deploying to police departments to handle their entire crime databases.

Doug wrote a much more detailed blog article about it here.

VMWare joins Linux Foundation alongside Adobe, others!

As reported in the Washington Post,

"Virtualization giant VMware has joined the Linux Foundation, lining up alongside existing members like Adobe, Google and IBM, the organization announced Wednesday.

Virtualization, the ability to run software in virtualized containers so multiple OSes or versions can run on one physical machine, is becoming more prevalent in IT environments. At its core, virtualization is enabled by software called a hypervisor, and can help drive down data-center costs, among other benefits."

To me, this is an awesome development. I am about to add Debian to my VMWare list and am glad to see they are seeing the light. For those of you who have not tried Linux lately, it has come a long way. Awesome day today!!

O'Reilly Open Source 2008 Slides available

James Ward and I jointly presented a session at this year's OSCON conference in Portland. The session was titled Flex: the Open Source SDK for RIAs and it includes step by step instructions on how to download the source trunk via svn and use Apache Ant to build.

Presentation: Flex_ the Open Source SDK for RIAs Presentation [PPT]
Paper: Flex_ the Open Source SDK for RIAs Paper [PDF]

Abstract: Adobe has released the Flex SDK open source under Mozilla Public License (MPL). This includes the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, the Java source code for the compilers, the debugger, and the core libraries. Flex can run in any browser—on Mac OS X, Windows, Linux, and AIR. This session will introduce people to Flex, provide code samples, use cases and a roadmap.

Duane's World Episode 7

In this episode we explore LiveCycle ES including demonstrating an AIR Client written by Jorg Knippschild on Adobe in Munich. Dave Liao and Vlad Ghelesel from Ensemble Systems are interviewed and discuss trends in LiveCycle ES development including coupling Flex and AIR. The Code and Tunes segment features great high-quality Imperial metal from my good friend Kurt Phillips' band Warhag.



The code samples will be uploaded to duanesworldtv.org later.

WTO Talks Collapse - this affects EVERYONE!

I was deeply saddened to read the following from the BBC website this evening:

"Marathon talks in Geneva aimed at liberalising global trade have collapsed, the head of the World Trade Organisation has said.

Pascal Lamy confirmed the failure, which officials have blamed on China, India and the US failing to agree on import rules. EU Trade Commissioner Peter Mandelson said the result was "heartbreaking". The talks were launched in 2001 in Doha and were seen as providing a cornerstone for future global trade.

The main stumbling block was farm import rules, which allow countries to protect poor farmers by imposing a tariff on certain goods in the event of a drop in prices or a surge in imports."

This is very serious. You might not think it affects you but this does. I worked with the United Nations (UN/CEFACT) as a vice chair to remove barriers to global trade for close to 6 years. I saw many things that were beyond change and a lot of things that could be changed. There was doubt of course, after all, who am I (a mountain biker/musician / tech guy) to help the world and defend those who cannot help themselves. Luckily I killed that small voice in the back of my head and dove in deep and felt I have caused change.

The failure of this round of talks on farm subsidies and farm tariffs means we are all going to pay more for food and people in some countries are going to die because they have no food. I have pinged Avaaz.org to get a petition started to bring to Pascal Lamy to urge the member nations to get back to the table and remind them that every day they stall, people die. Statistically, people have died because of failures in world trade in the time it takes you to read this blog.

If you see a petition from avaaz.org, please sign it. Stop this madness.

Tutorial on PHP-AMF

Fellow evangelist Lee Brimlow just built and posted a wicked tutorial on using Action Message Format with PHP. I think it is one of the best ever online tutorials on this subject. Lee takes you through the high level overview, then the server side AMFPHP and finally the client side code. You can access it here and see Lee's blog here. It is easy to code along with.

Adobe TV - Working with Flex Builders' Web Services WSDL Wizard

The following video is a simplified version of the Duane's World episode 1 Web Services AS3 code generation wizard. The source code for this is available here alongside other code samples. If you want the more thorough explanation of what is going on, the Duane's World 1 show is the best place.

The lowest form of life just left the planet

I saw a story on Slashdot today that made me ill. The Spam King apparently escaped from a prison then killed himself, his wife and child. At the same time, I got a report of bombs going off in Bangalore, India where I have been.

Harmony and Peace please! Both of these stories evoked strong feelings.

The Spam King was the lowest form of life on the planet. He collectively hurt our global economy more than most other criminals and deserved to go to jail. He took some of my life away and probably some of yours. SPAM is a crime. Make no mistake about it. The selfishness of this individual has now cost others their lives. This confirms my belief that spammers are in fact the lowest form of life and he probably would have been lower on the prison hierarchy than any other inmate.

The second story really worries me as I have good friends in Bangalore. When I last visited it, I found Bangalore to be alive and thriving. I wonder who would do this and why?

Killing of innocents can never be justified. I have to go speak at OSCON now.

OSCON 2008 and New Flex/AIR Course for GeoWeb

James Ward and I are heading down to OSCON today to speak and hang out. OSCON is a great conference but I haven't been in a few years. Looking really forward to it.

Yesterday we delivered a new 3+ hour course on Flex and AIR map based RIA development at GeoWeb 2008 (one of the best conferences in the world!). After completing the writing of the course and giving it once, we really want to offer it up to the community. It takes attendees through 9 projects with lots of coding to demonstrate concepts related to Geo-spatial mashups/RIAs in Flex and AIR.

Directories:

~/AttendeeProjects - the starter projects with the code completed and comments where students have to add code
~/CompleteProjects – the solutions source code
~/TeachersDocument (PDF and DOCX) – the manual for anyone wanting to teach this course. It has a lot of cut and paste code in it to speed up solutions.
~/Presentation (PPT and PDF) - the presentation slides

It is fairly well documented to allow anyone to present but if you find anything missing, please feel free to contribute. If you want the course, contact me at dnickull at adobe dot com. We'll send it out for anyone to use.

UPDATE:  I have uploaded the ZIP file here.  This is not a Flex archive but contains Flex Archives.  Unzip the course first then you can import the project and use the assets.

Car Reviews Indicate that New Cars are Cool But They Aren't Hot Cars

As some of you know, I am trading in my 2002 Porsche Twin Turbo. No - this is nothing to do with the price of gas, I just really don't drive it enough. The car has been a feature on Duane's World but is now up for sale. In the meantime, I am in need of another car. One of the things that I've noticed lately whenever I've been reading car reviews is that the new cars everyone is interested in are cool but they're not hot. What I mean by that is that these cars have some really interesting features but they aren't the kind of cars that you want to go cruising in with your buddies. Emerging car designers should think about ways to incorporate the cool features of these cars with a style that hot people are going to want to be seen driving. I guess people are maturing and realizing that things like hybrids are actually far cooler than a Porsche Turbo. Go figure?

For example, the Toyota Prius is great in terms of the technology used in hybrid cars and the fact that it gets great gas mileage but you aren't exactly going to want to drive up to your friend's house specifically to show off this car. Likewise, the Smart car is a cool car with a unique design that's different from a lot of the new cars out there but it's not as though you're going to be able to really feel like you're a hot guy while driving around in one of these cars. You don't drive up to someone else in one of these cars and rev your car engine to get attention on the road.

There's nothing wrong with the new cars that are coming out today. All of the car reviews about vehicles like the Toyota Prius and the Smart car seem to indicate that there are some features about these cars that are worth keeping as we design new cars in the future. I just think that we need to take some of the benefits of hybrid cars and small cars and make them a little bit more stylish. I'm all for driving a cool car with modern features but I don't want to look like a tool while doing it.

Why doesn't FIA or some other organization have a racing class for these cars? A lot of car technology (Radial Tires, Seatbelts, crumple zones, improved fuel mileage to name a few) are the direct result of innovation stemmed by racing. I can see two cars guys 10 years from now having this conversation:

Car Guy 1: "Hey - nice rod. What is that? A 20 Gigawatt DC inverter under the hood?"
Car Guy 2: "I wish. It's the stock 15 GW but I added a boost capacitor to give me 150 kw of torque when I hit the pedal hard"
Car Guy 1: "Wicked - nice styling too. Those 28" rims with regenerative braking kick ass".
....

You get the idea.

A personal interview with Andre Michelle, Webinale 2008 and Spoiler

Duane's World episode 6 is now out. I was really grateful to have been able to spend time interviewing Flash guru Andre Michelle. He discusses his new venture (www.hobnox.com) and shows off some cool screenshots of the new audio tools. These are really amazing!! Andre's work takes Flash to the ultimate edge.

The music for the Code and Tunes sessions is provided by Spoiler, my newest favorite metal band from Germany. Bass player Marc Thiele hand picked the songs for the video. If you get a chance to see Spoiler live - check them out! The code and tunes shows some Flex code to work with audio and explains how to add a pause, play and stop button to an audio player in a few minutes. Thanks to all the guys from Webinale 2008 (Felix, Stefan et al) for appearing in the video and helping me with interviews and location logistics as well as putting on a great conference! Here is the show. Feel free to use the embed code to redistribute wherever!



Oh yeah - there is also film of driving at 210 KPH on the autobahn!

Doc Or Die: XML Fever

Bob Glushko made a really funny post about XML fever to celebrate XML's tenth birthday.

Doc Or Die: XML Fever

Do you feel a wicked urge to build a meta schema language, fix the semantic web or start data modeling (only advanced cases of XML fever)? This doc explains why. LOL - thanks Bob!

O'Reilly Foo Camp 2008

I just got back from O'Reilly's Foo Camp 2008. It was really a life changing experience. The ability to mesh/mind meld with the world's greatest minds was incredible. Topics ranged from serious discussions on UN policy to create global fair trade and equality to guitar hacks and inventing new games.

I'd go as far to say that the 300 colleagues and peers at this year's Foo Camp should be consulted to set world policy. My head is full and it will take weeks to digest. I feel grateful for the interactions and the invitation to attend this weekend. There will be a future episode of Duane's World TV highlighting the event with interviews from Bob Glushko (UC Berkeley), Tim O'Reilly (founder - O'Reilly Media), John Markoff (New York Times) and Dries Buytaert (Drupal Founder).

I also want to express sincere gratitude for all the staff at O'Reilly for putting on this event. Everyone pitched in to make this a perfect weekend. Too many people to thank, but thanks to Tim, Sarah, the cooks, facilities staff and all others that made this possible.

Duane
(Feeling really grateful and optimistic about the future of our planet)

Frankenstein Fender?

22nd Century is remaining a three piece band. In order to cover the extra leads when we play live, I have acquired a rare doubleneck body and am building a Cremer/Fender hybrid doubleneck. The guitar will have a standard American Precision Bass on the bottom and strat on the top. Playing live will be a bit tricky as I'll have to switch back and forth between lead and bass while Tim learns to play guitar and bass pedals at the same time.

Here are the photos:

World Record Download? Where was the contest?

NOTE: This is not a rant against FireFox. For the record, it is my browser of choice and gets equal time with Safari.

I recently became aware and annoyed of a claim by Mozilla stating they own the world record (stamped by Guiness World Records nonetheless) for the most software downloads in one single day. This claim is obviously somewhat hollow as the details are slim to none, nor was anyone else in the industry that I am aware of even invited to the party.

You can read the claim here:

"Thanks to the support of the always amazing Mozilla community, we now hold a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. From 18:16 UTC on June 17, 2008 to 18:16 UTC on June 18, 2008, 8,002,530 people downloaded Firefox 3 and are now enjoying a safer, smarter and better Web."

How many downloads does Apple or Microsoft get when they update their OS? I looked at the figures of both Microsoft and Apple and figure both of them have probably beat this on several days based on install numbers alone (SP2 anyone?). Furthermore, as noted by fellow Evangelist Ben Forta, there have been over a billion downloads of the Adobe Flash Player in the first 5 months of 2008 alone. This averages around 6.7 million (1,000,000,000 / 150) every day sustained over 5 months and Adobe has actually publicly stated that we've had days where software downloads exceeded 10 million in a day. Some even place this number to 12 million per day.

I seriously doubt Mozilla beat yesterday's massive coordinated DNS upgrade patch. According to CERT and others, "This is the largest synchronized security update in the history of the Internet, and is the result of hard work and dedication across dozens of organizations."

Speaking for myself, I dispute Firefox's claim. Not that is really matters. I just prefer the truth please.


Sorry FireFox. I love your software, I use your software but if you want to have a real contest, you have to at least invite the competition.

Duanes World Episode 5 - E.B.U., Switzerland, Flex and Helcion!

Duane's World Episode five is now live. Special music guests and one of my favorite bands Helcion (Check them out!!!) supply ripping music for the Code and Tunes segment while I show how to work with video in Flex Builder 3. Other guests include Marcus Metzner (S4M - Germany) and Roger Roberts (RTBF - Belguim). Discussions include metadata for archiving media packages as well as the SOA infrastructure for enabling Media Assets to be repurposed for the web to meet new distribution and business models.

Air Canada Executive First Class Rocks!

On my recent trip home from Europe, I finally got the chance to try Air Canada's new executive First Class suites. The picture below does not do it justice. See the three D Flash at http://www.marketel.com/aircanada/Executive_First/index.html



Special thanks to Melonie, Natalie and Dean for being the best hosts on flight 897 yesterday!

Code your way to get into MAX 2008 for free!

Adobe is making a special offer for those of you who are holding off on contributing to the Open Source Flex SDK.

* For every 3 bugs where we accept and commit your submitted patch, we will purchase an Adobe-related book from your Amazon wish list (once you've had your 3rd patch accepted we'll reach out to you to find your wish list).

* For the first two contributors to have 10 patches committed, we'll pay for your MAX 2008 registration (any region).

The full details are posted at http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+3+Contributions

Searchable Flash - some early tips

Adobe announced this morning (I am in Zurich) that it is has worked with Google and Yahoo! to improve search engine capability to reach inside of the Flash (SWF) file format. You can read the FAQs here.

So how does it work?

This is being done via a headless Flash reader that can extract strings from Flash and use them to build an initial page ranking and string array for each page. The string arrays themselves are then fed into Google and Yahoo! ranking algorithms where they will give the page an initial ranking for each tree. Exactly what is indexed and what rank the search engines will give it is yet to be seen. Don't automatically assume everything in SWF is now at par with HTML text.

For example, a large vector-based drawing of the word "Washington" will not likely make you rank high as it is still not text. Cognitive capabilities are not easy to bestow upon machines (which is why Captcha works so well).



Why you might be excited

Without doing anything, the engines will use some of your text values in SWFs and possibly adjust your rankings for certain terms. This is a good thing for people who have not yet learned how to get Google and Yahoo! to use static content for their indexes. In cases where your unique text content has previously been inaccessible, there should be improvements.

Why you might not be so excited

Initial page ranking is not the silver bullet it once used to be. As soon as searches are performed and your content comes up, both Google and Yahoo! will still dynamically adjust your score based on a multitude of conditions. I have outlined several of these tips in this blog post already. Duane's World Episode 3 also has some tips and tricks on how to use Google's dynamic page ranking algorithm to move up the ladder.


Some tips and tricks:

Flash developers who took care have had their content indexed all along. Using XML or XHTML data providers with strings in them and a link from the index.html shell was a great way to get stuff indexed and still generate good page rankings. From your main SWF, you simply just used the XHTML file as a data provider and parsed it with E4X (ActionScript 3's XML parser). That way the same raw data was both indexed by search engines and also used by the application. Those developers who took this care might now be trumped by those who will get lucky and have high rankings.

Flash developers, like HTML developers, still need to understand that the pages that point at your content have a lot to do with your dynamic rank. Content is still king too. Make sure you have your keyword well researched before betting the farm on it. For example - how many people performed unique searches on that term? Is it an unambiguous term?

This will provide more relevant automatic search rankings of the millions of RIAs and other dynamic content that run in Adobe 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 now be confident it can be found by users around the globe.

One of the best ways to achieve a higher ranking is to examine other Flash sites and see what they have done. Sombrio is a good example. If you search for this in Google, the Sombrio Clothing Company comes up #1 out of about 2 million.

http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&rlz=&=&q=sombrio&btnG=Google+Search

Note that if you read this, then click on Sombrio Cartel, you are actually helping maintain it at the #1 place. Google will see the above string as a search in true REST style, then track what you click on, bounce rates etc.

Peter Elst also noted some additional concerns here. He wrote:

The concern I have here is that URL requests to the backend will get indexed, those URLs getting exposed in search queries or spider bots hitting those URLs could cause issues. Its not like in HTML content where the search engines can ignore form submit URLs, there is no such context in a HTTPService or URLRequest.

True. Once again, developers owe it to their clients to learn more about how the systems work. Note that Google currently does index some content and you can try this search by clicking here:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&as_qdr=all&q=sombrio+filetype%3Aswf&btnG=Search

More on this later. I am going to try some experiments to see what is possible.