Announcing Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview – 3rd June 2009

I am sure you have all been hearing about the new and exciting tools that we at Adobe have been building. We will preview many of these new innovations – Adobe Flash Builder (formerly known as Flex Builder), Adobe Flash Catalyst, upcoming versions of LiveCycle and BlazeDS at the “Adobe Flash Platform Tools Preview” to be held on 3rd June 2009 at Taj Residency in Bangalore. You can read more about the event by visiting our website.

Entry to this event is by invitation only. If you would like to join us for this event (it is an evening event with dinner:) drop me an email with your name, company, designation and contact number to  rrao (at) adobe (dot) com and I will send you an invite. Seats availabe on a FCFS basis. SOLD OUT! See you on June 3rd

Thanks for Voting. Adobe Rocks GIDS!

Adobe swept the “Great Indian Developer Awards – II”. Thanks to all who voted. We increased our tally from 1 last year to 3 this year and was the company with the most number of awards… w00t!

Adobe swept the stage in 3 categories:

• Best Collaboration Solution – Adobe Acrobat Connect Professional (nominated along with WebEx, MS Office Online.. etc)
• Best Web Development Platform – Adobe ColdFusion 8 (nominated along with ASP.NET, DOJO… etc)
• Best Framework – Adobe Flex (nominated along with .NET framework, Sprint & Struts)

sandbox violation – find answers to your Flex questions…

• How can we speed up the performance of DataGrid when there is a lot of data?
• How do we reduce SWF size so that the download times are lesser?
• My Flex application works fine when run from Flex Builder, but when deployed to server, I get security related errors. Why?

You always had questions like this and never knew where to go to get answers? Anirudh Sasikumar, a Technical Evangelist at Adobe has created a project called sandboxviolation. In his own words, sand box violation is  “for the flex and flash community where users can post questions / answers and vote a question or answer up or down earning reputation points along the way”.

Its available in 2 flavors:

Flex App on Google App Engine | An AIR app with offline support

Check it out, benefit from it, post your questions, answer other’s questions, vote answers up/ down and help the community churn high quality content…

Addendum: Anirudh’s written a Syntax Highlighting in AS3 as part of the above project which is awesome and then opensourced the code which has now created quite a buzz. Check it out too 🙂

Adobe riathon – registrations open…

If you are a Flex/ Flash /  AIR developer in India and think you can be the one behind the coolest of all  RIAs, you cannot afford to miss this event! Put on your RIA development shoes, build the coolest app that you can imagine and send it to us on or before 26^th November 2008. If your application catches our attention, you will be invited to a very special event on the 29^th of November at Grand Ashok, Bangalore where the top applications will go on stage for a demo showdown! This is your chance to Flash your design skills, Flex your coding muscles and AIR your demos in front of an elite judge panel & the Adobe community.

The Grand winner / winning team will walk away with a groovy Apple IPhone.

The runners up will take home with them a Sony home theater system.

What’s more, there are loads of IPod Nano’s, shuffles and Adobe branded goodies to be won.

This event also brings to you  an exclusive preview on the new developments in the Adobe Flash Platform. Experience the Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo), Gumbo(code name for the upcoming version of Flex) ,FXG and Flash Player 10.

Register today at http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com

For more information and contest rules & regulations, please visit http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

RIA Architecture Summit 2008

The RIA Architect Summit on 3rd April 2008 was a really exciting affair. We had gurus like Ben Forta, James Ward & David Wadhwani (GM & VP Platform Business Unit, Adobe) on stage.

The event started off at a very small scale with just 100-150 people planned. But as we started inviting people the demand just went through the roof, that we had to open it up. We finally had over 400 people attending the event that saw the venue logistics being stretched to the limit.

Welcome Anirudh & Sujit

Our evangelism team here in India got a boost last month when two bright guys joined our team. I’m extremely happy to welcome them to the family.

Anirudh Sasikumar is a hardcore programmer who comes to us from the world of C++ & Linux. He loves LISP and OpenGL and loves to dive into anything where he can apply his mind. He joins us from Procsys and has tried his hand at Flex & AJAX before.

 Sujit Reddy has muddled his hands in Java, J2EE, Flash & ActionScript2.0. He is surely a go-getter with a lot of enthusiasm packed within.

You should check out their blogs, they have already stared to post some very interesting stuff there… 🙂

I’m a Flex Evangelist

My benevolent employers at Adobe have fulfilled my dream, and granted me the title of Technical Evangelist in the Flex Product line. I’m really thrilled to be taking up this position… To be part of a team that boasts of names like Ryan Stewart, Ted Patrick, James Ward and Duane Nickull is an honor in itself.

It seems like a long time back that I came into Macromedia and into the Flex team at the fag end of the Flex1.5 cycle. 2 years have gone and we are in the middle of Flex3. To have seen flex grow from a small enterprise product to a hugely popular RIA technology and then progressing onto the desktop with AIR and finally going open-source, has been really emotional journey. Now I start the second leg. But as Spidey says “With great power comes great responsibility!” 🙂

I’ll now be a part of the Tech Evangelism team based out of India which includes Prayank & Ramesh. But my work is not India specific and would love to hear from individuals and communities worldwide. I personally would like to see Flex taking over the world. The potential is really there… as we see by the statistics in India and elsewhere. There are a lot of really knowledgeable people out there, but they need to be brought onto a global platform to interact and innovate. And hopefully I can help.

So if you think you have any idea that can help chalk out that future, feel free to contact me on my personal email id. If you are running a Flex user community in your city or country itself, we would really like to know. Community has been the backbone of the success of all products at Adobe (and erstwhile Macromedia) and its concerns will surely remain as one of our primary concerns in the future too. Now with Flex going open source, I can really say,

Flex is a software of the people,
by the people, for the people !

The Flex Show…

I hit upon a very nice site today… The Flex Show is a podcast service run by Ryan Stewart and Jeff Houser

It has interviews by some awesome names in the Flex arena, ranging from Matt Chotin  to Juan Sanchez and the latest in the list being Doug Mccune… Do check it out. I’m adding this to my blogs to watch list 🙂

For Flex Beginners, do check out his first podacast… Talks about a lot of stuff that i did in my e-seminar

Enjoy ! 🙂

Flex APAC eSeminar files on Google Code

During the last seminar, people complained of having lots of problems accessing the URLs of the eSeminars recordings & files. I thought we could collate it a single place. So I have gone ahead and created a Flex APAC Seminars Google Code Project which will host all the resources used in the eSeminars.

You can access the following information there…

• Use the Wiki tab to find what each of the eSeminars contained. It has a wholesome info on what the seminar was on, when it was done, the host and the topic. It also provides links to the recordings and the zipped archives of the files & resources used in the seminar.
• Use the Download tab to directly download the files (you can also go to the wiki and download from the link there)

For convenience, I have split the wiki into pages, each having information on 10 eSeminars. You can use this to access all the resources connected to each of the seminars. Do send me if you have any suggestions on this.

Flex APAC eSeminar series 2 – AS3 for OO Programmers

We had the second edition of the Flex APAC eSeminar Series yesterday. Harish from the Flex team here took the session on “AS3 for OO Programmers”. I was there with him to help with the logistics and to take the questions when Harish was doing the presentation.

It went off very well, much more successful than the initial trial run. We had a total attendance of 67 people, though mostly from India. Moving forward, we want the rest of APAC to actively participate too. We are working towards that.

Harish covered basics of AS3 and some nuances like converting an MXML code to AS and the component lifecycle workflow and things. I think it he did a great job. What’s more, there was a lot of interaction with and within the community which was very encouraging. Follow the following links for more details

1. Link to the recording of the connect session
2. Link to the resources/ppts/files, used in the presentation

Looking forward to meeting more of you in the seminars to come 🙂