I just checked into my hotel, opened up my laptop to get an IM message from FlexDaddy Andrew Spaulding bragging that he’s online via WiFi while sitting in his seat somewhere above Australia on his way to MAX Asia.

We needed to discuss a demo that i’m presenting soon so took the opportunity and we both linked straight into my Acrobat Connect room, shared my screen and away we went. We even fired up the webcams because we could. I didn’t really believe he was flying

Sadly i hear that Boeing are not continuing this service past the end of the year. Two steps forward one step back but i guess someone has to pay the bills and it just wasn’t turning a profit.

Time for a little sillyness… hope the orange text on black don’t hurt the eyes. Too bad i’m travelling, although trick or treating in a hotel might be fun! 

2 new projects are up on RIAForge this week specifically written for use with Adobe LiveCycle but open up many possibilities.

The first is the LiveCycle Productivity Kit which contains a whole bunch of helper classes for working with the various API’s. I’ve seen plenty of examples of these classes being used for integrating Flex & ColdFusion with LiveCycle solutions. One use case is to have a Flex app interact with LiveCycle Workflow to start new processes and query the status. Another is to query the LiveCycle Form Manager repository. This library of classes has been kicking around within Adobe for a couple of years now and its good to see it cleaned up and opened up as an open source project.

The second is the XMP Metadata Extractor by Duanne Nickull which extracts XMP metadata (who would have guessed?) from PDF documents.

RIAForge is definitely worth checking out.

I managed to get a hold of 2 tickets to see Pink Floyd’s Roger Waters show in Sydney in January. I went and watched Roger and his brilliant band perform about 3 years ago at the Sydney Entertainment Centre and he was fantastic, so i am really excited about this new tour. 

Still, “decent” tickets set me back $200 each, plus booking fee, which i think is way way over priced. Platinum tickets (front row area) were $350!  What is going on? Looks like i’ll be buying more live DVDs and less tickets in future.

The weekend has come and gone so quick and tonight I’m in the hotel room doing the last bit of prep work for tomorrow’s Adobe presentation.

So what to do in Perth over the weekend?

1. Ruth & I visited Fremantle, cathing the train for $3.20 each from Perth and arriving about 25 minutes later on the edge of “Freo”. Spent time walking through the town, looked at the markets, visited the old gaol and had fish and chips for dinner before catching the bus back to Perth. Nice.
2. Visited the Swan Valley winery area – Stopping at the Margaret Valley Chocolate Company store for taste testing and sipping many a wine. Stopping for lunch at the Duckstein brewery for a bit of german food. Yum
3. Driving to “The Pinnacles” 3 hours north of Perth to see fantastic limestone monuments jutting out of the sand desert. Narrowly missing snakes keeping warm on the road and reptiles trying to get across the road before we splat them, while us ourselves trying not to be splatted by 3 trailer road trains. Nature is Awesome
4. Finding the Maltida Bay Brewing Company that is responsible for a favourite brew of mine. Mmmm Beer
Anyway, off to bed so i can be fresh tomorrow for Day 1 of the Australian Adobe roadshow…

Adobe Australia’s Creative Suite guru Mike Stoddart & I hit the road next week (well.. airport lounge) and head west towards Perth (Tuesday) & Adelaide (Thursday). Mike will be covering the brand new Acrobat 8, now part of Creative Suite 2.3 as well as a whole lot of information on the rest of the suite, including 90 minutes just on Photoshop. I’ll be covering both Dreamweaver 8, now also part Creative Suite 2.3 as well as Adobe’s Production Studio for video. If you’re from one of these cities, register using the link below and come and say hi!
At the same time Steve Nichols, Lindsay Brown & Brian Chau will be heading to Auckland and Wellington, New Zealand to cover the same content as above, with Lindsay spending time in a seperate stream for business oriented users on Acrobat 8.

These are just a few of the cities we’ll be travelling to in the upcoming weeks so please check out the Adobe events pages below. Personally this is my first visit to Perth & Adelaide (ok, so i was there when i was 2 but that doesnt count) and i look forward to exploring as much as i can!

Adobe Creative Suite 2.3 Seminar Agenda & Registration

Adobe Acrobat 8 Launch Agenda & Registration 

Just added myself to Technorati, the blog tool / tracker. I had to claim my own blog! View my Technorati Profile

35 celsius (thats about 95 farenheit for those using the “old” system still) and its only the middle of spring! Summer is going to be a hot one by the looks of it. Meanwhile people on the other side of the world are getting cold

This week i’ve been on the Adobe stand at Sibos 2006 here in Sydney.

Sibos is one of the world’s premier financial services events which might prompt you to wonder why Adobe is here. It’s simple really, think of all of the people, documents and exchange of information required in financial transactions. I’m not talking about the technology required to move money from one account another, but all of the people facing correspondance that is required to facilate this. 

Think of the forms, documents and systems people need to interact with. Most of them sadly are still paper based and are processing information via rekeying or less reliable technology like OCR. Why do they still use paper?  It’s familiar, doesn’t require training to interact with, and its portable. Since businesses are made up of “people” and not necessarily trained “users” this makes sense.  

Adobe has been refining it’s PDF format over the years to contain not just the “presentation” of information, but also the all important Business Logic and XML Data layer. This means that the PDFs that you interact with using the free Adobe Reader can equally be processed by your Business Systems without manual processing. For the financial industry, this directly translates to reduced costs, higher data accuracy and enables the all important better engagement with customers. Businesses can now move to an electronic solution that meets the needs established by paper workflows without extensive retraining staff and customers.

Of course, Adobe has a whole range of serverside solutions to automate the flow of information, developer tools to quickly realise the desired solution, but most importantly, when the system is in place Adobe gives the “business” people the tools to keep the system, forms, documents etc up to date and to meet the business needs.

So the next time someone asks why Adobe (don’t you guys make that free Reader thing?) are at a financial services event, thats why.

I’ve updated the Eclipse server definitions that i had made available previously. Eclipse users who have updated to Web Tools Platform (WTP) 1.5 on Eclipse 3.2 can now continue to work with JBoss 3.2.5. This is also great news for Adobe LiveCycle users running the “turnkey” option as JBoss 3.2.5 is what’s used under the hood. Get the new Eclipse JBoss 3.2.5 Definition Files here