Builder.au have just published a write-up on the state of the development environment and its future for mobile devices, and how Flash is now a major player in this area. Its a good read, and not just because i’m quoted

Have a read here

Brian Chau has been busy recording his presentation from the recent Sydney, Auckland & Brisbane Adobe Events (Melbourne was before Christmas)

Whether you were at the event and would like a refresher or missed it and are interested in the following topics, go get a coffee (or a beer!), find a comfy chair and click on the links below to open the Connect recording;

Flash Video (1 hour): http://mmse.acrobat.com/p12964264/

The session highlighted a couple of examples of how websites used Flash Video effectively to communicate with their customers. Two deployment mechanisms were discussed: progressive download and streaming (via Flash Media Server). That was followed by a demo as to how to build a Flash app that streaming videos from the streaming server.

Flash Mobile (45 min): http://mmse.acrobat.com/p87978896/

The sessions started with a few Flash Lite examples for mobile devices like the Nokia Symbian S60 series and the Windows Mobile 5 phones. Followed by the demo using Flash Professional 8 with the Flash Lite 2.1 authoring update. Testing of the content using the built-in phone emulator as well as the new and yet-to-come Adobe Device Central.

Spry Framework for AJAX (45 min): http://mmse.acrobat.com/p23756668/

The benefits of AJAX application were explained. Followed by the examples from the Spry Framework download. Then it was the demo that built a simple AJAX application that loaded various xml files and displayed the result in a sortable table.

The rest of the sessions presented by Flex Daddy Andrew Spaulding on Flex are being recorded and will also be online soon!

Lots of new LiveCycle samples to play with!
The team over at Ensemble Systems have been busy putting together a great walkthrough tutorial (including videos!) that show’s how simple it is to build form based processes with Adobe LiveCycle. This is a great way to see how easy LiveCycle can be to enable your workflows. You can either just watch the videos, or install the software and follow along!
Using various components in the LiveCycle Suite, this tutorial shows how you can bind interactive PDF Forms that replaced the paper versions with the same look and feel, and integrate the data from the forms with backend systems (in this case a simple MySQL database) without any rekeying.
Also Ensemble have released two more samples;

Flex – LiveCycle Workflow integration

This sample shows how you can quickly initiate a LiveCycle process by invoking it via Web Services from your Flex app.
Flex Sports Pool

This sample demonstrates how Flex and Flex Data Services can be used to spice up your office Sport’s Pool competitions.

Lately when I talk to customers about forms, i get the odd question about what Adobe is doing with XForms. W3C’s definition of XForms is “XForms” is W3C’s name for a specification of Web forms that can be used with a wide variety of platforms including desktop computers, hand helds, information appliances, and even paper. XForms started life as a subgroup of the HTML Working Group, but has now been spun off as an independent Activity.”

The trouble for most of our customers is that XForms doesn’t hold the presentation description of how the form should appear, which is why many use Adobe’s XFA format inconjuntion with Adobe LiveCycle and LiveCycle Designer. When rendered as PDF, you get a form that you can confidently distribute knowing that the form will appear as intended, will print well, and have accessibility and legal layout parameters maintained.  This is quite important for both Financial industries and government alike (go have a look at your mortgage application form or ABN registration)
The good news is that today Adobe released an alpha version of its new XForms to XFA conversion tool that will in future become part of the LiveCycle Designer tool for forms (also sold as part of Adobe Acrobat)

The nice thing about this is that now you can live in an XForms world if you choose (ColdFusion users have been doing this for some time), then move across to XFA where you truly need that combination of data, business logic and presentation in the one document.

Read more from the LiveCycle Product Blog and Marcel Boucher’s Blog 

Adobe Partner SyndromeSoft have announced the availability of three free QPACs for Adobe LiveCycle Workflow as well as a few trial ones as well. Their website promises more QPACs in the coming months so it’d be best to keep and eye on them if you are a LiveCycle developer.

Marcel Boucher has updated the LiveCycle Productivity Kit (LPK) on RIAForge, which is a set of helper classes that implement the Adobe LiveCycle APIs. Apart from a couple of bug fixes, this release contains a new properties file called wfutils-config.properties that allows you to use LPK Workflow Utils with other app servers apart from JBoss, such as WebLogic & WebSphere. There is also an a new ServletUtils class to handle servlet related functions.