This morning I gave a keynote presentation at the Future of the Book conference in Auckland, NZ. My intent was to talk about what Adobe is doing in three areas related to Book Publishing: Meeting Customer Expectations,Speeding up workflows & monetizing your ideas and effort.

My talk included an update on PDF, a look at EPUB and the support in the Adobe toolset, and how Flash & AIR are allowing us to create really engaging experiences.

Here are my slides (demo links are below)

Continue Reading

David Harris from the Auckland ColdFusion User Group has organised a User Group meeting that coincides with my visit to Auckland this week. This means I’ll be able to show off some of the new Adobe tools!

The meeting is being held at the Auckland Media Design School and I’ll be first showing the new Flash Catalyst beta, the upcoming improvements in Flash Builder (was Flex Builder) & ColdFusion and even a quick look at the new LiveCycle Data Services beta.

The feedback on these new products has been very positive,  so come see what the fuss is about, share a beer (David assures me that there will be at least one!), and network with other Designers & Developers.

Register here: http://nzroadshow.eventbrite.com/

The engineers at Adobe have been working hard and hot on the heals of the Flash Catalyst & Flash Builder 4 public betas comes another release for you to have a look at and provide feedback on.

LiveCycle Data Services 3 beta (LCDS3) is the next major release of the server based product that allows for remoting, messaging & data management. If you are new to this product, LiveCycle Data Services extends the open source Blaze project, which enables a “real time web” experience that can push content to the Flash Player rather than polling. Beyond what comes with Blaze, LCDS3 allows extra features like PDF generation, data management and is a fully supported offering from Adobe. Adobe has beefed up tooling by adding plug ins for Flash Builder and simplified developing flex applications. You can now develop new fully functional flex applications with no server code in under 10 minutes! Continue Reading

Want to see Flash Catalyst & Flash Builder 4 up close and have a chance to ask Adobe some questions about the new beta releases on Adobe Labs?

Yes? Then join Andrew Spaulding & I and the fantastic Adobe User Group managers at one of the upcoming June user group meetings across Australia;

Canberra – June 11th – Mark Szulc
http://groups.adobe.com/posts/78231c9ce0

Melbourne –  June 17th – Andrew Spaulding
http://groups.adobe.com/posts/081e9d435f

Sydney – June 22nd – Andrew Spaulding & Mark Szulc
http://groups.adobe.com/posts/a8adb3e375

Other cities (Andrew & I will attempt to attend remotely if possible for Q&A)

Brisbane – June 17th (Gareth Edwards, Carly Gooch & Richard Turner-Jones)
 http://groups.adobe.com/posts/49bfc505f0

Perth – June 17th (Andrew Mercer & Kay Smoljak)
http://groups.adobe.com/posts/1edbf91f4b

Are you running another group activity? Let me know!