Acrobat 9 introduced the concept of PDF Portfolios, branded Flash based containers that allow the user to navigate through the files / content contained within the PDF. The portfolio is defined by a navigator, and these navigators are built using Flex. Adobe is running a competition where you could win great prizes by using your Flex skills to build a custom PDF portfolio. Check out these great prizes!

Contest First Place Winner:
Choice of either a Dell Adamo Desire or MacBook Air 2.13GHz

Second Place Winner:
Apple iPad wifi, 3G 32GB device

Third Place Winner:
HP Mini 5102 device

Top 10 entries:
Featured on Adobe.com**

Sweepstakes drawing:
Amazon Kindle

A panel of Adobe Acrobat experts will select 10 finalist entries. Representatives from several leading brand agencies and RIA design firms will then review the top 10 entries and select 3 winning entries. This is a great way to get your work in front of agencies looking for creative developers.

Australian entries are definitely welcome.. make us proud!

Full details are at http://www.acrobatusers.com/navigator-contest

While creating a new LiveCycle demo recently I came across an issue where I wanted to pass a URL of a document via Twitter. The process was storing a PDF document into LiveCycle Content Services, obtaining the URL, then notifying people about the new document via Twitter.

I took a look at the APIs for bit.ly and after a quick bit of Googling I came across Peter Mularien’s tutorial on URL Shortening in Java using bit.ly. About thirty minutes later I had an Eclipse project setup, a bity.ly account & developer GUID, and had written the component XML describing the properties to expose to LiveCycle. For more detail on that process check out this article:Extending LiveCycle ES software through custom DSC development – Part 1: Create a basic service component

btw – thanks to Gareth Faulkner from Adobe Australia for some debugging assistance!

The result is this new reusable component for LiveCycle!  All you need to do is provide

• LongURL
• Bit.ly Login
• Bit.lyAPI Key

Download the ShortURL component for Adobe LiveCycle ES

Let me know if and how you use it!

Adobe have released an update to LiveCycle Data Services and a new release of BlazeDS. Both  have been made available for download and the updated docs have been posted.

New since LiveCycle Data Services 3.0:

Alignment with Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4
The LiveCycle Data Services 3.1 supports the released versions of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4.

Extensibility and increased flexibility for model-driven development
The ability to generate and customize model-driven application code is much improved in LiveCycle Data Services 3.1. In addition to generating and customizing client-side ActionScript code and model-driven forms, you can generate and customize server-side Java code. You can also extract and customize the code generation templates for the generated client-side and server-side code.

The Modeler provides new user interface features for code generation. You can choose the types of code to generate, which code generation templates to extract, and where to save the generated code and templates. Continue Reading

Adobe has recently started showcasing the great solutions that Adobe Partners have built on top of LiveCycle ES. This example is from Australia’s very own Avoka Technologies and covers some of the forms capabilities of Adobe LiveCycle.

Avoka have taken the foundation that LiveCycle ES provides customers to build a form solution, and have created FormCenter to streamline the process of getting a full forms solution in place.

More information is here;
http://avoka.com/avoka_formcenter/formcenter.shtml

including a recorded presentation here;
http://avoka.acrobat.com/formcenter_css