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

For quite a few months now Adobe has been talking up Flash Builder, Flex 4 & ColdFusion Builder, but with the caveat that these tools were in beta.  Each of the betas made available via Adobe Labs added new features and allowed you to test and provide feedback to the product teams. Today, however, Adobe is announcing the immediate availability of the production versions of the following!

Flex 4 – Including the new Spark skinning and component architecture enabling a new level of expressiveness in RIAs in addition to supporting the new Flash Catalyst to Flash Builder workflow.

Flash Builder 4 – There are over 90 new features in this release, and you can use them with both Flex 3 and Flex 4 to gain big improvements in development time, integration and building more expressive apps. (Note: Please be sure to uninstall any FB4 beta SW before installing the release product)

ColdFusion Builder – This new Eclipse-based IDE for ColdFusion development is deeply integrated with ColdFusion 9 in addition to making it fast and easy for CF developers to create Flex applications with integration between ColdFusion Builder and Flash Builder.

The following is a list of resources where you can find out more information;

• Read Andrew Shorten’s Flex Team Blog post
• Get Flash Builder 4 (remember to uninstall any FB4 beta SW first)
• AdobeTV: Learn what developers like about Flash Builder in this video from Flash Camp Boston from March 19th
• AdobeTV: David Wadhwani, VP and GM of Adobe’s Platform BU introduces new Flash Platform  products
• Test drive Flex 4 – Take the Flex Test Drive: Build an application in an hour and learn about Flex 4 using this new guided, video tutorial
• Flex-in-a-week free video training – New for Flex 4
• Get ColdFusion Builder
• Video: ColdFusion Builder Feature Tour
• Flex product info on adobe.com
• ColdFusion product info on adobe.com

Lots of new toys to play with! Make sure you let me know what you’ve built.

My colleagues from Adobe’s Benelux technical team have come up with another great use case for my custom LiveCycle ES Twitter Component I built some time ago.

Anyone with a corporate shared Twitter account will understand the conflict between being open and allowing anyone to post a tweet vs making sure that only correct public information is exposed. This solution built out using Adobe LiveCycle ES & Flash Builder is one way of solving this issue.

Part 1 – Build a controlled tweet solution

Building a controlled Twitter solution using Adobe LiveCycle ES (part1) from Dr LiveCycle on Vimeo. Part 1 of a video that demonstrates how you can use LiveCycle ES to build a process and an AIR application to publish tweets to a corporate Twitter account where you have control on what’s published or not

Part 2 – Build a Tweet Archive

Building a controlled Twitter solution using Adobe LiveCycle ES (part2) from Dr LiveCycle on Vimeo. Part 2 of a video demonstrates how you can use LiveCycle ES to build a process and an AIR application to publish tweets to a corporate Twitter account where you have control on what’s published or not. In this part you will see how to archive all tweets in a PDF/A format within LiveCycle Content Services.

Note: I’m not sure why there is no sound!

This sample is just another great example of how Adobe LiveCycle can be used to facilitate the many channels of communication with customers!

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!

By adding extra features to Flash Builder 4, currently in beta, LiveCycle Data Services 3 enables developers to graphically build their data model and define relationships between entities. It is also possible to import a model directly from an existing database table via built in RDS support.

Once the data model is defined, it can be deployed to the LiveCycle Data Services instance running on the server, which will utilise Hibernate to handle all CRUD (Create, Read, Update, Delete) operations. In other words, you don’t have to worry about a lot of that “server stuff”, LCDS will call the database and send the results to your Flash app in real time!

There are a few videos to help you get started http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/videos/ and there are plans to add more. You can download LiveCycle Data Services (LCDS) 3 public beta here on http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/livecycle_dataservices3/.

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!

Today on labs.adobe.com, Adobe made available preview releases of the next version of two  tools in the Adobe Flash Platform. Of these two tools, one is an upgrade from a previous version (Flash Builder), and another is a completely new tool (Flash Catalyst).

Flash Catalyst is an incredible new tool from Adobe that aims to bridge the gap between developer & designer workflows. Traditionally designers hand over artwork as still images or “sliced up” assets to a development team that then need to go ahead and attempt to reassemble the assets as intended. I say attempt, as often it is very time consuming if not impossible for a developer to recreate the intent the designer had.

Designers can now continue to use familiar tools such as Adobe Photoshop & Illustrator to design, then use Flash Catalyst to add interaction to their design while at the same time moving the project into something a developer can use. Flash Catalyst converts artwork into a Flex project which can be opened up in Flash Builder and extended by developers.

Flash Builder 4 (formerly known as Flex Builder) is the latest version of the Eclipse based IDE that allows developers to build applications that execute in the Adobe Flash Player, Adobe AIR or even within a PDF. Renaming Flash Builder links the product into the Flash Platform, something that the name Flex often missed, yet it will continue to leverage the Flex framework to make it quick and easy for developers to build Rich Internet Applications

Developers will benefit from the new features in Flash Builder 4, including support for projects built in Flash Catalyst, round trip support for Flash Professional CS4, coding enhancements, service introspection and more.

As both of these tools are now on Adobe Labs as available free of charge technical preview, it is a great idea to download and test these tools to see how they assist your workflows, but equally important that you provide feedback to the product teams so they can make the tools meet your needs.