Everyone is toting a digital camera these days it seems and they have photos to share with you. I'm sure you're not one of those who want to bore family and friends with your gazillion pictures of your dog/cat/snake. Even if you are, you can now do it with some pizzazz and it's easier than you may think. You could send the photos via email but then they'd take forever to arrive and your family probably doesn't know how to open them anyway. So the best solution is a spiffy new photo gallery.

Registration opened yesterday - at the 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar being held by SYS-CON Events - for the New York Flex User Group. The group will serve as a central meeting place to exchange ideas, solutions and network with other Flex developers.

Fumi Matsumoto, CTO of Flex ISV Allurent, outlined today at 'Real-World Flex' in New York City the technical and design challenges related to the development of a new platform for building RIA consumer shopping experiences, built on Flex and Flash technology.

Many ColdFusion developers expressed this sentiment after downloading and working with the Flex 2 beta. Flex 2 has made developing rich Internet applications in the Adobe Flash environment possible for everyone (not just those of us who know and love timelines and tweens).

With its free features, such as the Flex SDK, Flex 2 uses Adobe's ubiquitous Flash Player as its runtime, which is why Adobe can confidently predict millions of users and 1,000,000 developers. That, according to Flex Product Manager Eric Anderson, is the key to understanding the potential of Flex: it is going to have the widest reach of any other technology in the world.

Working, as he does uniquely well at conference after conference, with live demos and no offline safety-net, Adobe's senior technology evangelist Christophe Coenraets delivered his session 'How Flex Can Transform the User Experience on the Web' to an audience of completely enraptured developers, architects, and IT managers in the Grand Ballroom of The Roosevelt Hotel in New York City at SYS-CON Events' 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar.

'The browser is not really a good model for applications,' said David Mendels this morning at SYS-CON Events' inaugural 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar. Rich Internet Applications are the future of the Web, and cross-platform, powerful Flex 2 is right in the eye of the storm. 'Flex makes RIAs mainstream for the developer community,' Mendels told the packed Grand Ballroom of The Roosvelt Hotel's Grand Ballroom.

The historic Grand Ballroom of The Roosevelt Hotel in midtown Manhattan again looks fantastic and Adobe's Dave Mendels (pictured) is keynoting which is certain to be a huge hit with the audience because he'll incorporate live demos etc.

Creating a user interface is just like making a floor plan. You have your 'room,' which is the screen, and you have the 'furniture,' which is your user interface elements. This article describes many of the ways to position those elements on the screen using XML tags (which we call MXML.)

In his presentation at the SYS-CON Events 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar on Monday, August 14th, in The Roosevelt Hotel in the heart of midtown Manhattan, Jesse Warden - a Senior Consultant with Universal Mind, who specializes in Flex, Flash, & Flash Lite development - will cover how to make the most of using Flash & Flex together in applications.

We need more developers on the Flash Platform and Flex 2 is just the framework and toolset to entice these people.' Aral Balkan, founder and director of UK-based Ariaware.

The purpose of this article is to provide an overview of the enterprise applications that I developed using the ColdFusion MX 7.1 product suite. Currently I am the only ColdFusion developer on contract at the Ft. Stewart Department of Information Management (DOIM). Ft. Stewart, the largest Army base east of the Mississippi River, is home to the 3rd Infantry Division (Mechanized).

'Apollo,' the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being developed by Adobe that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax) to build and deploy Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) to the desktop, will be the focus of a session to be presented by Luis Polanco at the Real-World Flex One-Day Seminar, to be produced by SYS-CON Events at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on August 14.

The SystemManager is the main manager that controls the application window, creates and parents the Application instance, popups, cursors, manages the classes in the ApplicationDomain, and more. The SystemManager is the first class that is instantiated by Flash Player for your application. It stores the size and position of the main application window, keeps track of its children, such as floating popups and modal windows.

Adobe's new 'Apollo' product and strategy will be the focus of a session to be presented by Luis Polanco at the Real-World Flex Seminar, to be produced by SYS-CON Events at the Roosevelt Hotel in New York on August 14. The Apollo session is just one of a diverse, comprehensive Flex program that will be presented to delegates that day.

Austin has announced the selection of sixty finalists for the 16th Annual Flashforward Film Festival. Chosen from designers, animators, directors and artists in 15 categories, final awards will be announced at the festival, which takes place in Austin, TX on September 13 during the Flashforward2006 event.

For those of who know of Flex 2, Adobe's tool for programmers to create Rich Internet Applications, it has this one feature that sets it apart from Flash, and incidentally, its brother Spry shares. It allows you to put a variable surrounded by curly brackets, and at runtime, anytime that variable changes, it'll update whatever variable is being set to it.

From the same company that brought you the most pervasive software in the history of the Internet, Flash(tm), comes another revolutionary solution to create even more power and intuitive user experiences. Adobe Flex 2 is a complete, powerful application development solution for creating and delivering cross- platform rich Internet applications (RIAs), within the enterprise and across the web. Not until now has there been a way for enterprise programmers and architects to work with existing tools of choice, familiar programming models, and integration with existing systems and infrastructure. Multi-step processes, client-side processing, direct manipulation and data visualization are all key factors in the Flex solution.

Adobe's David Mendels and Christophe Coenraets, Allurent CTO Fumi Matsumoto, Flash guru Jesse Randall Warden, ESRI's Mansour Raad, Mark Piller of themidnightcoders.com, Dr. Victor Rasputnis of Farata Systems, SYS-CON's Yakov Fain - all are due to converge August 14 in New York City to deliver the first ever installment of a 'Real-World Flex' series of seminars being pioneered by SYS-CON Events. The intense, information- and education-rich day promises to map not just the present of Flex but also its fast-emerging future.

ZapThink released a report showing that demand for Rich Internet Applications and more sophisticated user interaction is increasing dramatically. RIAs provide an end user experience that combines the experience that users are most familiar with in desktop and client/server applications, such as rich graphical user interface, responsive performance and highly interactive functionality, with the scalability, distribution, and manageability benefits that Internet applications provide. The report entitled 'Rich Internet Applications: Market Technologies and Trends' shows that Rich Internet Applications will continue to gain prominence in the enterprise, with companies spending more than $500 million on RIA applications by 2011.

I've lately seen a few posts on the Adobe forums and here on CMX about batch processing in Fireworks. Considering the Fireworks 8 Batch Processing utility had some noteworthy revisions, I thought it would be a good idea to go over the wizard in detail. Streamlined and enhanced file renaming, the ability to check file dimensions when scaling during a batch process and the addition of a status bar and log file are the most notable improvements to Batch Processing. There are many articles here on CMX that touch on Batch Processing, but they are geared towards specific goals. In this article, we'll examine the utility itself piece by piece.

SYS-CON Media announced today the promotion of Robyn Forma to Vice President of Sales and Marketing. Robyn joined SYS-CON Media in 1998 in the advertising sales department while earning her degree in Business Administration. After a few short months, Robyn was promoted to advertising account manager for ColdFusion Developer's Journal, a new publication at the time, and successfully oversaw the launch and advertising sales of that magazine, which is in its eighth successful year.

I've been building a bunch of custom AS3 components for clients lately, and have run across the need to use view states within an AS3 component.

Adobe Labs has released the first update to the Spry framework for AJAX. Spry v.1.0 was initially released in the beginning of May.

This month Darron's Diary looks at an Iterator implementation, at ECMAScript 4, and previews his own latest book. Because ActionScript is based on the ECMAScript standard, anything that happens in ECMAScript will almost certainly happen in ActionScript too. Not to mention, quite a few of the Adobe folks are on the ECMAScript committee...

Flexstore is a traditional Shopping Cart application. In this tutorial, we create two modules: The administration module is an internal application used to maintain the product database. You use the administration module to create, update, and delete products. The store module is a customer-facing application. Customers use the store module to browse and filter the product catalog.

lynda.com announces today its addition of Flex 2 Essential Training with Adobe-certified instructor David Gassner, to the lynda.com Online Training Library(TM). The training is delivered in QuickTime movie format, and is 4.5 hours long.

When ColdFusion was first released there was one main feature, more than any other feature, that made it very popular very fast: ColdFusion makes it ridiculously easy to create Web pages that can talk to databases and display database information. Now, almost 11 years later, this is still one of ColdFusion's primary strengths and most popular features.

I just got an e-mail from a recruiter of sorts. They want me to do phone Flex/Flash consultation for a 20-40 minute paid phone call. Apparently, Ether (www.ether.com) could make money if they employed some sales teams. It seems all of California is reaching out worldwide, looking for people to come to live and work there. The reason? To be tech lead in their startup and manage contractors and outsourced individuals to make bling and fame in Web Deux Point OMG. If my hunch on what this call is about is correct, this'll be the third startup this month looking for Flexcoder meat.

This article describes the differences between CVS and Subversion and explains how to install Subversion and migrate an existing CVS repository. It also describes how to configure Subversion in a Windows environment, explains a basic Subversion project structure, and introduces the main Subversion clients. Finally, it shows ways to use Subversion with Ant and how to get connected to the repository via JavaSVN and ColdFusion.

Developers are no different, yet I see 'improv developing' all the time. A project manager will just describe what's needed - the outlines of a plot - and let the developers work it out. The results are often what you'd see with a movie. However, designing an application with UML can act as a script for developers. They're still free to use their own creativity and experience when implementing the design, but the UML documents provide them with a map of what the final product should be.

The 'Real-World Flex' One-Day Seminar will delve deep into the central workings of Flex so that the seminar delegates can integrate this timely new technology into their applications, creating powerful interactive content. And CFDJ Editor-in-Chief Simon Horwith will lead one session devoted to ColdFusion and Flex.

Guido Bellomo has announced the release of wddxAjax v. 1.1. wddxAjax is a ColdFusion Custom Tag to enable AJAX on *.cfm templates. It was co-developed by Guido Bellomo and Stefano Vitta, of Bloggers.it. wddxAjax is fully compatible with Internet Explorer and Firefox.

FusionReactor is a must for administrators and hosting companies who need to monitor their systems and recognize and act upon issues before they present critical danger to their runtime environments, the company says.

I've written a lot lately about the growing strength of the ColdFusion development community - shown by the onslaught of frameworks and the rapid adoption and support for these frameworks, the growing number of bloggers, new conferences and the great success of the CFUnited conference, and by the commitment to the community being shown by Adobe.

At SYS-CON Media's SOA Web Services Edge Conference in New York City, we had a chance to sit down with David Mendels, general manager of Adobe, to discuss Adobe's acquisition of Macromedia, Flex, RIA, and more.

I've had a few days now to recover from and reflect on my experiences at this year's TODCon (a.k.a. 'The Other Dreamweaver Conference'), held this year in Orlando.

Depending on the scope of your project, you may have the opportunity for code reuse. The reasons you might want to do so are two-fold. First, you reduce duplication of efforts. If you have already created a hyperlink enabled CellRenderer for your DataGrid once, why do it again? Second, you create, or build upon, an ever growing utility code base. While it may not be in the 'utils' package per se, you'll soon end up with re-usable events, common GUI controls and widgets, and yes even utility classes. Whether by merely being in a different folder means the client doesn't own it is up to you or your sales team.

SYS-CON publishing director Jeremy Geelan interviewed Adobe's Christophe Coenraets at the recent JavaOne 2006 Conference in San Francisco, noting that a 'tipping point' in the history of Flex has been reached with recent rapprochement between Java and Flex. Coenraets notes during the interview that the server side of Flex is built on Java.

I'm planning to make several presentations on using Adobe Flex 2 with or without Java in New York and New Jersey this year. As the saying goes, 'If you want God to laugh, tell him about your plans', so let me put it this way: this is what I believe I'm going to be doing later this year.