A lot of my ColdFusion and PHP developer friends like to tell me that I should become a Flex developer. I have various reasons why I haven't jumped on the bandwagon yet, but here's one of the biggest reasons:
Enough said.
I have watched the emergence of Microsoft Silverlight with mixed feelings. On one hand, I am not a Microsoft fan, so I typically like to see other companies succeed in markets where Microsoft is a player. Therefore, I like the fact that Flash is the dominant player in the RIA market that Microsoft is attempting to enter. On the other hand, I like competition, and since Adobe enjoys a virtual monopoly with Flash, I'm kind of glad to see Microsoft throwing their weight behind a potential competitor to Flash. Up to today, though, I have always been a bystander in this game as I have never done anything with Silverlight, not even install the plugin.
Adobe brings web apps to the desktop with AIR, Microsoft is doing similar things with Silverlight, and now Mozilla announces Prism. The biggest difference between Prism and it's competitors is that you don't have to do anything extra to create a Prism app from a web app.
I saw a news report yesterday talking about Google Trends, and how you can see what countries and cities search for particular terms the most. I thought it would be fun to find out what countries/cities rank highest for some ColdFusion related terms:
UPDATE: Tim Buntel got back from vacation and responded to this blog entry in the comments. He listed a lot of things that they did to market ColdFusion 8 when it was released.
According to Adobe's main product page of ColdFusion, Tim Buntel is Adobe's Senior Product Marketing Manager. Therefore, because I want to make some ColdFusion marketing suggestions, I am hoping he will read this blog entry.
When I loaded the ColdFusion 8 docs into CFQuickDocs, I used the docs from the Dreamweaver ColdFusion 8 update which was on Adobe's Labs site (ColdFusion 8 was still beta at the time). This worked really well, because all of the tags/functions were in separate .htm files. However, now that CF 8 has been released, I need to update my CFQD docs to the final release docs of CF 8. So I went and downloaded the final Dreamweaver update from the CF downloads site, but I found that Adobe changed the docs for the final release. "Changed" isn't the right word, "stupefied" would be more accurate.
Asa, one of the most public figures behind the Mozilla foundation (and thus behind Firefox), recently posted about Mozilla's goals with Firefox, and why it doesn't make sense to turn Firefox over to a for profit corporation. One of their main goals with Firefox is "to protect [the Internet] and to help it grow in ways that are beneficial to everyone rather than just a few." Their main way of accomplishing such a noble goal is to zealously protect open standards, and advance such standards through Firefox and related Mozilla technologies.
I had asked on a couple of mailing lists for a way to deep link to a specific page in a PDF, and nobody seemed to know the answer. Today a coworker showed me how to do it, so I thought I'd post it here in case other people need to know how to do this.
There are two ways to do this, you can link to a page, or you can link to a "destination". Linking to a page is as simple as adding #page=11 to the end of your link. However, this doesn't work in IE if the user has Acrobat Reader version 7. But I tried this in Firefox, IE 6 and 7 with Acrobat 8 and it worked in all cases.
In order to link to destinations, you have to edit the PDF to create the destination. I don't personally have Adobe Acrobat, so I'm not sure what a "destination" is exactly. But I think it's a way to link to a specific location on a page, not just to the top of a specific page. To do this, just add #destination to the end of your link. For example, if you wanted to link to chapter 3 of a book, you could link it like this: http://www.mydomain.com/book.pdf#chapter3, assuming you've created a destination called "chapter3".
Here are two links on Adobe's site that go into further detail:
Link to PDF pages and destinations
Linking with Acrobat 7 fails in IE
There has been a lot of talk in the ColdFusion world about Apollo lately, Adobe's entry into the desktop software world. I think it's cool because it reportedly lets any web developer write desktop applications using their existing skills.
The Adobe Labs site says this, "Apollo is targeted at making it easy to develop and deploy Rich Internet Applications to the desktop." But why should I be excited about that? I think there will definitely be some good uses for it, but Adobe is spinning this as the greatest invention since the PC, and I just don't see it that way. I have spent a LOT of effort and time trying to convince people that web based apps are important and adequate for most people's needs, and now I'm supposed to start focusing the other direction?
Again, I do think that Apollo will be good for some cases, especially where a desktop application makes more sense than putting it in the browser. However, there are already a LOT of mature development environments for the desktop that can easily interact with the Internet, so I'm not sure how well Apollo will catch on. Sure, all the fanatics that love to play with all the new software that comes out of Adobe labs will jump all over this. But I think Adobe is going to have a tough sell when it comes to all the Java and .net developers out there. Not to mention all the web developers that are perfectly happy developing in the browser.
But, I could be wrong about this. I'd be happy to hear your arguments to the contrary.
Jake Munson
34 Yrs old