Blog has moved

So I've moved my blog from blogger to wordpress, and will be trying to share my thoughts periodically at:

blog URL: http://jonwall.org
feed: http://feeds.feedburner.com/Jonwallorg

Really, its not me, its Dan and Lily

A few days back, the next generation of the MXNA blog aggregator, went live, at feeds.adobe.com. At that point in a time, a number of people thanked the team that worked on this, and included me in those blogs.

While I did a little on that effort, it really was only a tiny, tiny bit of work, boiling down to a few emails. What hasn't been mentioned, is that in addition to Christian, Ben, and Mike C, there are two unsung heros who helped make this happen.

Daniel Taborga, who is a member of my team and also runs Adobe Labs, and Adobe Open Source, along with Lily Lee in Adobe Web Operations, worked very hard to help breath new life into such a critical source of news for the Adobe community that MXNA has been, and will continue to be. Like everyone else in the project, neither Dan nor Lily had been responsible for MXNA, and really just jumped in and worked hard to bring the app back online.

So while lots of folks helped out with this effort, and I'm sure there are a number of people who helped who still haven't been recognized publicly, I just wanted to take a second to sincerely thank Lily and Daniel.

Now with commenting!

As you may have heard from a few other blogs, especially Amy Wong on the Adobe Developer Connection blog, we launch some new stuff we've been working on to help developers get the best possible answers to their questions, and also help us deliver the best possible content.

First, search. We launch a beta of what we are calling Community Help. Its starting just with Flex. Whats cool about this is that it searches adobe.com, as well as specific community resources, to help you find the best possible answer, no matter where it is. There are number of folks at Adobe and in the community that add resources to the search index, so as new things become available that have good answers, we'll index them.

Commenting - Commenting isn't new. We've had commenting in a number of place on adobe.com for a while. But whats cool here is that with this implementation of commenting across the Flex Developer Center on the ADC, and livedocs, commenting has become consistent and integrated across both of those locations. This will really help our teams deliver the best possible technical content to help you be more productive.

Check out all the new stuff on the Flex Developer Center. http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/.


If you have additional questions how all of this works, Amy Wong's blog entry at the URL at the beginning of this post has more info too. And be sure to leave us feedback on what you think about all of this here. Or feel free to post comments on my blog and I'll make sure they are passed along.

- Jonathan

Adobe Developer Connection improvements

While I'm sure lots of people are focusing on Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 going live, and I hope lots of people think that the new opensource.adobe.com site is great, we've also made a bunch of improvements to the Adobe Developer Connection (ADC).

Since I know there is a lot of news for people to digest right now, here are the highlights of changes to the ADC. (with more detail below)

1. New navigation just for developers - the collapsible panels that made their debut back in October now extend across the site.
2. The ADC content has returned to the center of the page
3. The Search UI and functionality has been enhanced
4. Some of our existing membership benefits got better - more on that below.
   

So for those of you that want to get back to playing with the latest shipping technologies, just check out the updated ADC. And then you can feel free to stop reading. Don't worry. I won't be offended.

But for those of you that are interested in the details, here they are....

The new navigation extends across the entire developer site, so with just a few clicks, you should be able to find just about any necessary Adobe developer resource you need. And we've removed the regular Adobe.com navigation, with just a link to the Adobe.com site at the top. The goal is to provide just what you need and nothing to get in the way of that.

Content is back in the middle. Back in December, when Adobe.com got a makeover, the ADC content got pushed to the left side of the page. A few days ago, even in advance of this post and the big launch of Flex 3 and AIR 1.0, ADC content moved back to the middle. The pages were always designed to display content in the middle so hopefully its easier for you to browse and read now then it was just a few days ago.

Third, the ADC search box is now more closely aligned with the centered content, so it no longer floats out on the right side as it did starting in December. We added in the ability for a user to narrow down their search based on the type of content before they conduct their search. Thats a nice little time saver in my opinion.

Lastly, when you login to the ADC, you get a whole bunch of benefits for free. We've updated two of the more interesting ones. The ADC introNetwork - which lets you visualize your relationships with other developers and designers based on things like your skills, projects, and personality - now includes the ability to use video in your profile.

And we've made a number of enhancements to the Developer Desktop AIR application. The app got a facelift, and you can still track and get desktop notifications of changes in bugs in the public bugbase at bugs.adobe.com. The new feature that I think is pretty cool though is the new Component Explorer in the ADC Desktop. It aggregates a wide range of Flex components and lets you browse though and track updates to them. Be sure to login, then download it and check it out.

See, like I said, lots of details. So when you are done downloading all the new stuff, blogging, writing a few apps, etc, take breath and check out the new stuff on the ADC. In addition to all of this stuff, there is of course the new content, around Flex, AIR, and BlazeDS. Please let me know what you think about the changes to the ADC via the comments in this blog. And even more importantly, let me know what we can continue to improve, or do differently to help you find the information you need as quickly as possible.

Adobe open source site goes live

As Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 go out the door, some other very exciting things for developers are happening at Adobe. I'll have some news in a later post about the Adobe Developer Connection, but right now I want to share the news about the new Adobe Open Source site.

This new home for open source projects from Adobe serves as a hub to connect developers with all the code, projects, and news that we can. And for projects that Adobe hosts, like Flex 3 and Blaze DS, we have Subversion setup to let you check out the code, documentation, forums, and bug bases.

Plus, whats kind of interesting, at least if you ask me, is that the content publishing on the site is all handled by a wiki. So thanks to the good folks at Atlassian, for granting us an open source license to Confluence.

So check it out, and be sure to add the open source news rss feed to your feed reader. As always, let us know what you think.

Facebook Flash and Flex

I've been talking to the folks from Weekend Apps over the past few days, and they are getting 100 or so developers together in Santa Clara next weekend, February 22 to 24th, to build 20 Facebook apps in less than 3 days.

And since I'm biased, I think its very cool that Alex Notov will be presenting on how to use Flex to build a Facebook application. Adobe is helping out by providing some giveaways - one Creative Suite bundle (the winner of the suite can choose between Design Premium, Web Premium or Production Premium) and 2 copies of Flex Builder 3 (when it ships).

If you want to learn more, or happen to be in the Bay Area and want to join these guys, you can join their Facebook group, or visit WeekendApps.com.

For me, I'm just looking forward to seeing the apps at the end of the weekend.

The RIA universe is ever expanding

Once again, apologies for being quiet for so long on this blog. But there is so much exciting stuff going on right now that I had to stop for a second and make sure I shared the news with anyone who reads this blog, just in case you didn't hear about this anywhere else.

First, earlier today, O'Reilly and Adobe launched a new site called InsideRIA.com. This new community site covers all things RIA, including Flex, Flash, AIR, and AJAX. Rich Tretola is the editor and Andre Charland is the lead blogger. I'd definitely recommend checking it out.

Secondly, in the past few months, we've expanded the Adobe team that works with the development community. Specifically, we've added three new team members to spend a lot of time supporting Adobe RIA developers. The team is comprised or Raghu Rao, Anirudh Sasikumar, and Sujit Reddy Gurrala. All of them have great blogs, so you may want to pay them a visit. And if you haven't seen them online responding to technical questions on the wide range of forums and lists, then I'm sure you soon will.

Lastly, if you haven't heard about it already, the Adobe evangelism and product teams are hitting the road, bring the latest news about AIR and Flex to user group near you. The tour is underway already but there are a lot more events coming up. Check out the schedule at http://flex.org/tour/

- Jonathan