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.