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

Did You Know...vol. 4

OK, so it has been awhile since my last post, but sometimes you just get busy!

Lots of good nuggets today, so I am going to dive right in!!

Did you know that:

• Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow are doing a mini AIR user group tour in Europe? Be sure to check out Mike's most recent blog post for cities and dates. This is going to be a great tour so be sure to check it out if it is coming to a city near you!
• Adobe SF is hosting a RIA Developer Camp on November 5? This will sell out fast, so be sure to register early!
• The Adobe Mobile & Devices user group managers collaborated on a huge Flash Lite mobile game contest? Click here for more information.
• The Pacifica beta was open? Check out Renaun Erickson's blog for more details on what Pacifica is and how to sign up.
• Starting in November, Adobe will be making Flex Builder 2 available to qualified students and educators worldwide at no cost! Check out the press release for additional details.

If you already knew all of the above then you are keeping one step ahead of me!!

Until next time...

Ed Sullivan

Let the games begin....

Well I guess this has been a long time coming. And thanks to everyone for the warm welcome.

As Jonathan mentioned, one of my main responsibilities is overseeing the Adobe User Group Program. If you are not hooked into your local user group, you really should be. They are a tremendous resource for learning new skills, honing existing skills and keeping current on the latest and greatest from Adobe. If you are unsure if there is an Adobe UG in your area, please check out our handy UG locator at: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/usergroups/. If there is no UG in your immediate area, maybe it is time for you to start one!? If so, please feel free to drop me a line.

As also mentioned by Jonathan, I will be on the AIR Bus Tour all of next week, so if you are in DC, Baltimore, Philadelphia or Boston, plan on popping in to say hello. Early feedback from previous tour dates has been positively glowing! Additionally, I will be attending MAX in Chicago and will most likely be providing live updates from the conference via the blog for those of you unable to attend.

So, what can you expect to see from me in this space? A lot of the information that I make available to my user group managers would also be plenty valuable to the communities they serve, so expect to see that type of info frequently. Everything and anything as it pertains to the Adobe user communities will be fair game...information on user group events and meetings, special initiatives, technical content, as well as updates from adobe.com and Adobe Labs that folks may not have time to seek out on their own.

One great example of the type of info I will be surfacing is the fact that Adobe ColdFusion user groups worldwide are holding CF8 launch events in the month of August in support of our recent announcement regarding the immediate availability of CF8. Check the UG locator posted above to see if a CFUG near you is participating. These meetings will be a great resource for learning more about the latest CF release as well as provide an opportunity to meet and network with local like-minded professionals, win one of a kind CF schwag and maybe even walk away with a complimentary copy of CF8 Standard!

So thanks again to everyone for the hearty welcome and feel free to let me know via the comments section what type of information you would find valuable in this space.

One thing I can state in no uncertain terms is that the Adobe community absolutely rocks and it is a pleasure to work the leaders of these communities on a daily basis.

Thanks for listening (err, reading)...Ed

Giving back through code

I just got a note from Ali Daniali who is at the Flex 360 conference right now in Seattle. Ali has been running the Flex Code Jam, which has gotten a bit of mention in blogs, but I wanted to call it out specifically. Ali really wanted to find a way to give something back to the non profit world and pull a group of developers together to do it.

So he's organized a coding event at Flex 360 to pull some folks together to build a Flex based Virtual Food Drive application for a charity called Northwest Harvest.

Here are a couple of links:

• The Code Jam site - http://www.flexcodejam.org/
• Flicker pics from the Jam in progress -
• Northwest Harvest - http://www.northwestharvest.org/
  

And by the way, Ali runs our Seattle Flex User Group. - http://www.flexilicio.us/blog/

I love this concept and think that combining coding and charity makes a lot of sense. Special thanks to all the sponsoring organizations and most importantly all the folks participating in this!

Guest blogger: Ed Sullivan

Yes, that's right Ed Sullivan will now be blogging here. That means a few things:

1) If you already know which Ed Sullivan I'm talking about, you are probably saying to yourself "well its about time."
2) If you don't know which Ed Sullivan I'm talking about, you may be thinking about this one. Please read on to get introduced to the Ed Sullivan that I'm talking about. The bonus with this Ed Sullivan is that he's alive, so he should be able to blog periodically.
3) I haven't blogged in over a month, so by adding Ed here, I think we'll have a lot more frequency to the posts. Plus we'll probably pick up a few hits for TV nostalgia buffs.

If you don't know Ed already, he runs the Adobe program that supports about 98% of our user groups. He has a wealth of knowledge, and much of it gets disseminated via Adobe User Groups. But I'm sure he'll have some new interesting posts here as well. He always knows about the latest goings on for both designers and developers and I'd expect will be providing valuable information about things like MAX, new technical content, and much more, as well as of course, goings on in our avid user community.

So please welcome Ed by commenting away and look for a first post from him very soon. And for those of you attending the On Air bus tour next week, look for Ed. He'll be going to DC, Baltimore and Philadelphia. Or if you live elsewhere, see if you can find him on the bus video feed.

PS: You are probably wondering why we didn't change the name of this blog, so it no longer bears my name in the URL. We may do that, but it seemed like something that might take a bit of work, to ensure that the feeds and analytics were working properly. Most importantly I didn't want to cause any aggrvation for all of my 3 loyal subscribers (ok, thanks to Google Analytics and Feedburner, I know I have more than 3 loyal subscribers.) And with Ed on board I'm hoping/expecting that number will rise.

PPS: So yes, we may change the name of the blog at some point. But I don't think that will affect the feed. We'll let you know if it does. Or its possible that Ed might get his own blog. Who knows?