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WebDU Sydney Day 0

How do you get a lot of attendees on an Adobe User Group meeting? Make sure you have a lineup of known suspects employed by Adobe such as Tim Buntel, Ted Patrick, Mike Chambers and Mike Downey...

Tomorrow, WebDU kicks off in Sydney, Australia with sessions on Flash, Flex, Apollo, ColdFusion and more. Tonight, early registration was combined with a National User Group meeting with celebrity speakers from Adobe.

There was quite a crowd that turned up for the special User Group meeting and as AUG leader Robin Hillard pointed out, it was far more attendees than on any former meeting. Maybe not so strange when you offer such well known speakers? The bar at the far end of the room probably compensated somewhat for the lack of chairs. The program for the evening was presentations on new stuff in ColdFusion (CF), Apollo and a Q&A session.

ColdFusion
I did not expect there to be much of interest to Flash developers in this presentation, but I was wrong about that. Tim Buntel started off by telling how bad he is at keeping secrets. The upcoming release of ColdFusion is codenamed Scorpio. When he showed a slide with the current release plan for Scorpio, he focused very much on the word MIDDLE of 2007. Get it? In the very middle... ? CF will first launch as a public beta and a limited amount of hosted solutions will be available to those that do not have the extra hardware to play with it.

He went over some of the features sneaked already and promised some more at fridays keynote. There's a bunch of new features and this release will not be an "interim release" as many considered the present version. The new version of CF will be much faster than the current one by a good margin. It will fully support .NET local and remote objects plus Microsoft Exchange Server so it can now act as a digital hub bridging the Java world with the Microsoft world as well as all the other server technologies CF already supports. Sounds really powerful to one as me that is not too into CF at all.

Another neat feature in Scorpio is the addition of FCKEditor, a powerful web-based HTML text editor that has excellent cross browser capabilities. Scorpio will also be able to read PDF structures, prefill PDF files with data and store the data inputted in these by the user.

So what's the new thing for Flash developers then? The new feature isn't really for Flash devs, but Scorpio can produce very good looking SWF presentations very easy. You just add these tags to your CF script:

<cfpresentation>

<cfpresentationslide />

<cfpresentationslide />

</cfpresentation>

Add some attributes from a data source such as a form or a database and you get a nice Breeze-style presentation as a SWF file. It comes complete with a navigator panel showing an image of presenter (if this attribute is set), presentation name and title, an outline, a way to store notes and a Search facility. This presentation will offer MP3 audio support so any slide can have an MP3. It may even be possible to make the final result a downloadable SWF, but that's not yet determined. Pretty sweet way to make custom presentations.

Apollo
Next up was Ted Patrick, Adobes Flex Evangelist. He showed his Flex TV applications running as an Apollo-app, now with enhanced image renderer that made scrolling the images smoother. He really did not tell much new about Apollo and he sort of cut his presentation short, but the Q&A session after provided some interesting Apollo info:

- The final version of Apollo will contain an API to download the Acrobat Reader if not present on a users system. The user will be prompted if they wish to download the Reader.
- The Apollo team just started working on the PDF integration and the ability to read form info from PDFs are considered to be an important feature. This is however yet to be determined,
- Several asked about how will security be controlled? Code signing is not part of the current beta but it will be in the final version.
- Apollo will most probably be built into of the upcoming version of Flex.
- Adobe are working with PC vendors on the distributions side. They will not target Enterprise deployment with the first release. Mike Downey said that Adobe is planning a 1.5 release of Apollo that will also include mass distribution solutions (such as MSI installers).
- There was also a discussion about internal storage an Apollo. This is not scheduled in 1.0 - "Yet" added Mike Downey...

Flash
Once again, the question of better HTML rendering support was asked (not by me this time). Mike Downey said that this was being looked at for Player 10 (so no direct confirmation) and suggested to a round of friendly laughter that one use Apollo until Flash Player 10 emerges.

There was some also an interesting discussion about Adobe's quality of support now that they have fully merged with Macromedia. Tim Buntel answered this one well and said they were aware of some problems and were working on them. After this, the meeting finished off with discussing things more related to the Adobe User Groups. Coming from a mid-sized town (1 mill inhabitants) I found it both interesting and depressing to hear many user groups has a problem getting enough people to show up on the meetings. Even in London with more than 7 million inhabitants it could be hard to gather a crowd of 15 and the meeting discussed how one could battle this.

A certain way to get more attendees seems to be having fixed dates or a list of upcoming dates so that people can easily plan. Another suggestion is to use Acrobat Connect (formerly called Breeze) more. It is easier to find presenters that can spend 30 minutes or an hour to do a presentation from home. Breeze would make it easier for those that have families to both present and attend the meeting. Adobe offers Breeze accounts to User Group managers, so this could be a good idea for many. Tim Buntel also mentioned that Adobe offers many good Breeze presentations and the Apollo team has a new site up where they have put up all the presentations from the recent ApolloCamp event in San Francisco. The site even offers downloadable FLV files for offline viewing and the new Fullscreen mode that Flash now supports. The videos would not stream properly when I tried checking them out tonight, but that will hopefully improve over time. It looks as they are streamed via a server with low capacity, so changing them to HTTP streams would probably improve the situation.

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Written by Jens C Brynildsen (March 21st 2007)