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My friend John dreams 3 or 4 get-rich schemes every week. Most of them involve technology, and he generally tries to talk me into helping him with them. He can never be dissuaded from the belief that each of his brainstorms are nothing short of an entrepreneurial pot of gold. These revelations, of course, come despite the fact that he has virtually no programming experience and even less start-up capital. Most of his recent ideas have all been centered around the new Google Android phones and the ability to write apps for them. After listening to him babble about Android app development for several weeks straight, I decided to download the Android SDK and play around with it.

I think the bane of development planning can be those conversations where you personify your framework and start debating about what a service should "know", whose "job" a particular operation is, or what the handler should "care" about. This is one of those sort of questions, but I'll keep it brief since I'm more interested in your opinions than my ramblings.

This Wednesday Adobe's Kevin Hoyt spoke in Kansas City to a captive audience of about 75 people including ColdFusion programmers, HTML/CSS builders, and designers. The meeting was great. It also included Jack Stack BBQ and shwag from Uhlig, Emfluence, and Tek Systems to name a few. Kevin didn't drop any bombs I hadn't heard about yet, but there were definitely a few things I learned about Adobe's up-and-coming products. Here's a quick overview of my notes:

If you live in or around Kansas City, Kevin Hoyt is coming to speak about ColdFusion, Bolt, Flex, and Flash Catalyst this Wednesday. I am pretty excited. First of all, to receive some local attention from Adobe. Secondly, to get to hear Kevin (Adobe Platform Evangalist). Thirdly, they are promising BBQ. What else could be better?

Flex 4 (Gumbo) is now in Beta and new training tutorials are available from Trilemetry. There a handful of new articles you can read on Adobe's site and follow along with to learn Flex 4 with ColdFusion!

Well I didn't get to write this until this morning, but I wanted to reflect briefly on the first day of Max. This being not only my first Max but my first conference in general. I've got to say that overall I have been pretty impresed.

James Ward has a little tool called "Is It Flex" that will tell you if a given SWF file was made with Flex providing you know the URL to the SWF. James uses the SWFDump utility from the SDK and looks for some header info that the Flex compiler places in the SWF. A while ago I experimented with an ancillary tool on my site which attempted to find the URLs to all the SWFs in the page for you and check them all at once.

Here's a little tidbit that will be old-hat to any Flex/Flash people out there, but as a CF guy, I found it pretty interesting. Most ColdFusion programmers have probably heard of implicit getters and setters as a pattern some have adopted in CFML (and others seem to vehemently oppose). While learning Flex, I have found that ActionScript 3 also supports implicit getting and setting but it means something completely different that what I had expected.

I was just staring a a piece of ActionScript code trying to figure out why the two date objects I was comparing were not coming up equal. I'm ashamed to say I didn't notice the problem at first because I had mistakenly typed if(date1 = date2) Two equals signs ("==") work a little better than one since the single operator obviously changes the value of the former operand. :) Once I fixed that, I found my real problem.

In case you are wondering, "Axes" is the plural form of "Axis" and it is pronounced "Axees" with a long e as in "see". Perhaps you have never pondered that one, but it's been driving me crazy. In this post I wanted to demonstrate a little experiment I did tonight to try and not duplicate as much formatting when it came to my charting data tips. I can already think of a few problems with it, but I wanted to try anyway.