mobileMAX: Your MAX, Your Schedule, Your Mobile

After many late nights of coding, I am pleased to release my mobileMAX application. This mobile app will allow you to quickly view the conference schedule for not only the official Adobe sessions but all four of the unConferences. Additionally, you will be able to view the schedule of your chosen sessions (assuming you got the MAX scheduler to behave).

Home Screen for the Flash Lite version

iPhone Session Listing

There are four versions available; a Flash Lite 3.1 version (using the Adobe Mobile Packager), a Windows Mobile version (also using AMP), a Flash Lite 2.1 version, and yes an iPhone web version.

To get started, go to http://nuclearpathways.org/clients/max/ (I work on several sites related to the history of the Atomic Age and decided to just use one of those servers for the project). Once you have made an account, log back in to the Adobe MAX scheduler and copy the webcal URL for your schedule. Paste that into the web application and let it process your schedule. Once that is done you can download the mobileMAX app for your device. You don’t need do this, but the app becomes more useful if you do.

For the iPhone version, I created a custom web app. After opening the URL in Safari, click the “Add to Homescreen” button to create a shortcut.

It has been a blast building this and I hope the community finds it helpful. See you at MAX!

Adobe and Zend Announce Collaboration

Today Adobe and Zend entered into a collaboration to bring together the flexibility, productivity and enterprise reliability of PHP and Zend Platform with the user experience benefits of the open source Flex framework. This collaboration will deliver technologies, content and services to make it easy for enterprise developers to build web applications using Flex on the client and PHP on the server.

This is great news for many in the PHP community. I know some probably wanted another PHP framework as Adobe’s first choice, but they have to start somewhere. Hopefully Adobe will be able to work more formally with the other PHP frameworks, to offer a broader choice in solutions.

(Full disclosure: My brother-in-law is the Vice President, Finance & Operations for Zend)

Reflection from the glow of FlashCamp SF

I meant to write this up after I returned from Adobe’s San Francisco offices, but with Saturday being my 16th wedding anniversary, I figured I should not spend it in front of a keyboard.

I flew up to San Francisco that morning. I was surprised to find James Polanco from Development Arc, standing just past the security exit at SFO. He was waiting for his business partner who was arriving on another flight. We rode BART into the city chatting about the upcoming event. They had some meetings to attend to, and I headed for the hotel. (We were later photographed together at the event).

After spending after of the afternoon at the Contemporary Jewish Museum, I headed down to 601 Townsend. A small crowd was gathering in the lobby, while various Adobers, were busy setting everything up.

I chatted with several good friends, as a queue began to form. The line quickly began snaking around the lobby. After a few minutes, the check-in table was open; raffle tickets, badges, t-shirts, and other goodies were quickly handed out. I thanked Rachel Luxemberg for the suggestion of the museum. If you don’t know Rachel, you should.

I grab a nice beer from the great selection out together by Mike Chambers. Kudos for posting the choices. I know they were competing with FlashOnTap in the beer category, but it nice to be able to do some homework on the brews before hand, to make the best choices.

As we enjoyed a drink or two and a some nosh, I was able to reconnect with several old friends. I had to miss last year’s MAX due to the death of my father, so this brought back warm memories of events past.

We found our seats, folks from all parts of the community were in attendance: from Google to Facebook to students. Kevin Lynch CTO of Adobe, and David Wadhwani, GM and VP of the Flash Platform business unit provide an overview of the Flash Platform. The video and slides are now online. The rest of the presentations should be available within a day or two.

For a lot of folks, seeing the progress on Flash Catalyst was the highlight of the evening. When the CDs were begin handed out, it seemed that FC was being installed first on most machines.

Various team members showed various new elements with the Framework, the newly rename Flash Builder and Catalyst. Some of the key points were the Data List Component in Flash Catalyst, the new Skinning capabilities in the Flex Framework, and the Client Side Data Management.

Throughout the evening, the various teams were available for some one-on-one Q&A. I had a great chat with Adam Cath of the Flash Catalyst team about the Data List Component and using the tools for mobile UIs.

Everyone seemed to have a wonderful time. Thanks Adobe and Mike Chambers for hosting such a wonderful event. (And winning a copy of CS4 Master Collection didn’t hurt either!)

FlashCamp San Francisco SOON!

I’m glad I got my free ticket to FlashCamp San Francisco as quickly as I did, as they ran out in no time at all. I’m flying up mid-day and either might wander about the city some, or find a quiet spot and get some work done. I’ll let the fickle SF weather be my guide.

Hope to see you there!

FlashCamp San Francisco Announced

Mike Chambers just posted information on FlashCamp in San Francisco taking place on May 29th. If you are planning on being in the San Francisco area, be sure to register while space is available!…

I am planning on flying up for the event (just need to find my voucher from Virgin America). Hope to see you there!