The real answer… public speaking, community involvement, not sucking at what I do and genuinely enjoying my work.

Now, I can’t help you with all these topics. But I can give you some advice on getting start with being recognized. Start submitting to speak at conferences. Conference organizers love new faces. Start with smaller conferences and user groups to build your skill.

Here are a few tips you should find helpful when submitting:

• Be authentic! Your peers need real-world scenarios they can use. Give original presentation ideas that focus on knowledge transfer, with engaging and relevant examples.

• Include as much detail about the planned presentation as possible. The more they know about what you plan to present and why it matters, the better.

• Keep it free of marketing.

• Keep the audience in mind: they’re forward-minded, professional, and already pretty smart.

• Clearly identify the level of the talk: is it for beginners to the topic, or for gurus? What knowledge should people have when they come to the presentation?

• Give it a simple and straightforward title or name—fancy and clever titles or descriptions make it harder for people (committee and attendees) to figure out what you’re really talking about.

• Limit the scope of the talk: Pick a useful aspect, or a particular technique, or walk through a simple program.

• Explain why people will want to attend: Is the framework gaining traction? Is the app critical to modern systems? Will they learn how to deploy it, program it, or just what it is?

To be honest, I don’t always follow my own advice. But I do try to stick close to it.

Good luck and let me know if you get accepted to speak somewhere.

That is until the other day.

Adobe announced that they were donating the Flex SDK to the Apache Software Foundation (ASF). It’s about effen time!

I give the Adobe Flex team a lot of credit for creating a really great product, but in the end… they could only put so many resources on it for it to make financial sense. Going ASF is the right thing to do.

Adobe, go make more great tools for us… so that we can continue to inspire and engage our customers with great software.

Oh, and I’m hiring Flex developers. Just thought I’d throw that out there in case you happened to have been recently laid off.

But with a poorly handled announcement by Adobe regarding the Flash Player plug-in for “mobile browsers” it really caused quite a stir. Unfortunately, the intent of the communication was not clear enough for most people. Including most of us in the community. Adobe can only blame themselves for this.

What was lost in the message is that, although they will not be actively adding new features to the mobile browser Flash Player, they are continuing to support the mobile plug-in.

So what does this change? Nothing.

The Flash Player for mobile is already NOT on iOS devices. That is not changing that we know of. Flash Player 11 for mobile is already on Android, Windows Phone, Blackberry and others.

So again, what has changed? Nothing.

What made Flash Player dominate the desktop was its ubiquity. You could count on it being there. Unfortunately, that isn’t that case for mobile.

And for all the haters, this is by no means throwing in the towel or admitting defeat. Flash Player for mobile is already on 80% of mobile devices. iOS market share is still dropping. Just say’n.

But the key thing for Adobe was that without the ubiquity that Flash Player has on the desktop, it’s hard to make the same claims of rich interface consistency across platforms. Without the consistency across platforms, you might as well use HTML 5 which is supported as best as possible by all smart phone browsers. And as a tools provider, there resources are better spent where they will make the biggest impact.

You do have to take this decision with a grain of salt. HTML5 is still a specification that is being worked on for a couple of more years. Yes, YEARS before it will become a standard. See some of my points regarding HTML5. We, developers, will have to live through browser compatibility hell again as we did for a decade with JavaScript. yeah.    Since HTML 5 still needs work to get to its promise (http://www.w3.org/TR/html5), it makes sense for Adobe to put more resources into HTML 5.

Flash Player is not going anywhere, for now. Flash Player for the browser and AIR for Mobile and Desktop at still the easiest and most consistent way to put consistent cross platform engaging experiences in front of users.

As an aside, I still think that it is a huge mistake by Apple to not allow users to install Flash Player on their tablet. I can care less about phone browsers, they are simply too small. But I am always using the “full site” option when browsing on my tablet. And because I’m on a Galaxy Tab, I get to enjoy all sites as they were meant to be. I do give Apple credit for their impact on the mobile phone world, but I don’t think it will carryover as well on tablets. The competition in the space has already caught and passed them from a quality product perspective. They may have the tablet market share currently, but just like the PC and the phone, they will eventually be swallowed up by the flood of less expensive options that are as good as or even better.

The core of Flash Player is the Tamarin Virtual Machine, which is an open source project under Mozilla. While the SWF file format is not fully open, it is documented by the community on osflash.org. Additionally, there are numerous open source products that read and write SWF files.

The Flash Player’s product direction has traditionally been heavily influenced by the community and their needs. The core language for Flash Player is an implementation of ECMAScript 262, which is the same specification for JavaScript. Flex also uses CSS for styling of components/applications.

There are also several libraries included with Flash Player that are licensed through other parties (i.e. h.264) that are not open. Thus, preventing Adobe from making the whole thing open source if they wanted to. Not sure that they would, but this definitely kills the idea.

Come save us HTML5 in 2022 AD

HTML5 has been in the works since 2004 and is still in “draft”. Its primary intent is to reduce the need for proprietary plug-ins (like Flash Player and Silverlight).

I can definitely see the benefit of not relying on a plug-in for multiple reasons. There is a concern if users will have the plug-in, but the bigger concern is vendor dependence. I think Adobe has the install base issue covered fairly well, yet it should still be a concern for locked down environments. To the bigger concern, I’d say that we already depend on companies like Apple and Microsoft quite heavily and that Adobe is far from a fledgling start-up that would be considered very risky. Naturally, I understand to the concern and will help my clients choose the appropriate technology.

The reality is that HTML5 is not coming anytime soon

Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, claims that “the world is moving to HTML5″. How is that going to happen Steve when Ian Hickson, editor of the HTML5 specification, expects the specification to reach the W3C Candidate Recommendation stage during 2012, and W3C Recommendation in the year 2022 or later?[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML5]

Should we hold off development for a few years while Google (Ian works at Google) finishes the specifications?

Finally, how many different implementations of HTML5 do you think there will be?. There will most likely still be cross browser compatibility issues to deal with.

Flash Player and Silverlight

I’ll sticking with vendor dependence that I can use now over incomplete technology with potential compatibility nightmares any day!

A good friend of mine, Cliff Hall, is most known for the PureMVC framework which was inspired by his his lack of love for the Cairngorm framework. Well, Cliff apparently was irritated by the inability to create licensed products with Flex and AIR too, so he did something about it. Zarqon. He has created very useful tool for creating a licensed Flex and/or AIR applications. How you implement your app is totally up to you, Zarqon just helps you easily issue and validate licenses.

Are you a software skeptic, me too! No worries, there a free 30 day trial license that will allow you to fully evaluate the product and make a decision about whether it’s right for you.

It is now in “beta”, but if you begin implementation of a Zarqon-licensed product within the trial period that you plan to launch, let him know and you just may get a free license. Even if you do have to buy a license, it won’t set you back but $25.

I’m going to start my testing immediately and I’ll let you know my  thoughts later.

You can read all about it and sign up for the Beta at http://zarqon.net

Open a terminal window.

cd to download directory

chmod the AdobeAIRInstaller.bin to 755

su -m

enter password

./AdobeAIRInstaller.bin

The hidden reason is cost. Cost for setting up each developer environment. Cost of licenses.

The bigger reason is, or should be, security.

Enter Platform as a Service (PaaS) to the conversation.

Although the idea of using the cloud for development is good in theory, it can be cost prohibitive. Here is why:

• The cost of using the cloud. In reality, you’ll end up spending around $1k per computing instance per year. i.e. per developer

• You still have to license any development tools for each developer seat. Check your EULA, they typically address ways of circumventing license requirements via virtualization.

You do get the benefit of quickly setting up an environment for a team. But lets face it, the only real benefit is the level of security in that your code base is never on someone’s laptop. Don’t get me wrong… this is a really big benefit!

From my research, I would recommend VMware ACE instead of PaaS. VMware ACE allows you to provision standardized client PC environments inside secure, centrally managed virtual machines called ACEs. Each ACE contains a complete client PC—including the operating system and all applications. Administrators use the dynamic policy configuration capabilities in ACE to lock down endpoints with device and network access control, there by protecting confidential company data and ensuring compliance with IT polices. You will get security through a managed virtual machine and the ability to quickly deploy a “ready to go” environment for your developers.
No, its not cheap. But it is way less expensive than the cloud with the equal benefits.

I know this because I’m looking into these tools in order to manage our training facility where we teach ColdFusion, Flex and LiveCycle.

Most components have a toolTip property that you can set (typically bound to some data). But the List-based components are a little different. They use dataTipField and the dataTipFunction. The “data” version of toolTips is based on the list iterating through it’s dataProvider and then adding toolTip for each row.

So, while adding toolTips to a List with an itemRenderer, I ran into a problem. My toolTips weren’t showing up when I set the dataTipField. The dataTipFunction didn’t work either. What gives?!

Well, I had an inline itemRenderer for my list. And apparently the List doesn’t like adding toolTips, via the dataTipField, to a component that is inline.

The solution: Simply add a toolTip to the inline component. And in my case, bind it to the data property that is passed in by the list.

Note: You don’t even need to set showDataTips to true.