We’ll be releasing Apptacular soon on labs.adobe.com, but I’m tired of saying “It’s coming soon.”
You want Apptacular: Go get it: http://bit.ly/Apptacular
If you have any issues, please report them using this site: http://bit.ly/ApptacularIssues
If you want to participate in building Apptacular, you want to look at the source, and tests, etc. Check it out on GitHub: http://bit.ly/ApptacularGitHub
If you want to know more about what Apptacular can do for you, check out these tutorial videos:
Adobe and Intel are doing a joint event in San Francisco tomorrow. It’s focused on AIR and Intel’s AppUP Center for distributing apps.
Date: Wednesday, July 21st
Location: Adobe Systems Office
Address: 601 Townsend, San Francisco, CA 94103
Parking: Parking will be extremely limited in the Adobe parking structure;however, there is street parking available.
Once again I’m happy to be participating in an awesome Philadelphia based event.
On July 21-22 Wharton will host the Higher Education Web Symposium, an event that brings developers, designers and IT managers from Higher Education together to talk about making web experiences better. It’s open to the public, so if you are not in Higher Ed, but it sounds interesting, feel free to sign up.
I’ll be talking about Flash Catalyst, and showing how it can be used to quickly create interfaces for your web applications.
Can’t wait to see you all in Philly.
I’m posting all of the materials so that if you want to fool around with anything you saw in my demos, you’re all set.
It contains:
In this last video installment, I’ll show you how to take your desktop AIR application and turn it into a mobile one:
Flash Catalyst for Mobile Development 3 from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.
For my second video in the series, I’ll show you how to take a Flash Catalyst interactive composition and turn it into a stand-alone application using Flash Builder and Adobe AIR.
Flash Catalyst for Mobile Development 2 from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.
For my first video in this series, I’ll show you how to take an idea from one of Adobe’s design tools (Fireworks) to a working prototype using Flash Catalyst
Flash Catalyst for Mobile Development from Terry Ryan on Vimeo.
I’m starting up new little series entitled “Holy Crap, I’m a Mobile Developer.” The idea is that somewhere along the way I developed the ability to build applications for mobile devices, specifically Android. Sadly I can’t take any credit for this. The Flash Platform engineering teams did this to me.
In my series of demos, I’m going to show how to take a static Fireworks composition and turn it into an application running on a Nexus One. I start out using Flash Catalyst to turn the static composition into an interactive one (interactive composition sounds better than “dumb prototype”). After Catalyst, I add business logic using Flash Builder. Finally I use the AIR 2.5 SDK and the Android SDK to convert it to an Android app and drop it onto my phone.
My point here with these posts is to show off just how frickin’ easy it is to get your stuff onto a mobile device with the Flash Platform. It’s so easy that I can do it. That’s not false modesty, I’m mostly a back-end ColdFusion expert; on the front-end though, I’m usually at a loss. Not with these tools, I’m not. These tools make me look like a front-end genius. So I hope you enjoy this series.
So, hey, how are you doing? You’re here because you said something about ColdFusion, and questioned if anyone uses it, or something to that effect. If you’re genuine in your questioning of ColdFusion use and not just flamebaiting, let’s talk.
I work for Adobe, and I am the evangelist for ColdFusion. I can say categorically that people do use ColdFusion.
But what are the hard numbers that we can quantify? From our sales, community and web teams I can grab the following numbers:
Number of developers is a trickier issue. There is no direct way of tracking this. We can look at sales, but there isn’t a typical ratio of server to developer. So we have to rely on estimates. We have recently had some conflicting data here. Third-party numbers that we have access to say one thing; our internal estimates based on older models say another thing. Both agree that we’ve gained developers, but the numbers are too far apart to be useful. We are in the processes of doing a ColdFusion developer census using a new method, so if you are a ColdFusion developer please participate.
Numbers are great, but let me introduce you to the community of ColdFusion developers.
First, you probably met some when you dissed ColdFusion on Twitter. As you discovered the ColdFusion twitters are passionate, but you may not have seen how helpful they are. Ask a real question about ColdFusion on twitter something like:
I assure you, you’ll get the best responses 140 characters can buy.
Also check out the community on StackOverflow. We also have one at Dzone. And at github. We’ve got a small but growing presence in all of them.
Now, you might notice that participation is constant, but not a tremendous amount. That’s because the ColdFusion Community tends to be a bit insular. As a whole the community is working on it, but when you look at ColdFusion only resources like CFTalk and ColdFusionBloggers.org you’ll see constant volume.
Finally, if you look at the number of open source projects available at Riaforge.org, you’ll see again that there are definitely OS collaboration around ColdFusion.
Finally check out the list of ColdFusion conferences. A third of them are new conferences and have popped up over the past 3 years. We’re seeing a shift from huge national conferences to smaller regional conferences in the US, as well as a few more international events and activities mostly in Europe.
All of these point to a vibrant community that is engaged and loves using ColdFusion. Are we the biggest community? No, and no one will dispute that. But we are a community; we’re evidently still growing in numbers, and still branching out into new social networks. We use ColdFusion, and we love it.
To sum up this long answer to your short question: Do people still use ColdFusion?
Hell yeah.
Now, you might be changing your argument, from “no one uses it” to “well it’s not good because…” Well if that’s the case, I have another blog post for you to read.
Get it? FUD for thought… I kill me.
I was all fired up and started writing some stuff up about FUD, and why you shouldn’t do it, and what not.
So I started writing, and it felt really familiar, like I read it somewhere else… so I did some searches for key phrases and turned up this post on not resorting to FUD. It quotes me… talking about FUD in my forthcoming book.
I just totally almost plagiarized myself. Here what I had to say about FUD:
FUD stands for “fear, uncertainty and doubt.” Though the phrase was coined in the mid 1970’s, the concept has been around since the first caveman traded a rock to another one “in case the mastodons come back.” More recently it’s been marketers, public relations flacks, and sales guys who use this on you. Basically, the idea is to tell you something that will make you afraid of a rival’s tool, enough so that you invest with the FUD’er.
At a smaller level, this happens in the workplace a lot. Developers with experience with proprietary tools spread rumors about crazy license implications of open source tools. Open source adherents spread horror stories of hidden code in proprietary tool kits.
It’s ultimately self-defeating. At best it can win people some sort of short term gains, but in the long term, it is a road to nowhere. Eventually people wise up to be bullied repeatedly and some people speak out. This spread of information inoculates the rest and the technique becomes ineffective. [from chapter “Create Trust“]
I stand by that. FUD does ruin credibility. It hurts you, it hurts your listeners. Even if your product is better, talk about why your product is better, not why the other guy’s is worse.
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