It looks likes this one slipped by me, but Adobe Labs have released Dreamweaver beta, Fireworks beta, and Soundbooth beta.

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MacNN has a good article on the iPhone being too expensive for UK market which I couldn't agree with more.

When Apple brought the iPhone to the UK it seems they didn't do any research on our mobile/cell phone market. They took the model they used in the USA and moved it over here. For anyone not familiar with our model its simple.

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It's funny how this all happen at once.

On a recent trip I managed to snap the photo below. Its a UK mag called Mac World on the cover disc of this month is ColdFusion 8.

The reason I'm making a blog entry out this is that when I came home and caught up on my feeds I came across a post from Sean Corfield (along with others) in regards promoting CF outside of the community which reminded me of my photo.

It seems that CF is getting there again and I figured was worth of a kudos mention

Next week, everyday, Andrew Shorten is offering to UK and Ireland residents a chance to win a pass to this years Adobe Max Europe. Plus if you are lucky enough to win on the Friday you could also bag yourself economy return flights and accommodation all paid for.

So as of Monday don't forget to check out Andrew Shorten's site

Update: This appears to be on a different port for others. As Jax pointed out you can go: Eclipse, select Help -> Help contents to get there as well :o)

I was just going into some help files of Aptana when I came across the local address for the Eclipse Help system at: http://127.0.0.1:58041/help/index.jsp

In there was a wealth of information I just didn't know was on my hard drive ... though I suppose it depends on what plug-in's you've got installed but for me I had:

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If you haven't seen already, Damon Cooper has posted one of the first 'teaser' blog posts for CF8. But before it is released you should check out the Public Beta!! It looks like CF 8 is picking up some momentum now, what with Ben Forta's tour, there are even quite a few tracks at Scotch. So, when is the final release?

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/coldfusion8

Under the Mozilla Public License(MPL) Adobe are planning on releasing Flex to the Open Source community.

This includes not only the source to the ActionScript components from the Flex SDK, which have been available in source code form with the SDK since Flex 2 was released, but also includes the Java source code for the ActionScript and MXML compilers, the ActionScript debugger and the core ActionScript libraries from the SDK. The Flex SDK includes all of the components needed to create Flex applications that run in any browser - on Mac OS X, Windows, and Linux and on now on the desktop using "Apollo".

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Ted Patrick has announced on his blog that "One Solid Flex Release 2.0.1" is now live and ready for download.

What does the .1 release bring. In short:

• Faster Compiler
• Module Support
• Apollo Support
• Runtime CSS
• and my favourite, Mac support!

Check out Teds post for a better description.

What makes this nicer is that I won a copy of the licence at the CFDevCon and have been waiting for the Mac version to come out. So I think its time to collect on that too!

Flex here I come!

Well if you haven't got yourself a ticket yet to the CFDevCon one day event, do it! It's going to be the first of many to come hopefully, and we need to give it support so all the best events dont just happen state side - mainly cause I get jealous :o)

I started my journey this morning at 5:45am and no i'm not mad and sleeping in a tent outside to be first in line (hmnmmm note to self....) I'm going up into my office today which is about another 30min drive of the conference hall which means I wont have to get up so early to make the drive tomorrow.

So come on who's going?? I know a few but there's gotta be more of you hiding out there!

WooHoo, I don't know if he was the first, but Sean has just mentioned that Flex 2 beta for Mac is out!.

Though as David mentioned in his comments, ". Some day, we (Mac users) won't have to wait 6 additional months for apps.". Fingers crossed, knock on wood and all that, that this isn't the same for Fireworks.

WooHoo! I've finally got myself a ticket to my first CF conference, the CFDevCon. My ticket is booked along with my room in the Fairfield Hotel for the 9th November 2006.

It looks like it should be a good day with some of the topics covering API's, BlueDragon, CFEclipse and Fusebox. Also quite excited about the footnote on the site saying Starting from 2007 we are planning some much larger conferences covering other technologies such a ASP.NET, Web Services, XML, AJAX, web 2.0 and much more, with tracks teaching you how to leverage these technologies and integrate them with CFML. Watch this space.

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If you listened to ColdFusion nightly's from CFUnited you know that Matt & Peter had a few free copies of Fusion Authority Quarterly to give away. Well I jumped on that and finally this morning it arrived. So first of a big thanks Matt & Peter for sending it "over the pond", I would Skype but I don't have account or a Mic (though a new purchase soon might change that?) and a thanks to the Fusion Authority team as well (of course).

I've only had a flick through so far but i gotta say I like the format alot. I've never seen a CFDJ or another CF related journal so i've got no comparison here but what stands out straight away is the size. Its an A5 booklet which makes it handy as anything to store and cary around! The code sample layout is really good, I remember this being talked about in one of the Weekly's and I gotta say it works well. The text is a descent size and there hardly seems to be any adverts in thereThere's only one issue I have and all that is is the lack of volume/issue number down the side, the spine is left blank which will mean when these build up to go back you're gonna have to pull out the issues!

From the initial issue it definately looks worth subscribing to and for the overseas price to be £43 ($80) its worth the money.

I haven't quite checked the EULA about this but at the moment I am running Eclipse 3.2 and Flex is for 3.1 so this is one way to run the CF bits of Flex for Eclipse 3.2.

To access the ColdFusion (RDS support etc) I've manually extracted the CF_FB_Extensions.zip file from the Flex exe. To do this you'll need to download Flex and have a copy of Winzip (or WinRar etc etc).

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Well I'm, writing this on the train home after battling through the ever so friendly people on the london Underground. I'm coming back from the UKCFUG meeting tonight where the topic was Coldspring(CS) and what it does presented my Mark Drew. This is his part 2 speak after the Model Glue(MG) and Reactor(RC) preso the other month.

Though fairly short (about 60/70 minutes) he covered a lot of ground and answered concisely the question of "What the hell does CS do?"

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There is a new CFUG starting up for those who cannot make it to Angel in London. The new group will be based in the Thames Valley in Marlow (on the M40). The group has been set up by Kevin Roche with the first meeting being held on the 12th July and will be covering CFUnited.

I'll add the details to the CF events calenedar soon so its up there as well. You can register for the event via the UKCFUG site.

As a side note though i've heard of too many UK developers going to CFUnited this year. I'm getting a little jealous here - anyone fancy buying me tickets/flights/accomodation. In return you'll have a beer/vodka and coke drinking companion!! - Worth a try :o)

It looks like in the ColdFusion Extensions to Flex Builder 2.0 download they have ported the Component Browser functionality over. You can find this by going to Window >> show view >> other >> ColdFusion >> Service Browser.

It's a nice feature but I feel its wasted for a couple of reasons; I'll be honest I never liked the DWMX implementation of this function as having all your functions in one list is just measy. Plus this feature has been in CFE (nightly builds) and personally is a better version - look for Window >> show view >> other >> CFML >> Component Explorer. One of the things I like about CFE's is that it is project based, Adobes version works from your web root and mappings so in there is a lot of junk but it also misses a lot of my folders as I split them out over different IP's. One feature which is nice in the Service Browser though is the view by Access.

Which ever you like, its another tool in your arsenal. My only question is that if Macromedia (Adobe) are supporting CFEclipse development then why not work together on this?

I came across a problem which meant that the beans created with the Flex RDS plugging for Eclipse wasn't suitable for use with Model Glue. If you use the new RDS feature to create beans you'll notice that the setters look like this:

This is fine, but the problem with this is that the MG bean maker (CollectionBeanMaker.cfc) expects the name of the argument to be the name of the field, in this case "firstname". I did post this on the MG List and Sean Corfield said he was going to see if this could be fixed for the next beta. In the mean time if you have a large bean file the following regex code will clean of the cfc. From the Find/Replace menu tick "regular expressions"

In the find dialogue box put

And in the replace box put:

You can find out a little more about regex and back validatin in Eclise here at Adam Howitt's Blog

The DMXZone.com is asking Will you be upgrading (or buying) Macromedia Studio MX2006 ?.

Two of the possible six answers are

• Because of a possible Adobe merger, I don't plan to upgrade/buy MX2006.
• Because of a possible Adobe merger, I plan to wait before I upgrade/buy.

Personally i'm probably going to be asking those above to upgrade straight away. Why? Mainly because the merger isnt going to even happen for about another 8 months, on top of that Adobe aren't gonna just pull/not support these products for another year. Its going to take a little time while they combine software packages etc.

The IE Blog have posted a Few details on the up coming release

They mention support for alpha channels in PNG along with better support for CSS.

The comments are quite good (until it posted on Slashdot - then the trolls start the anti MS bashing)

One comment which i though good was

"SVG support. Now that Adobe owns Flash, they may not be pushing SVG as its competitior, so MS could fill the void." - I figured if the buyout goes through then maybe Adobe would look at getting SVG into Flash not just do away with it??

Here's a wild thought!

When Macromedia took over Allaire then did some mild updates to Homesite then pretty much killed the development - fair play, they did have Dreamweaver afterall.

So if all goes well "could" enough support get HS+ 5.5 development started again (surely with Adobes abundance cash then could through some at HS) or would it now mean total death for the ageing editor?

Update: Just noticed Nick Bradbury has had the Same thought, with some good comments posted.