Ryan is posting and doing a fine job. I thought I'd talk about Day 2 from a designers POV.

Day 2 was geared for the designers, or maybe former Adobe people in the room, which made me very happy. The line up started with Dreamweaver and went to Photoshop, Illustrator, Apollo and then FlexBuilder 2.

Dreamweaver: We are still under NDA, so once again I am not able to say as much as I'd like. What I can tell you is they really took their time with Dreamweaver and listened carefully to what the hard core developers asked for. The one theme I kept seeing throughout the day was that all the apps seemed to have more tools for the newbies. That being said, I wish there was more on all the apps for the hardcore developers.

(I'm sitting here watching Ryan edit pictures in some hideous "Windoz" program and I can hardly contain myself. Sorry for the distraction)

Anyway, there will be some really amazing CSS improvements. Can't say what, but I was super impressed in what we will be able to do with Dreamweaver 9.

Photoshop: Well, if I was impressed with Dreamweaver, I was literally blown away with the new Photoshop features. So many in fact that it will change a few things in how the product is packaged. As a trainer I could only think of taking the test for this version. Yikes!

Illustrator: Not impressed with the speakers. It was so slow that no one clapped when they were finished showing a new feature. You could almost hear a pin drop. A room full of mostly developers who could care less about Illustrator I guess. Too bad. Illustrator is an underdog program because it isn't utilized as much as it should. As a trainer, I see people using Photoshop (alot) when they should be using Illustrator, but just don't know how, or don't know the features exist.

So what did I think of the new features? I honestly don't think much of what they showed, but I think if someone else had showed the newer features, it would have been a more impressive demo. Maybe. I still think the Illustrator team is located on a deserted island with no phones or internet. The palattes are all the same across the board of CS3, but it still seems the other programs work together better.

Ryan will talk more about Apollo, but very cool. And to quote Forest Gump, that's all I'll say about that.

Dee

Mike Chambers, the manager of developer relations for Apollo is discussing how Apollo will work. He made the mistake of telling us that what he was going to show us was public...we corrected him very quickly (as a group) that we were under NDA. Ed has been repeating his NDA, cone of silence speech every few hours. Unfortunately, now that we corrected Mike, it is unclear which of the things he is saying are public versus private....someone just asked for clarification, the next few paragraphs are public. 'Apollo is a cross-OS runtime that allows developers to leverage their existing web development skills (Flash, Flex, HTML, Ajax) to build and deploy desktop RIA's.' - Mike

Mike is showing his demos on a Mac running Parallel with Windows XP running inside of it. Of the Apple fans I've talked to, it is very clear that they are fervantly into the Mac OS. I rarely see people drool over their Windows.

Mike just showed full screen HDTV running in Parallels on his Mac through an Apollo app. Very good runtime performance, and that is with early builds. One nice thing with Apollo over the old Central (only released as a developer preview) application is branding. Adobe isn't putting large branded chrome on the applications you build. Your app is your app.

If you have feature wishes for Apollo, you can send them to wish-apollo at adobe.com. You can always report bugs and feature wishes for the majority of projects at http://www.adobe.com/go/wish/ Links that Mike recommended:

• Apollo on Adobe Labs
• Mike Chamber's Weblog
• Apollo Smart Category at MXNA

Christian Cantrell is now a part of the Apollo team. His job duties are to 'build stuff'. Mike responded to a question on use cases for Apollo by agreeing that his demos (video, mp3 player, etc.) are his own personal hobbies (he did state a few legit ones). Must be nice to have a job where you get to play part time.

Ted Patrick, a new Technical Flex Evangelist demonstrated some basic features of Flex Builder 2. Most of the information was rather generic in nature and can be found by visiting Flex.org for links, blogs and resources. He briefly discussed the pricing and product line.

Flex Framework, SDK, Compiler >> Free
Flex Data Services Express >> 1CPU Free

In Flexbuilder, you can highlight a section of code, hold the control button down and hit the up or down arrow keys on your keyboard to move the block up and down. This is a side benefit of the Eclipse application.

Note: There appears to be a minor bug in the RDS feature in Flex Builder relative to the ColdFusion wizards.

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I'll be posting a brief photo montage of some of the semi-public areas of the Adobe offices on FusionAuthority.com in a few days.

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FYI: SQL statement is not saved in Report Builder Issue

In ColdFusion Report Builder 7.0.2, if you type a SQL statement into the query builder, save it and then reopen the query builder, the SQL is no longer there. It is available in Snippets, however.

Solution - Download and install the latest build of Report Builder 7.0.2 from the ColdFusion downloads page to fix this problem.

Last week I started training my replacement on the contract job I have been working. Sadly, he is a Java developer who has never touched ColdFusion and yet because of budget changes, he will be expected to complete some code changes to my ColdFusion code once I depart. While talking to him it became clear that he dislikes IDEs for development work. Instead of using Dreamweaver, Eclipse, etc. for his development, he uses a straight text/code editor, UltraEdit32. While watching over his shoulder I noticed a few other signs of his preference for using rather low end tools.

I'm a little surprised by this. Why don't employers encourage staff to use the tools that increase productivity. Am I to believe that using a tool like Eclipse doesn't make a coder's job more efficient? (versus using say, Notepad)

To each his own.

I'm reminded of this by hearing the almost audible grins on my peer's faces as they watch Scott Fegette show a few new features that are in the works for the next version of Dreamweaver. Scott is filling in this morning for the Dreamweaver 'Next' presentation (next just meaning the next version, it is not the code name).

John Nack, 'the Ben Forta of Photoshop' (Evangelist). While showing some cool masking techniques, John made a rather comical change to his original photo, eliciting the comment, 'The first rule of demo club, don't deviate from the demo'. The builds we were shown (he flipped between 3 I believe) had varying levels of stability and completeness of certain features. I didn't see any real problems, but I'm weak with Photoshop. By the rather loud applause a large percentage of the audience were enamored with the upgrades and tweaks.

Terry, Brenda & Lydia - group product manager for emerging markets talked about Illustrator and a few other features having to do with fonts. Frankly, I'm lost by their presentation since I don't use Illustrator and a cell phone call was the perfect reason to excuse myself. The highlights for me were the start screen when Illustrator opened and the bright colors they used in their demos :-)

What does the inside of Adobe look like?

Ed, one of our community relations people at Adobe informed us that thanks to significant requests (mine!) they have acquisced and we will be getting small tours of the buildings this afternoon. No word yet on the scope of the tours, but rumor has it that there is a basketball court with the Adobe logo embedded in the floor on the 7th floor of one of the buildings. I'm hoping for a few good camera shots of the sky bridges between the towers and maybe a couple senior developer's offices.

Ryan Hartwich

Shortly before departing for our evening activities I noticed channel 63 on my hotel TV was tuned to a mysterious channel...an Internet Explorer error! What a surprise then that dinner conversation turned to Microsoft products and their infinite problems (remember Clippie?)

Here are a few shots from Dave & Busters (an adult centric bar/restaurant/pool hall/arcade), our evening entertainment.

Tom Green (Adobe Community Expert (Flash) and author, and Lisa Hesselton (corporate champion)

Matt Woodward of the ColdFusion Weekly podcast, Jeff

Dee Sadler (Kansas Ciy, KCWebCore Manager), Myra Ferguson (Columbia, Missouri, Mid Missouri MMUG manager), William, Leif Wells, Lisa Hesselton

Ed Sullivan, Adobe Developer Relations, Todd, Schlomy Gantz Tom Green

Charlie Arehart, Atlanta ColdFusion User Group Manager

This afternoon Ben Forta is presenting on the Engagement Platform and LiveCycle platform. Ben demoed a combination of Flex 2 and LiveCycle to work on a form in a browser and then go 'offline' and pull a PDF. He edited the PDF and then went back online and the Flex application updated to show the data was complete (using the Flex Data Services to synchronize the two). Hey look, ColdFusion and Dreamweaver!

Ben Gets Excited! ---NDA? CF/Livecycle integration coming...later...

'Livecycle in its current form is not targeted to anything small' (in response to a small employer question). After the intermission we'll have an hour for Scorpio demos, contingent upon new builds working with the demos.

Scorpio - Nice demos and new features. We are still quite a way away from a release, so plenty of the features shown are early in the development cycle. Sadly for you, the NDAs rule and there isn't anything I can share at this point.

Mike Downey is presenting on Flash 9, all NDA of course. Don't you hate that? The crowd has a large contingent of Flash developers & designers and they seem to be really thrilled with the features being displayed.

Tonight we will be going as a group to Dave & Busters. In light of Doug's 'Gnurd' research study, I'll attempt to capture him some additional data points.