Adrock Set To Rock Out In Cleveland

The ColdFusion 9/Bolt/Flex 4 world tour makes it's highly anticipated stop in Cleveland tomorrow night. World famous ColdFusion Project Manager extraordinaire Adam Wayne 'Adrock' Lehman will make his illustrious solo debut when he presents information about the highly touted new software releases from Adobe.

From the Cleveland CFUG site:

The June meeting will be held on Wednesday, June 17, 2009, from 6:00PM - 8:00PM, at the offices of Dealer Tire, LLC, located at 3711 Chester Ave., Cleveland, OH 44114. Dealer Tire is located just east of the I-90 Chester exit, and just west of the East 40th Street traffic light. Note: If coming from I-90 and Chester, prepare to do a U-turn at East 40th.

If you're within driving distance of Cleveland I seriously recommend you come up for the event. I can't be certain, but I hear rumors that Adrock will be giving away $10,000 to one lucky attendee. (OK, that's a complete lie, but I wouldn't be surprised if he gave out some cool schwag).

Be there!!!!

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Introducing The Adobe Community Achievement Awards

I'm happy to announce that the CFEmmy awards have now evolved into the Adobe Community Achievement Awards. I started the CFEmmys a few years ago as a way for community members to recognize the outstanding achievements of their peers for the sometimes thankless work they do to grow our community. I'm really excited that Liz and Nafisa have thrown their support behind this effort - it should be a blast to present the awards at CFUnited.

Nominations are being accepted until June 8. Feel free to nominate those who you think deserve to be on the ballot. We'll hold a round of voting once all the nominations are in and the winners will be announced during CFUnited in August.

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Why Presenters Should Use SlideSix

We are in the midst of 'conference season' where many folks within the Adobe Developer Communities (ColdFusion, Flex, AIR, etc) are attending any of a number of amazing events to learn about our favorite technologies. I specifically mention Adobe technologies because the majority of my audience here at my blog use those technologies on a daily basis, but this post certainly applies to anyone who has a need to present material in front of an audience.

So as many of my readers know, I run a presentation sharing community called SlideSix. I often encourage friends and acquaintences to post their slides to SlideSix. Many of them actually do, albeit sometimes reluctantly. By far, the most common complaint I hear from folks is some variation of "my slides really aren't that helpful without my presentation."

My response to that statement may surprise you - I completely agree. Which is why SlideSix is much more then slide sharing. There are other sites for that, and they seem to be pretty happy in letting folks post slides that may be meaningless outside of the context of the material that was actually presented. SlideSix is about presentation sharing. Once you've uploaded your slides you can easily record audio or video narration for your slides within our management console. Recorded narration can take a simple slide deck and give it meaning. It can put context to your bullet points and images and let you tell the story behind your message. Want to show a demo of something? Record it with any standard screencasting software, upload it to YouTube or Vimeo then search for it in SlideSix and attach it right to your slide. Sure, it may take a little time to put together a proper web based multimedia presentation, but the payoff is an impressive product that you can embed on your site so people who may not have had a chance to see your presentation in person can have a very similar experience to those who were lucky enough to see it live.

SlideSix is also the perfect tool to practice your presentation. How many times have you stood in front of a mirror or your dog and practiced giving your presentation? Did you really benefit from doing that? Wouldn't it be much better to actually record (and re-record) your material so that you could actually view it back and share with others for feedback?

I encourage presenters to take a look at SlideSix for your presentation needs. You'll be happy you did, and so will your audience.

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I'm An Adobe Community Expert

Last week I learned that I've been selected as an Adobe Community Expert. I'm very excited and honored to be chosen to participate in this program. Adobe explains the program this way:

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Why Should You Attend CFUnited 2009?

I put together the following presentation with the blessing of Liz and Nafisa to combine a lot of their hard work into a single resource that answers the question:

Why should I attend CFUnited 2009?

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Quick Upload/Import Added To SlideSix

Over the weekend I quietly implemented a new feature at SlideSix. The management console is a great way to have full control over your presentations, profile and groups, but I realized that sometimes users just want to quickly upload or import a presentation. To that end I've added a new page to allow you to do just that. Now when you login to SlideSix you'll see a new link at the top of the page:

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SlideSix Adds Embedded Videos From YouTube And Vimeo

I'm thrilled to announce the release of a new set of features on SlideSix that further our goal of becoming the premier multimedia presentation sharing community on the web. First and foremost in this release is support for external multimedia. This means that you can now perform a single search from within our management console that will look for matching videos on YouTube and Vimeo. Once you have found the video you'd like to embed you simply attach it to your slide and the video will be displayed as a new slide in your presentation. Many folks have asked for this feature and I believe that it has been implemented in such a way that is true to the core vision of SlideSix - easy to use but extremely powerful. In the spirit eating my own dog food, the following presentation provides a nice intro and overview of this exciting new feature:

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Determine Exposed Methods Of An Externally Hosted SWF

Have you ever loaded up a SWF from an external source in Flex and wish that you knew what methods and variables it exposed? Most of the time you probably have a decent set of documents for the SWF that tell you this kind of information, but sometimes developers give you a means to embed their SWF but fail to provide any meaningful API with which to interact with the SWF. In the Java world we'd use the wonderful item known as 'reflection' to see the properties and methods of our class. With Flex it is a bit more complicated, but it can be done.

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Introducing The Flex Powered SlideSix Management Console

On December 19, 2007 I wrote the first line of code for what would become SlideSix.com. Exactly one year to the day I'm proud to launch a major enhancement that I hope will help to encourage more folks to join our presentation sharing community. Here is a quick presentation that I hastily threw together to introduce the feature.

There are still a few tiny bugs and a handful of features and enhancements that I need to address, but I'm confident (hopeful) that the application is stable enough to have folks take a shot at using the console to manage their presentations, profile and groups. To check it out, login and click on the 'Management Console' link at the top of the page.

My plan is to start doing a series of small but informative posts about the site itself and actually do a bit of marketing (gasp!) for the site now that this feature has been launched.

Comments, bug reports, etc are welcome and encouraged. There is a feedback mechanism built directly into the console.

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ColdFusion, Flex and AIR Developers - Spread The Word

We've all heard the news about Adobe layoffs this week. Some of our friends have even lost their jobs due to poor economic conditions and slumping sales. So what can we do about it? I for one believe that as an avid fan of many of Adobe's technologies that it is my responsibility to evangelize the technologies that I appreciate - since they do after all make my life easier. I'd like to think that we all feel some sense of responsibility to help our favorite tools grow.

To that end I'd implore folks to help spread the word about Adobe technologies. One way we can do that is to embrace and actually use those web sites and applications that are built on those technologies. Instead of singing the praises of sites built on PHP and Rails, use one built on ColdFusion. If it's not as good as a competitor, make suggestions! File bug reports, submit ideas to the developers! I understand this is easier said then done. I don't expect anyone to drop Twitter or Facebook when there is not a comparable or superior alternative. But when comparable alternatives exist, lets embrace them!

Another way we can spread the word about these technologies is to nominate some applications/sites built on Adobe technologies for the 2008 Crunchie Awards. Click on the badge above and nominate SlideSix, or click here to nominate Broadchoice Workspace (or heck, click both!). Let's put our technologies on the map and in the spotlight. It's our community, we can stick together and promote it or we can let it remain in the dark.

Who/what else would you nominate? Feel free to post a link in the comments - but only after you vote for me ;)

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