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?

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:

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:

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.

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.

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 ;)

I've started to dabble a bit in Flex/ActionScript lately, so I'm starting to pay attention to some more Flex/AS related posts via the aggregators. This morning a post to the Flex cookbook titled Why is session info (cookies) not sent when uploading files in Firefox caught my eye since I struggled with this issue a bit recently. The article explains why session state is not maintained when using FileReference.upload(), but it doesn't explain how to workaround the issue.

To workaround the issue when uploading to a ColdFusion server, the tactic that I have come up with is to pass the jsessionid into my Flex application (via Flash vars) and then pass the jsessionid along with my file upload by appending it to the target url. I'm not 100% sure this is the best solution (feel free to comment with other ideas or suggestions), but it serves the purpose of maintaining session state which allows me to do things like ensure that a valid, logged in user is performing the upload.

Wow, it feels kinda weird to actually blog something technical here. While working on a little Flex project recently I found myself with the need to create a CF style UUID (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx) within Flex . Flex UID's follow the 8-4-4-4-12 pattern (xxxxxxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxx-xxxxxxxxxxxx). Quite a simple task really when you think about it, but here is what I came up with:

I could have gotten fancy and done it with a regular expression, but I'm sure the cost of manipulating the string in ActionScript isn't all too much to worry about.

Last night I pushed the newest addition to SlideSix - a slick new presentation viewer built with Flex. Here is a screenshot that gives an overview of the viewer and it's functionality. CFPresentation worked out very well for a while, but I was starting to feel limited by the fact that the viewer itself isn't very customizable. The presos were also starting to get pretty large in file size and I really needed a solution that allowed a single viewer which retrieved content on the fly instead of writing everything to disk. I'm quite happy with the results. Here is the viewer (forgive me for not putting together a proper presentation introducing it):

The preso used in the screenshot above is a pretty comprehensive example (except for the lack of an attachment). Check it out.

Next up is a Flex based slide uploader/manager/media recorder.

I came across a free, open source Flash/Flex IDE recently called FlashDevelop. Being a Windows only product I'm sure it won't benefit many ColdFusion Mac lovers, but I have been playing with it a bit and I have to say it is really a pretty damn good IDE. It doesn't have design view like Flex Builder (although there is a slick AIR app on the AIR marketplace that mimmicks design view) but it does have full code completion for MXML and AS2/AS3. It also can compile your project for you.

This may be the nudge I needed to play around with Flex a bit more. I'm still surprised I haven't heard more about it in the blogosphere - maybe I'm just not paying close enough attention.