On a recent dreary Saturday afternoon in Denver my friend Jon Rose and I decided to give the video podcasting thing a try. The first episode is about the changes to the recently released Flash Player 10 that will impact software developers (primarily those of the Flex persuasion). When preparing to record the interview we decided to break out the Glenlivet. One thing led to another and somehow we came up with the name “Drunk on Software” as a cheap ripoff of the popular “Joel on Software” blog. But don’t worry… Even though some episodes will involve drinking they will hopefully be coherent and useful. In the future we will be interviewing the smart people we know in the Denver area (or wherever Jon and I happen to be). So if you’d be interested in being interviewed and can handle being barraged with questions while we drink fine liquor, please let us know!

Next week I’ll be in Denmark for a few Flex presentations at JAOO and at the local university:

Architecture of a Rich Internet Application (RIA) with Josh Holmes

Developing RIAs using Adobe AIR & Flex

Data Synchronization for Rich Internet Applications

Oct 1st Presentation at the University

Hopefully I will see some of you there!

This week I’ve been at Oracle OpenWorld checking out all of the new applications Oracle has been building with Flex. Some of these seem to be integrating Flex and ADF which is a great combination of technologies! I’ve recorded videos of some of these applications which I hope to edit and publish here soon. One of those videos will feature the new Oracle MetaLink, which is a fantastic Flex application (details on Edwin Biemond’s blog).

Having used Linux as my primary desktop for over ten years I can’t help but be a bit jealous of all the great software Windows and Mac users have available to them. But I can’t really blame the software creators for focusing on only those platforms. It’s just purely economics. The cost / benefit of making software work on Linux just isn’t there for most consumer software. What we have always dreamed of is “Write Once, Run Anywhere”. Why can’t software developers write applications for one OS and have it run on all of them?

Flex and JSF have both been widely adopted by the Java Community. In many instances developers must choose between the two technologies. Today Exadel announced a new product called Fiji which alleviates this decision by providing a simple and seamless way to integrate Flex and JSF.

This is very exciting news for Java developers. For more information read the press release, check out the product page, or see the live demos.

Last year at JavaPolis Bruce Eckel, Christoph Rooms, and I did a keynote about Flex. That talk has been posted on Parleys.com (which btw is an awesome Flex app!). You can watch it there, in their Adobe AIR application, or right here using the new Parleys.com Share (beta) widget. If you have any problems watching it here please let me know or file a bug. Thanks!

A podcast I recently did with Chariot Solutions has just been published. Let me know what you think.

A friend of mine recently asked me to help him troubleshoot some performance problems with his Flex application. In his scenario he had a large list of data and wanted to filter the data such that each time the search string grew by a character the complex filter would only be run on the results of the previous filter. A very simple approach to this is just to keep a record in each item indicating if the item matched the filter for each search string. Even though the filter function will still run for each item, the complex part of the filter function could easily be isolated and only run for the subset of data which matched the previous filter. This may not be the best way to do this (I’m open to other suggestions) but it was simple. You can see the results of my first attempt here:

It appears the Flash Player engineering team is making progress on 64-bit Linux support. There are no details yet on when this will ship. But I’m sure they could still use your help.

Intuit has been using Flex in some very exciting ways recently. One of those is to use Flex as a developer SDK for QuickBase. This allows developers to easily build a great user interface on top of the solid and in-the-cloud back-end of QuickBase. You can find out more about this in the QuickBase Developer Program.

A few weeks ago I presented to developers in the QuickBase Developer Program about making Flex applications look and feel great by adding effects and by skinning components. Intuit has allowed me to repost that presentation here. Let me know what you think.