Apple goes out and builds this great platform that revolutionizes how people view their phone. Every wireless company and handset manufacturer in the world has been trying to tell us for years that the mobile space is where its at. People spend very little time with their personal computers, but their cell phone is with them all day long. Adobe spent 4 MAX’s conferences in a row telling us “this is the year for mobile”. Yet it never happened. People wanted the cheapest phone they could get from their carrier and the carriers had to discount nicer phones to get people to upgrade and extend their contracts. Then the iphone came out. Not only are people jumping ship from their cell carrier and their crappy free phone, they are willing to stand in long lines and pay $700 for a phone! The world turned on its ear and overnight every other handset manufacturer and wireless carrier was behind in the race. Developers start making money writing apps. Users start buying apps and they spend hours wasting time reading twitter and facebook wherever they are. The world is changed, we even get the “real” internet with us in our pocket every minute of every day. Except that its only mostly the “real” internet. We see most of the content, but all over there are these little boxes with a blue lego on them. I wonder what was supposed to go there? Oh, that’s right! That is all the flash content from the “real” web that is missing from the “i” experience. So the users demand, the developers cry, but apple says no. Flash is to resource intensive and buggy to run on their blessed device. The best hand held phone in the world, the “jesus” phone can’t run flash. And that is where the secret plan started.

In that little statement Apple challenged the world. The most amazing piece of technology every made can’t run flash. Every competitor in the market is trying to figure out how to get their market share back and actually challenge the dominance of the iPhone. And now they have their chance. If anyone can build a handset that can run flash, and the iPhone can’t, then it must be a better phone than the iPhone! And so now, Sony Ericsson, HTC, Blackberry, Nokia…. 19 of the top 20 handset manufacturers are releasing phones this year that run Flash Player in the browser! 19 of 20! Blackberry for gods sakes, they can’t even make a browser work worth a damn but now they are gonna have Flash Player!

So after seeing this all come together I have to assume that this was a marketing move that was designed by Steve Jobs himself. Because the sure success of this endeavor could only have been put together by the mastermind that is responsible for Apples recovery in the world. There is no way that by accident, Apple could have caused the proliferation of the Flash Platform to every other device on the market and there by ensuring its continued dominance and the success of the Platform.

No, that “no flash on the iPhone” plan could not possibly have backfired at all. :)

So that got me to thinking….”Can I do what lee did without using Flash CS5″ The answer came back pretty quick that I could. So I fired up CS4 made me a graphic, and then started porting his Flash IDE code to an Actionscript AIR project. I was really impressed at how quickly you could build something cool so I wanted to share that.

So please enjoy a very VERY fast paced video where I convert Lee’s project to a project that just about anyone should be able to try out.

Here is the code that Lee wrote (mostly), and here is my completed code

Matt has been playing with multitouch since before it was easy, so you can rest assured that he will bring great info to the table about how it works and what you can do.

Join us at 6PM on Thursday February 18th to see whats cool! Visit http://www.pdxria.com to RSVP!

It seems that seats for this great conference always run out, so make sure you go check out the fantastic schedule and register for the event.

In addition to some of the best minds in the Adobe Community, they saw fit to let me present again this year. I will be talking about the Git distributed version control system. You might think that your current source control setup is enough but you owe it to yourself to see how the power available in Git. Many of the Actionscript communities frameworks and projects have already made the switch. Make sure you know why and how you can get that code. So come on out to my session and I’ll make sure you Get Git when you leave.

With all the new multitouch stuff coming out in AIR 2.0 and in Flash Player 10.1, I am in the market to buy a tablet. And I’ll be honest, I was holding off doing so until I found out what Apple’s tablet would do. Because all of my computers are Apple and so are most of my gadgets. I think they build good stuff and I am very happy with all of it.

But I wont be buying and iPad. At least not as a tablet. I am extremely disappointed in Apples decision to base this off the iPhone OS. I have no, less than zero, interest in having a giant iTouch laying around the house. I really wanted a tablet computer based on OS X. But what I really wanted was an OS X that correctly implements the Multi-touch events so that I can use multitouch monitors with my existing equipment.

I have been considering getting a nook/kindle reader. And in that line of things the iPad might still find its way into my home. But since the battery life on the iPad is 10 hours instead of the 10 days on the kindle, that may not happen either.

So while I still dream of an actual mac computer tablet, I may just have to settle for windows 7 for a while or make my own.

Features of AIR 2.0 include:

• Enhanced support for interacting with printers (beta 2)
• Support for TLS/SSL socket communication (beta 2)
• Support for the detection of mass storage devices.
• Advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets.
• Support for native code integration.
• The ability to open a file with its default application.
• Multi-touch and gesture support.
• New APIs for access to raw microphone data.
• Webkit update with HTML5/CSS3 support.
• Global error handling.
• Improved cross-platform printing
• Improved security and support for enterprise and government standards.

Head on over to Adobe Labs to grab the bits.

Many of you know that Carrie and I have been trying to have another child. We have a wonderful 3 year old little girl but she very badly wants to have siblings. We have been working on that task for over a year.

Recently we had become hopeful that we were going to have a second. We got a couple positive pregnancy tests and things seemed to be proceeding as planned. Unfortunately, after a trip to the doctor yesterday it appears that is not in the cards this round.

Yesterday was an emotional day for my wife and I. It was our 12th anniversary ( dating anyway :]) and we found out we had lost our new baby. We are doing fine. We are dealing with this and looking forward to putting it behind us so we can start trying again.

Sorry for anyone who happens upon this looking for technical things but I have many friends who I communicate with online, and this topic required more than 140 chars.

If you would like to hear more details about the ordeal you can visit my wifes blog.

The purpose of this post is to be informative, not to illicit responses so I think I am going to close the comments. If you feel strongly that you need to say something to me about this, then odds are you already know other ways of getting a hold of me.

Thanks.

Well today I am happy to report that the Release Notes have been updated with correct instructions on how to install the SDK on the Mac. I think it would have been easier to distribute a zip or tar.gz for the mac, but hey, at least they instructions work.

Find out more about the updated Release Notes here: http://blogs.adobe.com/air/2009/12/better_sdk_overlay_instructions.html

Check out Christians post here: Labels in ActionScript 3

However I have been doing lots of Java and Groovy work. Well those with Spring and Hibernate really. And mostly in the context of how to get data in and out of Flex. When ever I work with these tools I think of ColdFusion and how with the release of version 9 the language has really come back to being core. The last few releases have seen lots of bells and whistles added which are great for demo’s and POC apps, but never seem to benefit me too much. Sure I can manipulate images and pdfs now, and hell I can even automatically make some ajax controls. But those things have been simplified across the board. The things that pulled me away from ColdFusion in the first place was that I was more effective writing code in other languages. The frameworks and tools available there made it easier to work with than doing stuff in CF. But now in CF9 with the ORM and then little things like nested array and object syntax ( think [{foo:'bar',foo:'beer'}]) I think I may revisit CF as well. I had a pretty big application I worked on last year using CF and I was begging the whole time for a better language. I think CF9 might have made that better. Although it still bothers me that I have to actually have a running cf server with my site setup to run my unit tests. It is hard for me to believe that many people use CI in the CF world and that makes me sad. I have spent a good portion of my personal time the last couple months helping organize the FlexUnit 4 project and have really started to push testing and CI in my flex projects and to my clients. Not sure how that will work if I pick up CF again. We will see.

Ok, thanks for hanging in there for my random thoughts. Please feel free to add your random thoughts below.