Pamelia Kurstin plays a musical instrument called the theremin. ( Pronounced: th-AIR-e’men ) Adobe needs to hook up with her for their next AIR tour. If I have to explain why then please exit the blog through the back door. :-)

And if you were at Grant Skinner’s 2006 presentation at FlashForward in Seattle then you’re probably thinking the same thing I am: these two need to put on a show together.

My wife is a huge fan of the show What not to wear on TLC. ( It’s essentially about showing women how to dress better. )

I think we - the Flash/Flex community - could use a show How not to code. I know that I’d watch it. And SeanTheFlexGuy is game. So lets do this thing.

I’ll help out with doing the encoding, video player stuff. But I don’t know squat about shooting or editing video.

The perfect hosts would be McCune and Deepa. But they are probably busy with their book. Maybe Ryan Stewart and Ted Patrick could do it in their copious spare time. They already travel all over the world for Adobe so they could just do one show per trip and we’d be set.

Unfortunately HowNotToCode.com is being squatted on. But HowNotToCode.org and .net are available.

By the way, I volunteer to be the first dweeb who gets lambasted for his coding practices, or lack thereof. I can see it now: the host would be banging his/her head against the wall saying, “I can’t believe you use the Flash Authoring tool to write code.”

I busted out the Visa and got my Flex3 last night - $299 for the Professional upgrade.

And of course there was rejoicing throughout the land because AIR 1.0 was released!

My Pownce client still works. The Google Analytics Reporting Suite seems okay. MoTwitAir is a go! ( Kudos Sim! ) But Snitter was a no go. :-(

( Update: Snitter has a fix for AIR 1.0 posted already. Snitter on! )

The Adobe Media Player still works. I really need to use that more to watch videos at TED.com.

I hope the Flex team is kicking it at a huge release party before heading off for a well deserved break. Then back to work on Flex 4! ( Actually, Ely is probably half finished refactoring the Flex framework already. )

Adobe also tossed up a new ad-banner on their homepage. I like the “Carpe Desktop” bit.

Mr Flex is having fun teasing us with the Flex 3/AIR final release. So when is Adobe finally going to put out?

Well, 360Flex starts Monday in Atlanta. Hummmm, you do the math. That gives Adobe a platform to announce from where they are sure to get lots of blog coverage - not that they need it.

Ted was at the Flex Users Group meeting here in Los Angeles and said point blank that Flex3/AIR would launch at the end of February, give or take a week. Well, lets take a week. :-)

I don’t know about you but I’ll be visiting the purchase page for Flex around midnight EST and hit refresh a few times.

By the way, can anyone think of a product that got more use and attention than AIR has before it was even out of beta?

I wasn’t a big fan of Microsoft before I worked for them as a contractor for the Xbox/Zune division. After working for them I found even more reasons to dislike them.

That’s how I feel about MS as a whole but I loved working with the team at Xbox/Zune and got to do some really cool things. But we were purposefully located off campus and so didn’t have to drink as much cool-aid.

Note: I always spit mine out when no one was looking. :-)

I was told point blank by my direct manager that I would never be a Microsoft employee as long as I was an Actionscript developer. I was given the option to migrate into User eXperience design work, like he did, and become an employee. But as long as I wrote Actionscript I would be a second class citizen at Microsoft.

If Microsoft does buy Yahoo then I wonder how all the Actionscript devs there will be treated. Certainly better than an Actionscript dev at Microsoft but how long will it be before they are getting visits from the Silverlight team?

Silverlight instructor says: Hey look, you like to write code, right? Well with Silverlight you can do the same things that you can with Flash in 10x the amount of code. That’s right. You get to write more code. Just what you’ve always wanted!

And not just Flash devs. Think about PHP. From what I understand Yahoo is PHP. They have contributed a great deal to the language over the years. Are they eventually going to migrate to .NET? I’m sure that would go over like a lead brick.

All I can say is that if I worked for Yahoo I’d be updating my resume just in case the deal goes through. Or come to the freelance world where there is more work than you can shake a stick at.

Note to Keith Peters: you were right. :-)

I’m bummed. There will be a 360Flex conference in one month, February 25-27, and I won’t be there. I went to the first two last year - San Jose and Seattle - and had a fantastic time. With my recent move from Seattle to LA and starting up a freelance business I just don’t have time to go to Atlanta right now.

One of the biggest headaches I had during the first two 360Flex conferences is trying to decide which session to attend at any one time. That’s inevitable that there will be contemporanious sessions that you must see at any conference but more so with 360Flex because of all the great speakers and topics that are covered.

If you’ve never been to a conference then this is the perfect opportunity to get your feet wet. Besides the obvious value of the sessions there are the discussions with your Flex peers in the hallways between sessions and at the end of the day that are invaluable. I’ve learned just as much, if not more, from the conversations with other attendees as I  did during the sessions.

There is no telling what can happen at a conference like this but one thing is certain. You’ll be a better developer for attending.

Hopefully there will be another 360Flex this year in the SoCal area. If so I’ll be first in line to get my ticket. ( hint, hint )

Ted Patrick presented last night at the LA Flex Users Group meeting about the upcoming release of Flex3/AIR. Here are my take-aways:

Release date for Flex3/AIR is in the 4-6 week time period. So the end of February, give or take a week.

$249 to upgrade to the pro version is an incredible value considering you get the memory profiler, advanced dataGrid, new charts, and a few other goodies I can’t remember. The profiler alone is worth the price of the upgrade.

Flex3 will be open sourced when launched. Personally I don’t think open source counts until Adobe mounts a webCam on Ely Greenfield’s forehead. Then, it will be open sourced!

Ted talked about AIR being a desktop platform right now but eventually becoming a device platform. The ubiquitous question was asked, “Does that mean the iPhone will eventually support some version of AIR?” Ted responded by saying something along the lines of, “I know Nothing!” and asking for another question.

So we are faced with this: either Apple is absolutely against supporting AIR in which case Adobe would want to deny any knowledge of Apple’s intent knowing that we developers will read into it that it’s inevitable thus creating a little more interest in AIR. Or, Apple is on board with AIR and work is being done to support it. But in Apple like fashion they have to keep this an ultra secret so that Steve Jobs can make the announcement on stage in front of thousands of sycophants. :-)

Bottom line is this: AIR will be on lots of handheld devices. Some of them similar in functionality to the iPhone. If it isn’t supported on the iPhone itself then Apple will wish it had when the competitors begin to take away their market share with cheaper more robust versions.

I’ve been saying for years that Adobe should build a handheld device that supports Flash/AIR and leave it to third parties to make the UI. Each would be identical with respect to hardware but there could be 10,000 versions of the UI. The cream would rise to the top.

I asked Ted about USB support in AIR. ( In case you didn’t know your AIR apps won’t natively talk to devices connected via USB. That’s because there are lots of differences in how each OS deals with USB. Project Artemis from EffectiveUI helps bridge the gap. Paulius Uza has also made some inroads in this department. )

Ted mentioned that Flash can see USB connected devices such as webCams and Mics. It isn’t impossible, just problematic to make it reliable on all OSes. But it’s something on the table. My hope is that it will be part of AIR 1.5 when AIR supports Linux.

Ted mentioned the internal app at Adobe that they use as a personal directory. It sounds like quite an amazing work and it supports P2P functionality. Basically an AIR client can talk to another AIR client, presumably anywhere. Ummm, I think that’s something that could rock the Casbah.

What’s really cool is that an AIR app can talk to a SWF or Javascript in the browser. That’s great for creating a bridge between a Flex/Flash/Javascript app and your AIR app. You could use this to sync data. For instance you could build an AIR app for offline work. When you go back online you open up your  webApp and tell your AIR app to update it.

Side story: while working at Xbox/Zune I did a prototype for a usability study for interaction between the Zune website and the Zune client. I enabled it so that the user could click something on the website and update something in the client and visa-versa. I mean this is Microsoft. They wrote the browser ( IE ), the OS ( XP/Vista ) and the client ( Zune software ). Turns out that they couldn’t do this without popping up lots of security warnings that couldn’t be shut off. Sound familiar?

I halfheartedly tried to talk the developer into building the Zune client with AIR so that they could have all this amazing functionality - plus cross OS support - but no luck.  Oh well, their loss. :-)

There was lots more about security, modules, framework caching, etc but that has been covered in lots of other places.

Is it late February yet? :-)

The Flash player got an update today and there is also a Flash Debug player update. I always have a problem finding the debug player download page. So I thought I’d share in case I’m not the only one.

Side note: I use FireFox as my primary browser but I use IE as the default player to publish my Flex apps in. Debugging crashes the browser fairly often, at least I do, and this way I don’t have to wait for those tabs to open up again on startup. Plus, FireFox isn’t the quickest launching browser by a long shot.

John Wilker twittered that he was going to make some cool announcements. Since I did a bang up job with the Adobe MAX predictions I thought I’d see if I could keep the streak alive.

• The next 360Flex conference will be in the SoCal area. I’m going out on a limb with LA, because, well it’s really big and they have a lot of conventions there.
• The conference will be held sometime around the end of July.
• Admissions will be $499
• We’ll get a catered lunch but not a dinner.
• Doug McCune and Deepa will co-host a session and mention their Dummies book 15+ times. ;-) (Yes, I’ll be there counting.)
• John and Tom will be the hosts

Okay, I’m guarantied to get at least 1/3rd of my predictions correct because of the last two.

See you there!

TheFlexShow.com has the first of a two parter discussion about the Adobe MAX 07 conference in Chicago. The three great reasons to listen to the discussion are that Ryan Stewart and Jeffry Houser do their usual great job of hosting and Tony Hillerson, of EffectiveUI.com has some great comments and insights that he shares.

Between the three of them they pretty much make up for the fact that I’m also there leading the discussion astray from time to time and mumbling in the background. The show is worth listening to if you want a good overview of the MAX/Chicago conference.