You ever wonder why Deepa never seems to get any work done? Well, now you know. :-)

Hey Matt, let’s do lunch.

I turned off the FlipCam too early. After the video ends Mark Anders comes back to the podium and says something like, “I don’t know what to do now. I really thought she was going to show us some Thermo stuff.”

Sweet news: The Flex team has been working with the Degrafa team to bring the two together for Flex4. Here’s Juan Sanchez and Tom Gonzalez talking about what we can expect.

Justin Everett-Church showed off some cool visuals of the new features in the Flash Player 10 - Astro. We get to see some PixelBender, the new text layout examples, and a big hand for 3D ,or 2.5D but still amazing.

I’m here at the 360Flex conference in San Jose and I have my wife’s FlipCam. Here’s some of the bits from day 1.

They gave us “The King 3D glasses”. I guess somebodies going to have a 3D demo later. Or maybe they just want us to look like dorks.

You should know right off that I’m about the least qualified person to speak about the intricacies of computer languages. But I’m going to go there anyway.

By now you’ve heard the news that ECMA 4.0 has died and been replaced by ECMA 3.1. A lot of people think it’s another power move by Microsoft and I certainly wouldn’t put it past them. Hell, it’s why they are who they are.

So here’s my two cents worth: Screw’em. I’m an Actionscript developer. I don’t use and don’t plan to use Javascript or C# or any other language for the client side. Why the hell would I? I don’t care one iota if Actionscript is standards compliant. Just make it the best frakking language it can be so that I can do my job better and faster.

John Grden pointed out that everyone seems to have it in for Adobe. So why not turn the tables. We all know that the Flash player is the most ubiquitous software EVER. Adobe, I say use it to your advantage. Wait until Flash player 11 and make sure that it and every other version of the Flash Player can’t possibly work in Internet Explorer. Lets see how long those IE numbers hold up when no one using IE can go to youTube. Yeah, they would sink like a rock.

I’m all for playing nice in the community. But when someone, Microsoft and Apple especially, do something underhanded to hurt Adobe I take it personally. I wish I had a wildly successful website just so that I could disable it in IE. Hummm, now that you mention it, maybe I can live with a 30% decrease in traffic on this blog.

Unless you’ve been hiding under a MSN search box you’ve heard the news that Adobe has worked with Google and Yahoo to make SWF files truly indexable by search engine spiders.

I’ve put together a quick Flex application this morning to take this new feature for a test drive. It’s just a TabNavigator displaying a few tabs of content about Greek gods. My goal isn’t to become the number one result for zeus. I just want to see the content get indexed and see what the search results look like.

If you would like to help out with this little experiment then try linking to the application so that it might get crawled sooner. Wouldn’t it be cool if this little experiment ended up being on Google’s first page for “greek gods zeus”? I’ll do a site-search every few days to see when it gets indexed and report back in another post when it does.

I pulled the content off of the Wikipedia.org site and dropped it into a database here at polyGeek.com. Then I used AMFPHP to grab the data and create as many tabs in the TabNavigator as there are results. And I added toolTips to the images if you mouse over them.

The nice thing about the TabNavigator is that the BrowserManager is automatically engaged. And I wrote 3 lines of code to enable the deepLinking in the app so you can land directly on a specific tab depending on the URL. And as always, mi coda, su coda.

In the code I’ve added the SQL, images, and my GoRemote.mxml to help you recreate this if you want. You’ll just need to get AMFPHP going yourself and add my AMFdata.php file to the ../services/amfphp/ folder. I might cover all the more in depth in a later post, someday.

Addendum: I just read the blog post at Google and it mentions that

Googlebot does not execute some types of JavaScript. So if your web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file…

I’m using the default Javascript/HTML code that FlexBuilder creates. So I’ll see if it gets indexed. And if you’re wondering why I use the default FB code it’s because I’m too lazy to take the additional step of using SWFobject, most of the time. :-)

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?