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After looking through many reviews, I decided on the old Macbook Pro instead of the new Macbook Pro and got a great deal at amazon for $1599 after the rebate and 4GB Ram for about $60. It was pretty simple to install the ram, the hard part was finding a screw driver small enough to take out the screws. I’ve been a PC user forever, but I’m loving my new macbook so far. My main reasons choosing the old Macbook Pro was the cheaper price, matte screen (didn’t think I’d get used to the glossy screen), DVI connector, and Firewire 400. Now that I’ve got my MacBook Pro setup, I can finally start using Adobe CS4. I’ll be looking into Adobe AIR, After Effects, Flex Builder and haXe (my friend Don got me into it). Actually, I have tons of stuff I want to look into after Adobe Max.

My first Adobe Max was awesome! I learned tons of stuff and had a great time. I’m glad it was only 3 days cause my brain was fried by the end of the third day. Luckily they’ll have all the sessions online later so I can watch the sessions that I missed. I found myself going to most of the flex sessions and the 360|flex unconference sessions. The sneak peaks of whats in the works in their labs was awesome! Just to name a few: Alchemy (Using C/C++ in Flash), Cocomo (Real Time Social Capabilities), RTMFP, Meer Meer (comparing sites in different browsers side by side and overlapping in DreamWeaver), Photoshop plugin (forgot what they called it, but it extracts an object from a layer by creating a selection around it and then it blends with the background seamlessly), Exporing images (somewhat like google street view and photosynth from microsoft except you can explore more seamlessly by zooming, panning, etc), and many others that I can’t remember at the moment. Can’t wait for the next Adobe Max.

After reading about the poll from insideRIA about what frameworks people use for Flex, I decided to look into Cairngorm a little more and now have a better understanding after going through a series about Cairngorm over at the Adobe Flex Developer Center. It gives a pretty good overview of Cairngorm and how it is used to build some e-commerce application. I went through it in about a day and have a pretty good understanding of Cairngorm now. Now I’ll need to look into the other frameworks….maybe after I try Cairngorm out on a project.

I just checked and the Adobe Product trials are finally available for download. Just in time for Adobe Max too, although, I wish they were available earlier….I suppose if they were available earlier, my trial may have run out by then. Now I can try out After Effects after watching a few tutorial videos at VideoCoPilot.net.

I can’t help, but get excited when Ted Patrick has been counting down the days to Adobe Max with the number of attendees increasing steadily on his blog. I wonder if it’ll reach 5000. This will be my first Adobe Max and I am really looking forward to it. I’m going to have to check on my schedule again because there are so many sessions that I’d like to go to and other things going on that it’s hard to choose. Luckily, I found a video of a session from 360|Flex on Ted Patrick’s blog that I was going to attend at Adobe Max. Now I can choose another session to go to. I wonder if they’ll be recording the flex sessions at Adobe Max and posting them later.

I was working on an AIR application for a golf tournament when this error popped up when I tried installing my application. “The application could not be installed because the AIR file is damaged.” That didn’t give me much information about what the problem was. After a couple hours of looking through my code, looking at the descriptor file, making changes here and there, and trying to install repeatedly only to get the same error everytime, I finally found a post on the subject on the web.

http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-10582

It turns out that my “Texas A&M” asset files that I included in the AIR project was the cause of the problem because it contains the “&” in the file name. Once I removed the file from the AIR project, it installed fine. So then I renamed my file and took out the “&”, and it worked fine as well. So just remember to check your file names for all assets if this error ever pops up. I would think that flex builder should catch this error when it packages up the AIR app.

One more note, when creating your install badge, you’ll need to put the absolute path to your .air application in the flashvars for “appurl”.

More Info at: http://www.tonynorcross.com/?p=13

I’ve added Source Code View for my portfolio in case anyone is interested in viewing the code for the project. I’ll try to keep it updated as I add more stuff to the project. This project was built using Flex Builder and Actionscript 3. You can right click on my Portfolio and select View Source to see the code. The link directly to the source code is below as well.

Portfolio Source Code