O’Reilly: Inside RIA

In this entry, I give you a list of my favorite Flex related presentations being given at the Adobe MAX conference this year, and a short description of why I think you should attend each and every one of them. :) Not attending MAX? Don't worry - they'll be available online sometime shortly after the conference is over.

Certification for developers and Adobe product users of all kinds will be available at the Adobe MAX conference at a 33% discount. Certification will be going on all three days of the MAX conference Info can be found on this part of the MAX homepage if you scroll down to the 2nd item from the bottom. If you're interested in taking an exam, feel free to brush up on your skills with a free study guide from Adobe. A full list of the available exams and links to the study guide pdfs can be found here.

Bruce Temkin is a Customer Experience analyst with Forrester Research. I was recently forwarded one of Bruce's articles on the importance of user experience and decided to check out his blog. I was really surprised by the wealthy of insight Bruce provides for free here on the blog - he has thoughts about preserving your business through recession, tips for management in customer experience environments, the importance of UX, and how to create innovative UX in any vertical.

Nokia recently launched a new site that allows users to use their imaginations and create new visions for headphones of the future. The headphones users create are mostly fictional, adding some wildly expressive features like hot rod exhaust pipes, peacock feathers, missiles, etc. The site is part of a contest Nokia is launching around the configurator. Users are invited to create and submit their designs online, where they'll be voted on by other users. The top 10 users will get a free trip out to Nokia's headquarters in the UK, where their designs will be produced into real headsets and given to them to keep. I caught up with the development team who built the app and they were nice enough to give me an interview. Read this entry to see the full interview text as well as get some more information on the contest.

Efflex is a set of designer effects for Adobe Flex created by Stephen Downs (aka "Tink"). Stephen presented Efflex at the recent Flash on the Beach conference and has a background in building applications for the Flash platform. In this entry I'll talk a little bit about what Efflex has to offer and what sets it apart from other effects libraries.

Merapi will be featured in two separate sessions at Adobe MAX, and Merapi project evangelist Dave Meeker wants to demo your application. If you have a Merapi-powered AIR app, get in touch with Dave at meekerd@gmail.com and get on the...

Have you ever woken up in the middle of the afternoon and thought, wow, I need a graphics editing tool that's a heck of a lot better than Paint, but not nearly as complicated as Photoshop? If so, you're looking for SUMO Paint - the robust and free RIA for graphics editing.

The Skin to Win challenge is over and the winners have been posted on the Scalenine.com blog. Each of the winning entries receives mention in the post, and clicking on the screen shots leads to an interactive sample of each implemented skin. All of the winning entries look really good - browse on over and have a look. Thanks to everyone who participated in the challenge!

The ILOG Elixir team is going to present two sessions at Adobe MAX on their unique visual interface library, and they want to showcase your app. If you've built anything that uses Elixir in the past year or so, check out this recent blog post by the Elixir team and get the publicity you deserve!

Today Joost launched it's new, non-download required version of it's service, which joins Hulu and a scad of other companies in delivering real television shows and movies straight to your Flash-10-enabled browser. Joost is based out of Estonia and founded by Niklas Zennström and Janus Friis, who also founded both Skype and Kazaa. In this entry I'll discuss the advantages and disadvantages of the new online version of Joost.