What a great event and a great way to shoot a night. The venue was perfect. the crowd enthusiastic and attentive. 5 stars all around. More comments are on the CFUG website. to be followed up with a post on my thoughts on AIR after I get a little sleep. Lots of potential ideas in my head tonight - now it's just a matter of implementation!
I'll be live blogging the onAIR event at the Franklin Institute this evening over at the ColdFusion user group site. Check it out throughout the evening!
I hope to see lots of people at the Franklin Institute tonight for the Adobe onAIR bus tour. We're exploring more options for using AIR to deploy our apps. adding offline capability to our rich internet app offerings. Aside from the geek factor. there will be a contest. prizes. cool people and refreshments. Sign up now! - it's free entertainment!
Presentation complete!
All materials are available at http://www.countermarch.com/salesforce
Got a little crazy at the very end of the preso - recompiled my Salesforce Query Tester Flex application as an Apollo app. Seemed like the kind of utility I wanted on the desktop while I do my development. Works great!
I expect that we'll do more work with Salesforce in the near future. The Apollo hook is an especially attractive one now - who really wants to have to log in to a bunch of different web apps to get things done? I could see a salesperson running a small Apollo app to run up-to-the minute lead reports or banging out quick emails to a "favorite" list of Contacts. Forget the browser...this is moving way beyond that now!
And just for the record...converting the Flex app to an Apollo one really was as simple as changing mx:Application to mx:ApolloApplication. To create the package I used this:
You will need the Apollo runtime from Adobe Labs to run the AIR file. And a Salesforce login too :-)
Mike's giving a talk now as part of the keynote on Apollo.
He's showing a version of an online/offline word processor app called Buzzword. The guys from Virtual Ubiquity built a SICK word processor that is the nicest tool I've ever seen in this space. Yeah. yeah. Word is nice and all BUT...the excitement of online word processors is a bit much. Problem is you can't work offline. Like. for example. on a plane...or a room with no internet access...or in your car...etc. So here's an app that bridges the gap without any crazy syncing that falls to the user to do. Quite convenient and a really nice UX to boot.
demo...gTimer. Looks like a neat online/offline project tracking/time tracking app. The QuickBooks timer app sucks - this does SO MUCH MORE including calendaring to show your time breakdown. simple color tagging. centralized project/client tracking. The ability for a team to be on or off your network to log their time is beyond useful. He also created a FlashLite version in about 3 days that has almost all of this functionality as well.
I better get serious about learning everything about Flex so I have a good shot at doing serious Apollo work. RecruitWeb would be an AWESOME Apollo app!
http://apollocamp.eventbrite.com/
ApolloCamp is a one night. single track conference hosted by Adobe covering everything you need to know about getting started with building Apollo applications using Flex.
Details:
Who: Anyone interested in using Flex to build Apollo Applications
What: ApolloCamp - one night mini conference for Flash and Flex developers interested in getting started with Apollo
When: March 16th. 2007. 5 PM PST - 11:30 PM PST
Where: Adobe San Francisco Office. 601 Townsend St. San Francisco. CA 94103
Why: Why not?
How Much: Free and open to the public (Limited space and Registration required)
What to Bring: Yourself. Laptop. any Flex apps you might want to get running within Apollo. We will provide the Beer. Red Bull. Coffee. Pizza. Wii. the getting started guide. knowledge. venue and bits.
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Yeah...wish I were closer...I'd go!
Looks like the Adobe website has caught up with the announcement from MAX regarding the $100.000.000 fund they've created for new ventures.
Learn more here including an email address to send your proposals to.
I'll get started on ours tonight.
If anyone out at MAX is reading this. can you give me a hint about data security in Apollo?
The scenario is this: we have a recruitment system. It stores some potentially sensitive data about recruits - things that I would not leave out in the open personally. so naturally we take care to not do it with their info.
When Apollo is in "disconnected" mode there's got to be some sort of local data storage that kicks in. All I've spotted so far on what that local data store is is this blog post. XML and TXT aren't what I'd consider "secure" if they can be read by other apps on the machine.
So how do I ensure that this data would be protected when the user is disconnected from our secure web services? Also somewhat curious about a sync API or something similar.
I wish I was in Vegas to ask these questions personally!
Steve Rittler is the President of CounterMarch Systems and former manager of both the Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group and the Philadelphia Developer Network.
You can connect with me on Twitter and LinkedIn.
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