I recently moved from Word 2000 which I have used since it first came out to Word 2007. It was difficult and I struggled to understand the new version. Everything I was used to using had been 'improved'.

I am just about used to the new version now and am enjoying it finally but today I saw somthing that could quickly make all that history.

Check out this new word processor from Adobe. Its called Buzzword and looks really easy to use and doesn't seem to do a bunch of stuff I don't need.

I especially like the price.

I just saw a demo of Agile Agenda, a Flex application for project management. It won a prize at MAX and Looks really neat. I will have to investiagte further.

Chris Scott gave a very detailed review of ColdSpring and how to use it with Flex. Unfortunately there was so much content I did not get most of the detail in my notes so I just have the bits that really interested me here.

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Live Cycle Data Services can be used for RPC, Messaging and Data Management.

There is a free updater to CF7 which does most of this. But in this case you have to install two copies of JRun. One for CF7 and one for Data Services. With CF8 it will be installed with both Standard and Enterprise in same JRun instance, unless you untick the box in the install. It is difficult to update later, so may be worth installing it from the start.

This allows the Live Cycle APIs to be called directly which improves performance. There is no need for the RMI interface that would be required in earlier versions.

Flash Remoting has also been updated and can be used to connect Flex to ColdFusion.

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I went to two sessions this afternoon on Sorting and Filtering and on Drag and Drop. What struck me about these two is that despite some minor quirks they both showed how great Flex is.

The session on Sorting and Filtering by Scott Stroz was interesting and showed how fast Flex was at sorting and filtering large datasets of around 2000 or so records. It all seemed to happen in the blink of an eye!

The final session I went to was about Drag and Drop. For me this is the main reason for using a RIA over the traditional interface. Kevin Schmidt showed the easy and more difficult was to use Drag and Drop in Flex.

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Matt went through how Flex is executed and some examples of things that can make your application slower.

Firtsly he explained that the Flash player is multi-threaded but presents a single thread of execution.

Rendering and Actionscript are executed sequentially. If you render in separate steps you are not going to see the rendering flash because it will be delayed until after code execution.

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In Flash it is normal to spread assets and code along the timeline so that it can load in a streaming fashion to increase performance. In Flex there is a download animation in frame 1 and everything else is normally loaded in frame 2. This can perform badly.

Jim told us how modules help with application performance because flex can load them as needed rather than having to load them all at the start.

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The XD Team is working with companies who want to push the envelope. Including RIAs and Mobile phone interfaces in Flash and Flex. Now working on new Flex components.

Mike and Tom outlined a typical scenario involving the development of page wireframes, then graphic design, then code in Flex or HTML. They then showed a series of new techniques and thinking that would allow much better user interfaces to be developed.

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Jim has been working with Flash since 1999 when Flash 4 was new.

As applications develop, requirements grow and complexity increases so it is important to be able to add new facilities. Cairngorm makes it easy to collaborate on a single file or projects. It makes it easy to find things in your code and add new features.

Every time you use Cairngorm you have to add the Cairngorm Library to the build Path in project properties. Ant can be used to create the application skeleton to save a lot of typing. Eric Feminella has written some Ant Scripts, which create several objects needed by the framework. Several folders are created with Actionscript files in each already.

• business
• commands
• control
• events
• model
• vo

In the class we created a news reader which would take newsfeeds from Reuters. There were one or two problems keeping up with the class. (I am not used to the US keyboard.)

www.cairngormdocs.org is the place to go for the full description of the framework.

My overall impression was that there does seem to be more overheads here than is really necessary for a simple application and I am concerned that with a really large application the huge number of files will grow and make it difficult to maintain things.

At lunch I talked with Mike and Angie Nimer who have some experience of using Cairngorm. They confirmed my thoughts and both said that there is a heavy price to pay in terms of extra overhead required in order to build an application with Cairngorm.

Matt has worked on Flex since the start, and gave an interesting talk about the plans for the future of Flex. He began by telling us about a number of Flex based applications which have come out over the past couple of years. Including Photo editors, product configurators and

Yahoo Maps.

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I have arrived in Washington for the Flex Maniacs Conference. The Plane arrived quite late after a 2 hour delay in London because of the Rainstorm at Heathrow. But that means that I had a good night sleep and am feeling good to go for the start at 7:15.