AT&T is slowly but surely trying to make themselves irrelevant.....

MacTrast Post....

I've probably blogged an unflattering thing or two about Steve Jobs in the past, primarily because I was not a big fan of his politics or, perhaps more to the point, his philosophy about certain matters of the Apple business model didn't quite gel with me. Never the less, he was a brilliant man. And I drive a Ford pickup truck while he was a multi-billionaire so he must have been doing something right. I don't agree in a great many cases when a CEO is said to be a visionary, but Steve was the very definition of the term. I've been a loyal Apple customer for many years and it feels almost like I've lost a friend today. There are likely no other corporate leaders who's products I know and love that I feel that way about, no offense to them of course. This is, perhaps, the thing that sets Steve Jobs apart from all other giants of the tech (or any other) industry....he WAS Apple. You can't help but say a silent little "thank-you, Steve" every time you unbox a shiny new Apple device. I will continue to do so even though he is no longer with us in the corporeal sense. May God welcome you with open arms, Steve. And a heart felt thank-you to you. You will most certainly be missed.

* Way too many people....attendance should be limited or capped in some fashion to preserve a good attendee experience. If there were 5,000 people at this year's MAX, I would say it should probably be limited to about half of that....maybe 3,000 tops.

* Food was sub-par. It was cold most of the time and didn't taste very good. While I don't exactly attend Max for the food, a little extra effort here would have made the event a bit more pleasant.

* Max Bash was OK....I think I'd rather have the money spent on the Bash in the form of swag of some type (devices, software suites, etc...). And, again, the food was cold, though this may have had a lot to do with the fact that the Bash was held outdoors on a chilly night.

* Wifi for this event was horrible. When I was able to get a connection, it was slow enough to be considered unusable. In addition, it ruined a couple of the demos I attended as certain key features of the software being demoed could not be carried out.

* Hotels for the event were WAY overpriced. This may just be a drawback of Los Angeles.

* Hotel shuttle service was excellent.

* Logistics for food service and moving people from point A to point B throughout the conference was excellent.

* Not wild about LA....need to vary the location from year-to-year. San Francisco and Chicago were nice locations in the past.

* I resent that I could not attend all the sessions I wanted because of "wait-listing" and otherwise full sessions. If you accept this amount of money from someone who expects to be able to participate, sessions should NEVER fill up.

* Not enough ColdFusion coverage. Is this a sign of things to come for the platform?

* It was re-assuring to see the direction being taken with Flash Builder and the Flash platform, particularly around mobile development.

* The number of greeters and people providing direction was a bit excessive, as was their feigned enthusiasm welcoming people and upon their departure. If Adobe is spending money on this, it could be better spent elsewhere. (It reminded me of those over-enthusiastic new Apple Store employees at a store grand-opening....just a pet peeve of mine I guess).

* The sessions were excellent for the most part. In particular, the Sencha presenter, Ray Camden discussing the next version of ColdFusion and the panel discussing Flash vs. HTML 5 were excellent. Easily the best sessions I attended.

* One or two of the Adobe "Evangelists" seemed a bit unfriendly and at least one of the Product Managers was a bit full of himself. I like my vendors to pander to me. This event is not about Adobe, it's about Adobe customers. The information provided at Max, and the manner in which it is provided, are important for users and IT managers to be able to make rational decisions about development direction and such.

* What happened to Tim Buntel?

* Overall, I'd give Max 2011 a grade somewhere between C+ and B-. I probably won't go again until it is held somewhere other than LA.

After reading some encouraging articles about how to get ColdFusion 9 working on OS X Lion, I took the plunge yet again and ran through the upgrade last night (keeping the "clean install" in my back pocket as a last resort). The upgrade from Snow Leopard to Lion went just fine. I reinstalled Java, Coldfusion 9, and the 9.01 update and ColdFusion runs perfectly. My only other show-stopping issue with Lion was disappearing cursors in Flash Player 10 inside of Flex applications. So, just for the hell of it, I installed the Flash Player 11 beta and the problem was solved. The only problem now is, there is no debugger version of FP 11 that I can find and I've still got a couple of strange (but workable) quirks with CS5 apps. I'd say this is a successful OS update, but some of it might have to do with the Lion 10.7.1 release, too.

Well, after using OS X Lion for about 2 [frustrating] weeks, I decided yesterday to downgrade (thank God for TimeMachine) back to Snow Leopard. There were just too many quirky problems and software compatibility issues, particularly surrounding my ColdFusion and Flash Builder installs (not to mention with the Flash Player itself). Today, I also downgraded my Safari 5.1 back to 5.05. Again, too many quirky problems with Flash Player (the debug version). I can't say it's unexpected.....version 1.0 of ANYTHING is generally going to be problematic, but I'm still disappointed. I've come to expect much better from Apple, but their new OS is a bit reminiscent of Vista in the Windows world. Great concepts and high aspirations but, for now, poorly executed. Perhaps their first couple of update releases will resolve some of the issues, but I will thoroughly test before taking the plunge again. My restoration went pretty well, but there were some issues that left me a bit nervous about the validity of the state of my system. Once I fixed Java, however, it's smooth sailing.

I was recently asked to put together a "Getting Started with Flex" tutorial to share with other developers in my enterprise. Although we are a large, nation-wide organization, I may be one of the few Flex developers among the respective IT organizations. I thought a good starting point might be references to the excellent videos at Adobe.com ("Build a Flex app in an Hour"). I'd never really watched in full any of the tutorials on the Adobe site to be perfectly honest. For the few years that I've been developing in Flex, I've generally lived in source code mode preferring to code much of my applications by hand. I guess it's my control freak nature. However, I was really impressed with just how little code a beginning Flex developer has to write in Flash Builder 4. After watching a few of the videos, I put together a quick and dirty example application without touching any of the generated source code. The app included a datagrid and data entry form both bound to data services generated by the Flash Builder wizards. I literally did NOTHING but drag and drop and point Flash Builder to a couple of pre-written CFCs on my ColdFusion server. It was incredible! I ran the app and, without a hitch, it rendered a simple CRUD app in the browser (in far less than an hour I might add). I may actually use some of these features to generate app stubs to get the ball rolling on new projects. I can't wait to see what 4.5 brings.