Adobe have today announced that they will be offering Flex builder 2 as a free download (at no cost) to education establishments and students. Not only a welcomed announcement by the community but also this shrewd move will mean more institutions teaching Rich Internet Application development, and more graduates ready to tackle the next generation of web applications and satisfy the growing demand for Flex developers. (Hopefully in time for the impending Rich Internet Application boom?)

For More Information.

• Adobe’s Announcement

I was pleased to hear the announcement that Doug McCune will be writing the upcoming Flex 3 for Dummies with Deepa Subramaniam. I am looking forward to seeing this early next year. What I am most excited about however, is that Doug has posted a sneak peek of his excellent TileUI Flex App to promote his announcement.

Doug McCune’s TileUI.

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Following my previous article I discovered Chatopica an excellent chat widget, you can integrate directly into your blog. Current topics are related to programming and design but custom topics are coming soon.

Chatopica is created by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of SearchCoders, Tom being the presenter of the excellent eSeminar on an Easy MVC approach to developing flex apps, I blogged about.

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Like many others, I have been struggling to fully get my head fully around the Cairngorm Micro Architecture, and even with the excellent Cairngorm Creator, I find it a little overkill for many Adobe Flex projects I am involved with, in fact, so does Steven Webster (one of the creators of Cairngorm).

So yesterday I sat in on an excellent Adobe eSeminar, presented by Tom Bray of SearcherCoders who presented an easy / simplified Model View Controller architecture based on Cairngorm.

To demonstrate the need for these frameworks, Tom started with an excellent example of an application based on a simple chat client. Inspired by his excellent Chatopica perhaps?:
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For all you Apple Mac fans out there, Mac OS X 10.5\’92s release has been announced for the 26th October 2007 (As promised).

I have already pre-ordered my copy and looking forward to the 300 new features.

In particular:

Ruby on Rails – “Work in a developer’s dreamland. Leopard is the perfect platform for Ruby on Rails development, with Rails, Mongrel, and Capistrano built in”

For more information, scoot over to Apple’s Website

Buzzword is a revolutionary Rich Internet Application that allows anyone with a browser access to a powerful word processor that gives Microsoft Word a run for it’s money. Virtual Ubiquity the developers of Buzzword (which includes well known Flex blogger David Colletta) has recently been acquired by Adobe Systems.

Although Buzzword currently has a comparatively limited feature set, it gives you everything you need to produce professional and striking documents that can be printed directly from Buzzword or exported as Microsoft Word .doc file or Word 2003 .xml file.

Virtual Ubiquity / Adobe’s Buzzword.

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Mephisto is an excellent blogging platform written in Ruby on Rails by Rick Olsen and Justin Palmer both of whom are behind the excellent Lighthouse Issue Tracking Software . This article / tutorial takes you step by step through the process of creating a custom theme / templates.

To an extent I am going to assume you are already familiar with Ruby and the Rails Web Development Framework, but where possible I hope to keep things as simple as possible.

First of all one of the best ways to go about learning how to create a custom template / theme is to download one of the existing themes you like from the Mephisto Themes Gallery and look inside the .zip file and see how these template authors have gone about implementing their themes.

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I thought I would post a very quick tip on how to execute a command line / shell command with Ruby. There are several ways to run command lines / shell commands in Ruby as discussed by Jay Fields however by far the most useful of these is the %x command, as follows:

1. @whois = %x[whois www.gotripod.com]

And what is important and not mentioned by Jay is the fact that you can pass parameters into %x[] as follows:

1. dom = ‘www.gotripod.com‘
2. @whois = %x[whois #\{dom\}]

Yahoo recently released a new Flash framework for use with it’s Search, Weather, Mapping, Upcoming and Answers APIs called ASTRA (ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications). As the documentation is still a little sketchy in places I thought I would write a quick getting started tutorial on using the ASTRA framework with Flex 2 and Flex Builder.

Yahoo Maps Flash Component

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