We all knew AIR would build up momentum and really take us to the next level in desktop applications working with internet based apps, especially those who saw it at MAX 07 during the showcase. I personally, got really excited... especially after seeing Thermo and how we can use it to skin our future RIA apps.  With that said, looks like AIR is going to be used in Nasdaq and in the American Cancer Society!  You can read all about it here at ComputerWorld.  The article also talks a little about how the "others" (Microsoft, Mozilla corp) are working to create tools/plugins that can compete with Flex and AIR.  One thing is for sure, Adobe has a HUGE lead on this and with the amount of users that already have the Flash Player installed that just increases their lead.

A friend of mine drinks the Microsoft kool-aid alot and was talking to me about XAML, which looks alot like MXML in my opinion.  With all the people that already have the Flash player installed why would you develop using this when you can use Flex and just have a .NET backend?   Would love to hear about some other opinions/options on RIA technologies, also does anyone know if Microsoft has an AIR type platform yet?

I created a new mango plugin for the brightcove player, now you can add brightcove videos easily using the Mango Post tool in the admin by adding a simple tag [brightcove:videoid]. All you need to do is pass in the video ID when creating a new post in Mango and the video will display in the position of your posting.  I was inspired to create this plugin by Seb Duggan, who created the YouTube Plugin for Mango recently.  Like him, this was my first Mango plugin.  I plan on adding width, height and maybe some other useful features to the plugin soon.

You can download the source here. Read on to see the plugin in action!

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I put together a simple Flex application to show how easy it is to create a flash remoting flex application.  The app doesn't use a particular framework and I used the Flex CF Wizards to create all the ColdFusion code, which made my job really easy.  You have probably already noticed that the blog entry is labeled "Part 1", I plan on having three postings.  The first one (this one) will focus around a basic Flex application that uses Flash Remoting to talk to ColdFusion. In this example we wont bother with frameworks, we will try to use binding as much as possible, view states and some other basic Flex concepts. The second entry (Part 2) will take our Part 1 Flex application and will add a little more depth, such as adding a Cairngorm framework to the flex project. The third entry (Part 3) will migrate the Contact Manager that I do in Part 1 and move it over as an AIR application.   There might be a fourth posting on a Cairngorm AIR application, but to be honest I haven't worked with Cairngorm in AIR yet, so I plan on playing with it a little before I make another entry ;) . 

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I know, I just started this blog and thought I was set on the skin I was using but.... Laura the creator of Mango Blog recently ported over a new skin called "GlossyBlue" by N. Design Studio and well I just really like it so I figured what the heck, might as well use it as my blog skin right?  So enjoy!  I hope you like it as much as I do ~.^

I have been using Mango blog now for about 3 months on this site and I have been using it on a internal company site for a little over a year.  Mango blog is continuing to blossom into a great coldfusion blog engine that is extremely easy to skin, Laura at AsFusion is doing a great job! 

Recently I wanted to add ads to my blog to try and monitize it a little bit (aka extra cash).  I originally thought about adding a plugin to Mango blog’s admin section, but realized one I don’t have a great understanding of the framework and two I wanted a quick way to add Google AdSense and Amazon Adsto my site. 

The second option relates directly to you know what, faster time to market – exactly!  So once I implemented both ad options using the standard copy/paste procedure and adding more junk in my mango skin I decided that I wanted to make it more reusable and clean it up a little.  You never know, the code could indeed become handy in the near future and honestly I like to keep things nice a neat.

So instead of going the plugin route I decided on a easier approach, I created four custom tags each one handles a piece of the ads on this blog:

• AdSense.cfm
• AdSearch.cfm
• AmazonDeals.cfm (In-Work)
• AmazonOmakase.cfm
  

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