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If you are a full time student attending a Canadian university and you possess a passion for the latest technology, you should consider applying for the Adobe Ambassador program. Being an ambassador, you have to know the products well enough to help others and answer questions, organize campus events on behalf of Adobe, and maintain a blog promoting the latest products and events. If it sounds like the kind of challenge that excites you, please head over to Mike’s blog for more information.

For my fourth-year engineering project, my team is experimenting with smart home appliances. A small piece of that project is to build a gadget engine similar to the Google Desktop. The idea is that we would use chunks of loosely coupled interfaces (gadgets) to monitor and control the home appliances.

Since I was responsible for designing the gadget engine, I decided to build it using C# embedded with the Flash player. As an experiment, I embedded Jamjar into a C# application. The prototype turned out to be pretty cool because it reminded me of Apollo. So I’m posting it here for you amusement. Note that Adobe does not officially support embedding Flash players in C# applications – experiment at your own risk

To be completely honest, I’m still a newbie when it comes to Flex. I’ve been meaning to ramp up on Flex during the summer, and I was really excited when my “Total Training for Flex 2” DVD came in the mail, but I didn’t have the time to even crack open the box until very recently. So last week, I finally had the time to sit down and watch the whole DVD from start to finish. For those of you who are interested, here is the course outline showing the material covered.

Having done a few video tutorials myself, I know how difficult and time consuming it is to do a short video. The Total Training DVD has about 8 hours worth of material and it’s really well done. James Talbot is a very engaging speaker. He’s obviously very knowledgeable of the product. I was really impressed by his emphasis on applying “good practices”. He showed us little things like how to break MXML files into different components at very early on, which turned out to be very useful once you start building real-world, non-trivial applications. Speaking of real-world applications, the training videos also shows you how to build a photo organizer – a reasonably complex application. There’s nothing more satisfying than building a neat little app that’s actually useful.

With that being said, I don’t want to mislead you into thinking that video tutorial is a faster way to learn. The whole course took me a little over a week to finish. I spent two hours every night, one hour watching the videos and one hour playing with the sample apps that came with the DVD. Now that I think about it, it took me about the same amount of time to learn C# or Python by reading books. However, I found videos are more engaging and pleasant than books. You really have it try both to see which one is better for you.

I hope my short review is helpful for those of you who are looking for good Flex training materials. Please don’t hesitate to leave a comment or contact me if you have any questions.

Steven Webster, an Adobe consultant, has recently made an interesting post talking about the exciting potentials of integrating Flex and LiveCycle. Mr. Webster works on the frontline dealing with customers everyday. He obvious has a lot of insights into the customers’ wants and needs. I’m really looking forward to see more posts from him regarding this topic.

I’ve been working on a small project to mount a Flash remoting interface on top of the LiveCycle Workflow API. It turned out to be harder than I expected, but fortunately, I found this great tool that can sniff AMF payloads. It’s not free, but I’ll pay for it gladly since I can’t imagine debugging a Flex app without it. Apparenly, I works on XML traffic as well.

Update:  I did some googling and found this Flex based AMF sniffer. According to the blog entry, this was actually shipped with Flex, but I couldn’t find it in my Flex install dir. Judging from the date of the post, this might have been shipped with Flex 1.5 but not with Flex 2.

XPAAJ is a Java library for processing PDF documents. It’s similar to LiveCycle Forms to a certain degree, and it’s completely free for the Adobe enterprise customers (if you bought either Flex, ColdFusion, or any of the LiveCycle products). This tutorial shows you how to take data collected from a Flex interface and merge that data with a dynamic PDF form using XPAAJ. Click on the icon below to watch the tutorial,