FlexLive.net

In Ryan’s recent MAX update, he mentioned Adobe is putting up $100,000,000 in venture capital to fuel the Apollo echo system. I didn’t take it seriously until I saw this confirmation article on CNET. Although I still believe that reliance on venture capital is not healthy for startups, nevertheless, I think it would be a fun exercise to brainstorm for some cool Apollo ideas. I’m going to throw a few of mine up here. Feel free to leave a comment or follow up with your cool ideas

The first thing that came to my mind was a Picasa clone, but then I remembered that photo and video sharing has been done to death… scratch that one.

How about an instant messenger and social networking hybrid? It would look just like a standard IM client. Users would be able to chat with their friends’ friends or introduce their friends to each other…

If you are not into the “social networking” fad, maybe something more practical… what about tooling for Flex/Apollo developers? The transition from browser to the desktop means Flex has to do more heavy lifting than before, which represents many opportunities for third party vendors. Here are a few ideas,

Flex profiler: the flash player (debug) has a built in profiler, but the output is pretty raw. Maybe you can write an Apollo app that takes that profiling data and represent it using Flex charting components.

UML tool for ActionScript: most Java developers must have heard “round-trip engineering” – tools like Rational Rose let you generate UML diagrams from Java code and vice versa. It’s extremely useful for large projects. If there is an UML tool for ActionScript in the market today, I would definitely buy it.

Object layer generator: a lot people have been asking for direct SQL access from Flex. It wouldn’t be long before these Flex SQL client components pop up all over the place (I think Ted Patrick is working on a MySQL client). Why not go a step ahead and build a tool that generate ActionScript classes mapped to database tables?

Alright, it’s getting late and I think I had enough fun. I hope my solo-brain-storm session has piqued your entrepreneurial spirit. Keep in mind that these are just bits and pieces of ideas. It would take a lot more to build a successful business. But then again, if YouTube can sell for 1.65 billion, anything could happen

I helped organize an Adobe event on the University of Ottawa campus two weeks ago. I meant to blog about it sooner but school work has been crushing me to death lately. The event was the first of its kind and it has been a fantastic learning experience for everyone involved. We made a few mistakes and had to deal with some glitches, but in the end we had a very positive feedback from the audience of ~70 engineering students.

During the event we decided to focus on Flex because the product is so cool it practically speaks for itself. To keep things interesting, I went through a few slides quickly and spent the rest of the time doing live coding. Follow the links below for my slide deck and the Flex app I wrote in front of the live audience.
adobe_flex.ppt

helloworld.zip

Marcel Boucher has just launched the LiveCycle Productivity Kit. It’s an open source project that greatly simplifies the LiveCycle APIs – highly recommended for LiveCycle (Java) developers. Get it from the RIAForge while it’s hot.