Mark Drew (Redux)- cf_etc...

On Friday night, Adam had an accident and broke is arm and leg as he was hit by a car in Regent Street, London. I accompanied him to the hospital in the ambulance that night and got it all sorted. It was simply an accident and even though the driver was just under the alcohol limit, the police are not taking action (as far as I know).

He is currently in a hospital in London where he has already had surgery on his leg and will be having surgery on his arm (maybe) later today. Hopefully he will be out in a week or two.

Even through this, he has managed to  Twitter and update his status. So he is doing OK, if a little out of it due to the pain killers.

I am sure we all are sending him our support.

Well not really, since I can't call it that, but since it has been posted on the Adobe website I can finally admit that I am an Adobe Community Expert! With that in mind, I guess I better return to my regularly scheduled blog postings about ColdFusion, CFEclipse et-al! I am currently writing a couple of articles that you should hopefully see soon enough in some well known community publications (there I have said it, I have to do it now!) as well as delving deeper into big applications using Model-Glue and changes to Reactor to make it more fun to work with! So, hello world :)

During the CFUnited 2008 Conference in DC, most speakers were able to record their presentations onto Adobe Connect. This is a great feature for most presentation styles (of course not all, since you might want to have a discussion, rather than a presentation), rather than just filming the speaker. Here are the Adobe Connect presentations that have been posted so far:

• CFEclipse reloaded: http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p69604765/
• Coldspring: Better living through configuration http://partners.adobe.acrobat.com/p37989763/

You can see the other presentations posted here and here Let me know what you think!

Tomorrow (Wednesday 31st October), we will be having a great little get together at the UK ColdFusion User Group. Kev and I will be going over what we learned and saw at this years Adobe MAX Europe conference in Barcelona. Spaces are really limited and its at our new venue in Picadilly Circus (actually, its my office!) Register today and there will be some great bits and pieces to win!

If you missed my CFEclipse presentation at Adobe MAX Barcelona, João Fernandes has been kind enough to post up a video of my whole presentation! You can check it out here: http://www.onflexwithcf.org/index.cfm/2007/10/20/Using-Eclipse-for-ColdFusion-Development--Videos I had some problems getting the debugger working, and I realised later that it was simply that I named my project wrong and should have set up the mappings. Hope you enjoy it!

It has been a while since I blogged, basically I have been so busy I forget to breathe sometimes. Anyway, the good news is that I am heading to Adobe MAX Europe in Barcelona on Sunday! I think this is going to be an awesome conference, one that I am very much looking forward to, especially since I am a MAX virgin! Apart from trying to attend as many presentations as possible on Flex and AJAX, I shall (surprise! surprise!) also be a speaker! My presentation is on using Eclipse for ColdFusion development, which is a slightly different take on my usual presentation (ok, ok, you caught me, I will be mentioning CFEclipse) as it will cover a lot more ground that I usually do! One of the important decisions that I have left now is whether I shall be doing the presentation in English or in Spanish, not sure what the rule is here? When in Rome?...

A little twitter message from Kev got me thinking about something totally unrelated really, but it might explain a few things. Let me fill you in with a few facts first:

• Eclipse just released version 3.3. Last year, at the same time, they released 3.2 and the year before that 3.1
• Adobe's ColdFusion going to be 12 years old tomorrow (10th of July)
• I am going to be 33 on the 11th of July

Take all these facts together and you start seeing a pattern! I share (nearly) a birthday with a technology I love. I work on CFEclipse which is built on the Eclipse platform, which releases a version for the last 3 years that matches my age, within two weeks of my birthday, hmm... this is real synchronicity at work here don't you think? Anyway, Happy (Early) Birthday ColdFusion, may Adobe keep releasing great software for many years to come! (just as a thought exercise, do you think they will release CF tomorrow???)

I wanted to put down (for the help of new Switchers and myself) a list of applications I consider a top 10 of commercial (have to pay) applications for OS X. There are so many applications that are free on the Mac, that cover nearly everything you want to do, but for this post I wanted to cover some of the paid for applications. I know there are Open Source alternatives for most of this software, but sometimes there is just software that *IS* worth the few pounds/dollars/euros that it takes to buy them. Please bear in mind, that I am a web developer (or application developer depending on the time of day) so these are focused on what I do. So without further ado here is my list (in no particular order): 1) TextMate http://macromates.com/ &euro 39 This is the "Missing Text Editor" for the Mac. I use this all the time, and there is a CFML plugin for it, for when you need to edit those random CFML files. Obviously for projects I use CFEclipse, but a text editor is always a handy tool 2) QuickTime Pro http://www.apple.com/quicktime/pro/ £ 20 QuickTime already comes with OS X but what you really want is the very cheap Pro edition, if only to watch stuff in full screen, and not to mention its export capabilities! 3) Parallels http://www.parallels.com/en/products/desktop/ $79.99 /VMWare Fusion http://www.vmware.com/beta/fusion/ $ 39.99 (for pre-orders) With the advent of the IntelMacs, we can now run Windows natively or in Virtualisation, so these are the best (maybe only) tools for the job! I classify both of these as one since they do the same job (I have been checking out VMWare Fusion for a few weeks using my BootCamp drive, and I am really enjoying it, it seems faster than Parallels) Don't boot up your Mac without at least one of these! 4) iWork http://www.apple.com/iwork/ $79 I do a lot of presentations and the best software for that is Keynote, it just runs rings round PowerPoint (now if only Adobe Connect would support either PDF or Keynote files!!) I dont use Pages as much, but its still a lot nicer than the interface-cluttering Microsoft Word. 5) Coda http://www.panic.com/coda/ $69 We all have some small sites to manage, and Coda, a new kid on the block brings in some real nice features for this. I think its worth it alone for the CSS and the Site panel (which it automatically creates thumbnails of your sites!) I haven't bought this yet, but I am really liking it. EDIT: the latest version of Coda supports CFML too. 6) Adobe Fireworks CS3 http://www.adobe.com/products/fireworks/ $299 I am not a designer but I love Fireworks. I have been using it for years and its the best web graphic design software I have used. I know Adobe Photoshop is the daddy but the ability to do everything web design related in one package (down to creating the HTML for you) is just too good. I love this app! 7) Aqua Data Studio http://www.aquafold.com/ $399 There are apps for every database out there, but if you are connecting to a variety of databases this rules. Unfortunately because of the price I have to install Windows and use Microsoft MSSQL Enterprise Manager, but if I could afford this, Windows would end up just being a shell for Internet Explorer. This is a must if you do a lot of database work. (Aqua Data Studio v4.7 is actually free, but it doesn't have all the features I would like it to have) 8) OmniGraffle http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omnigraffle/ from $79 If you are doing a lot of diagrams, be they UML to system architecture, OmniGraffle makes it really nice with very impressive results. 9) OmniPlan http://www.omnigroup.com/applications/omniplan/ $149.95 I always hated Microsoft Project, there is something evil about it (maybe just because I am a developer) but when I had a go on Omni Plan, I thought "hey, I *CAN* get into project management!". As with OmniGraffle its results are impressive as well as pretty, and hey, if you are going to be staring at something all day, you might as well be staring at something good right? 10) Delicious Library http://www.delicious-monster.com/ $40 This is a great little tool if you have lots of DVD's (and books) as well as appreciative friends who like borrowing them. The main thing about this is that you can very easily create a whole library of your DVD's simply by scanning the bar-code using your iSight camera. You can then have a list of who you have lent out your DVD's too as well as loads more info and suggestions (driven by Amazon I think?) So, there it is, my 10 must-buy applications for OS X. Edit: If you think this post was usefult, why dont you Digg it?

I have just booked my flights (is it really worth it to go from London to Edinburgh?) to Scotch! I shall be getting there on Wednesday night and leaving on Saturday, so its a pretty brief time away, in a way, that is good, allows me to get everything ready for my CFEclipse presentation (more software than presentation) as well as the CF8 AJAX presentation later on in the day. Now that is 2 reasons you should go to Scotch, nevermind the free beer in the ColdFusion Celebration! Now to find a hotel (the conference is not in a hotel for a change!)...

Did you know you can suggest topics for this years Adobe Max? I don't know about you, but I think the people's favourite free IDE for ColdFusion should be there, don't you think? Not saying anything but *hint* *hint*, Barcelona isn't that far from London, and I think I might know someone that knows a bit about CFEclipse that could go and talk. Up to you really, but you could go and suggest a topic. Now, what comes to mind eh? Did I also mention, that at each conference, I shall be unveiling a MAJOR new feature of the product? I am sure I did. So the first feature, called Project:U will be...

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