The Flip products are wonderful, small portable super-friendly video cameras (my 10 year old is becoming a budding director thanks to one he just got). The Flip website uses Flex in various places, including for designing your own Flip Mino. And then when you checkout, the online store is powered by ColdFusion 8.

Fig Leaf Training has posted sample chapters from several of their courses, including "Moving To ColdFusion 8" and "Administering ColdFusion 8".

ColdFusion Product Marketing Manager, Kristen Schofield, has announced (a few weeks ago) that she has updated the "ColdFusion Evangelism Kit" to include competitive information and more.

Lots of folks have been asking for the cool ColdFusion Rocks t-shirt (originally designed by eBoy for the AIR Launch poster, and tweaked for a special MAX 2008 t-shirt design). Adam Lehman has announced that he is giving one of these t-shirts away every day in January, see his post for details.

Not sure how I missed this one, but ... AboutWeb's Phill Nacelli posted his rendition of Adobe Labs.

Lee Brimelow's new Flasher Magazine is now also available as a video podcast.

Terry Ryan's post yesterday got me thinking. 2009 does indeed look like it'll be a lot of fun. We've already started talking about Centaur (aka ColdFusion 9), Bolt (the CF IDE), Gumbo (aka Flex Builder 4), Catalyst (aka Thermo), and there's more we've not discussed yet. Humm, I think it's time to start scheduling a massive usergroup tour. ;-)

So, Happy New Year to all. And get your rest, you're going to need it!

Terry Ryan has posted his 2009 predictions, several of which pertain to ColdFusion. And while I won't confirm or deny any of his comments, it's good to see folks get excited in anticipation of Centaur and Bolt.

Fellow Adobe Platform Evangelist, Lee Brimelow, has launched his new project, Flasher Magazine. Issue 1 is online now.

Developers seem to either love or hate Eclipse, few are neutral on the subject. But, like it or not, Eclipse is an important part of our lives as the platform on which Flex Builder is built, and is about to become an even bigger part of our lives when "Bolt" is released. The most frequent Eclipse gripes are related to performance, and so Marc Esher's post entitled Speeding Up Eclipse caught my attention. Marc offers a few practical suggestions that are worth a quick read. But, equally useful, are the comments on his post.

cf.Objective has rightfully earned a reputation for quality content appealing to the higher end of the ColdFusion developer spectrum. cf.Objective() 2009 has been scheduled for May 14-16, 2009 at the Hyatt Regency Minneapolis, MN. Registration is now open.

The Deccan Herald is the largest English-language daily newspaper in the Indian state of Karnataka (home to Adobe's Bangalore office). The Deccan Herald is running a story entitled Top 10 Web platforms of 2008, and Adobe AIR is #3 on the list. eWeek in the U.S., The Deccan Herald in India, ... where next?

Many of you probably remember Peldi (aka Giacomo Guilizzoni) from his appearances at MAX events. Peldi spent 6 years at Adobe where he worked on Connect and more. I bumped into him at MAX in Milan, and we chatted briefly about his new company and product, and he gave me his card. Over the weekend I had the chance to tinker with his latest creation, Balsamiq Mockups, a utility used to create screen mockups. This is a fun little app. The UI is very slick, the included controls are extensive and highly configurable, and the app is available as a desktop application (courtesy of AIR) and as a plug-in for poplar web apps. He's posted online demos that explain the app better than I could in a few words here, so check it out.

eWeek has published it's list of The Top 10 Products of the Year, and the very first listed is Adobe AIR, concluding:

"The product that comes closest right now to the true vision of this next-generation Web application is Adobe AIR. Descended from Flash, AIR makes it possible to build powerful and interactive applications that have all of the benefits of both Web and desktop apps (such as offline capabilities, in the latter case)."

No, that's no a typo, Adobe Hair it is.

Flex Camps are small highly focused events, usually one or two days in length, concentrating on Flex, AIR, and related technologies. Chicago is hosting Flex Camp Chicago on January 22-23, 2009. This event boasts a pretty compelling speaker lineup, including fellow Adobe evangelists James Ward and Kevin Hoyt, as well as well known names in this space, including Michael Labriola, Jeff Tapper, and Mike Nimer. I plan on attending and presenting an opening session. Registration is required.

The AIR team has announced the immediate availability of AIR 1.5 for Linux.

Intergral has announced the release of FusionReactor 3.0.1. New features include support for 64bit ColdFusion, as well as Flash 10 and AIR 1.5.

Obviously, I think you're better off building Flex clients, but ... if you are tinkering with Silverlight, Andrew Powell explains how to power your apps using ColdFusion and AMF.

Adrian Bridgwater attended MAX Europe in Milan, and comments on our sneaks session.

ColdFusion users have long wanted a way to define settings per application, rather than server-wide, even within a shared instance. ColdFusion 8 introduced the beginnings of per application settings via Application.cfc (which we introduced in CF7).

To set application settings using Application.cfc, variables are set in the THIS scope. THIS.name to set the application name, THIS.sessionManagement to enable session state management, and so on. In CF8, Application.cfc and the THIS scope can be used to define per application settings. For example, THIS.mappings is a structure which can be used to define ColdFusion mappings. To set a mapping you just modify that structure like this:

To set the Custom Tag path you can update THIS.customtagpaths which is a simple ColdFusion list. You can set the path like this:

Or use ListAppend() to add a path, like this:

It's clean, simple, highly intuitive, and in CF8, limited to just those two settings - mappings and customtagpaths.

In CF9 (aka Centaur) we may have the opportunity to enhance this functionality. And actually, we've already started doing so. For example, at MAX in Europe I mentioned that CF9 allows for THIS.datasource to be defined as a default datasource, eliminating the need to specify the datasource for each and every query. And that's just an example.

There are others I'd like to see, starting with THIS.logdirectory to set a log file location per application. But, rather than my list of settings, I am interested in yours.

Now, this should go without saying, but I'll say it anyway. When discussing a future product there is no firm commitment being made about any features. Stuff can, and usually does, change. But, having said that ...

What are the settings you'd like to see us support per application in CF9? Feel free to list multiple, but be sure to define them in the order of priority.

(Oh, and before the thread goes off on a tangent, yes, I know we need a way to define on-the-fly datasources as you could in CF5. But no, these are not technically application settings, and are out of scope for this thread).

Three ColdFusion positions this week:

• Southcentral Foundation (Anchorage, AK) is looking for a ColdFusion Application Developer. Requirements include experience with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. Experience with SQL, .NET, SQL Server Reporting Services, and/or BIDS are a bonus. Details posted online.
• e9digital (New York, NY) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include ColdFusion 8 experience including object oriented or CFC development, as well as experience with SQL, XML, XSLT, CSS, DHTML, and JavaScript. Details posted online.
• UKTV (London, England) is looking for a ColdFusion developer. Requirements include 5+ years of ColdFusion experience, as well as as experience with SQL, XML, and JavaScript. Experience with ActionScript a plus. Details posted online.

We've started posting Adobe TV content as video podcasts on iTunes. To kick things off we've we re-encoded 12 Adobe TV segments, and in the future we plan to deploy content on a regular basis. You can access the videos via the Adobe Developer Connection channel on iTunes.

The LinkedIn Flex Developers Group is now accepting new members. LinkedIn can increase group size on request in 1000 member increments, so we're OK until we hit 4000. All pending requests have been approved.

And in case you want to sign up, here are the links to all three LinkedIn groups:

ColdFusion Developers Group

Flex Developers Group

Adobe AIR Developers

InfoWorld just reviewed AIR 1.5, and was more than impressed, giving it a 9.3 (out of 10) and full marks for ease of development. The review concludes with "For developers who want to bridge the gaps between Windows, Mac, and Linux -- and between the desktop and the Web -- now is the time to be working with AIR".