DZone Refcards are free printable cheat sheets for popular applications, tools, languages, and more. DZone has now posted its ColdFusion Builder Refcard, created by our own Terry Ryan.

Intelligent Software Solutions has developed and deployed an application to enable critical infrastructure monitoring to the White House Situation Room. The application uses touch technologies to provide insight into the current status of various elements of critical infrastructure across the United States. The application provides users such as the President and his staff with the ability to view the status of any of thousands of pieces of critical infrastructure with a single tap on a touch surface. And the application was built using Adobe Flex.

A bit more detail in the press release.

Robert Scoble dropped by our San Francisco office, and chatted with execs from the Flash team. His thoughts (and videos) on Flash and Apple devices are a worthwhile read.

Lately, some (okay, someone) have accused Flash of being a resource hog. And lots of others have jumped on the bandwagon, without actually having performed any real tests or gathered any real data. But Jan Ozer has been doing just that, and has posted all of the details online. Streaming Media has posted their summary as well.

Title says it all. Some really nice Flash charting examples. Check it out.

I reset online passwords regularly (as should everyone). And I approve of password restrictions (minimum lengths, no reuse, at least one digit and one uppercase, etc.). But, as you can see in this validation screen, American Express apparently does not want passwords to be *too* secure! FAIL!

FlashCamp is coming to Boston next week on Friday, March 19th, 2010 at 5:00pm. This is a free event with limited space, and the speaker lineup is pretty phenomenal, and includes Deepa Subramaniam, Heidi Williams, Doug Winnie, Chet Haase, ColdFusion's own Alison Huselid, as well as presenters from Zend and more. Registration required, so sign up now.

Who says you can't have it all? Check out this YouTube video showing the web, Flash and AIR on an upcoming HP slate device:

Also, see this Wired story.

HTML5 includes geolocation APIs that work even on devices without GPS support. And Serge Jespers has posted a demo showing how HTML5 and Flash can work together to use HTML5 geolocation to power a Flash app.

My Google Nexus One just alerted me to the fact that an update is available to Photoshop.com Mobile for Android. While the update downloads, here are some application details from a product team blog post. In addition to contrast, color, blur and other photo editing changes, the biggest enhancement is that the photo editor can now be embedded into other apps.

I'm a long time TiVo fan, and so I've been paying attention since TiVo announced that a new device was on the way. And the newly announced TiVo Premiere looks really impressive - everything that TiVo owners so love and then some. And, to top it all off, the UI is our very own Flash (and rumor has it that TiVo will open the box to 3rd party Flash apps, too).

I ordered a part from the Lenovo web site, and just received an e-mail shipment notification pointing me to the Lenovo Order Status site which is powered by ColdFusion!

TechRepublic is running an article by Brian Kotek entitled A look at ColdFusion 9's new features.

Check out this video:

Pretty slick (background music aside).

The United States Census is a decennial census mandated by the United States Constitution, and is used (among other things) to determine how more than $400 billion dollars of federal funding each year is spent on infrastructure and services.

Participation is mandatory, and the US Government (including the President) are engaged in a campaign to raise awareness and drive participation. Indeed, they have a very modern looking website, a blog, and are even using Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, flickr, downloadable widgets to get the message out (see the What You Can Do) page. And I'm really impressed with this use of the Internet, social networking, and more to get the word out.

Or rather, I *WAS* impressed. Until I saw the message "We Can't Move Forward Until You Mail It Back". Mail it back? Really? We have a really nice web site in over 50 languages, social site integration, even a slick Flash powered interactive version of the form .... and then this:

Q: Can I fill out my form online?

A: No. Not at this time. We are experimenting with Internet response for the future.

The future? Really? As in the next US Census in 2020?

2000 was still early Internet days, so back then this would have been forgivable. But this is 2010, people live online, a couple of months ago online holiday shopping $s exceeded in store shopping $s, we bank online, utilities prefer to send you e-bills, and on and on and on .... But mail back your Census form, and we'll revisit in the future!

Ouch! What a failure!

In case you missed it, Adobe Flash has been in the news lately. Seems some don't care much for it. But, a PC Magazine columnist has just weighed in on the subject in a post entitled In Defense Of Flash.

Michael Hu, Sr. Product Marketing Manager for Adobe AIR, as just noted that today is AIR's 2nd birthday!

Google Australia team member Pamela Fox explains HTML5 vs Flex for rich internet applications in this O'Reilly video from Ignite Sydney. She compares openness, UI components, vector graphics, 3D, bitmap manipulation, video, file system access, development environments, testing options, compatibility, and more - all in 5 minutes or so. Nice job, Pamela!

There's been lots of discussion about the upcoming Flash Player 10.1 and its phenomenal performance on the 1GHz processor Google Nexus One. But what about battery life? Fellow Adobe evangelist Mark Doherty weighs in on this one in a post entitled Battery Performance with Flash Player 10.1 on Nexus One.

We've just posted a ColdFusion 9 performance brief entitled Improve application performance and scalability with Adobe ColdFusion 9, 13 pages with all sorts of details. Key findings show that overall server performance in ColdFusion 9 is up to 40% faster than in ColdFusion 8 and up to 6 times faster than ColdFusion MX 7. Good stuff!

The CODiE Awards, originally called the Excellence in Software Awards, were established in 1986 by the Software Publishers Association (SPA), now the Software & Information Industry Association (SIIA), so that pioneers of the then-nascent software industry could evaluate and honor each other's work. Since then, the CODiE Awards program has carried out the same purpose - to showcase the software and information industry's finest products and services and to honor excellence in corporate achievement and philanthropic efforts.

ColdFusion has won this award previously. And ColdFusion 9 is a finalist in the Best Web Services Solution category.

Over the past few days I have really gotten to put the Google Nexus One through its paces. Search, multiple mail accounts, lots of text messaging, maps, navigation, voice commands ... I've been giving it a real workout.

And all went well until ... I have run into my first major problem with the device. I'd been using a Bluetooth headset with it all last week with no problems at all. But in anticipation of 10 hours or so of driving this weekend, I paired the phone with my car, only to find that it would not work at all. Well, it paired, but that's about all it did. It won't connect properly, when it does connect you get piercing shrieking sounds instead of audio, it won't dial ... it's basically useless (for anything but showing battery and cell strength).

Judging by the threads online, this is a common problem with lots of different cars (most of which actually use the same Bluetooth controls). It does not appear to be an Android issue, as users of others devices are reporting that all works well. This most likely is a problem with the HTC hardware. And this could be a deal breaker for me. :-(

The Creative Suite Developer Summit will take place at the Adobe offices in Seattle, WA from May 3rd to the 6th, 2010. I am scheduled to present a session entitled Flex and Flash Builder 101. Registration is now open.

Check out the Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2 mobile preview videos showing off Flash (on the HTC HD2 and Nexus One, Dell Mini 5 tablet, Palm Pre, and Motorola Droid) and AIR (on NVIDIA Tegra-powered tablet, and Droid).

Title says it all. Details posted in this TechNote