PhoneGap 1.4 has just been released, and here's a list of all that has changed.

jQuery Mobile 1.0.1 has been released, full list of enhancements in this blog post.

The latest Inspire Magazine is out, and it includes an article by our own Ray Camden on Combining your web skills with PhoneGap to build mobile apps.

Thibault Imbert has written a great post Introducing Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2 Beta 4 and Stage 3D support.

FireLogger is a server logger console for Firebug with built-in support for Python and PHP. CF-FireLogger adds ColdFusion support to FireLogger, enabling logging of information from within ColdFusion code directly to the Firebug/FireLogger console.

I usually post these on Fridays, but this one is too good to wait:

• Adobe (San Jose, CA or San Francisco, CA) is looking for a ColdFusion developer to join the Adobe.com team. Requirements include BS or advanced degree and 3+ years experience (or equivalent knowledge), and experience with ColdFusion, Mach-ii, AJAX, JSON, XML, and Adobe AIR. This is a 6-12 month contract position with the possibility of converting to full-time in the future. Send resume to Kavitha Mattikalli.

I mentioned Adobe Edge Preview 4 last week. The father of Edge, Mark Anders, has recorded a video for Adove TV that highlights some of what is new in Preview 4, including symbols (which allow you to create reusable objects that are independent of the main composition), web fonts, and more.

One more this week (and I love the way this position is described):

• The Catholic University of America (Washington, DC) is looking for a ColdFusion developer to work on "CF9, jQuery, Adobe stuff, Win7, CSS, mobile stuff like CSS and jQuery for mobile devices, Hg, MSSQL, Oracle 10" and more. Details posted online.

Fellow Adobe evangelist Holly Schinsky has posted an update on Apache Flex progress.

Adobe Edge Preview 4 is now available! Preview 4 introduces significant new features like Symbols, Web Fonts, and Element Display, as well as a number of usability and performance enhancements.

The Flex User Group 2012 Tour: North America Dates have been posted. Watch for Europe and Asia dates coming shortly.

The ColdFusion team has relaunched their blog at blogs.coldfusion.com.

The Chicago Tribune is running a story on how to Track the primaries and the candidates this election season. The first app they picked? The Flex and AIR based PolitiFact app.

Here's a new opportunity:

• Simpleview (Tucson, AZ) is looking for 4-6 ColdFusion developers. Requirements include strong HTML, JavaScript, and CSS skills, as well as a solid understanding of SQL Server T-SQL and CMS experience. Details posted online.

Title says it all, PhoneGap has won an InfoWorld's 2012 Technology Of The Year Award.

ColdFusion security guru Pete Freitag has written an article for ADC on Securing your applications using HttpOnly cookies with ColdFusion, explaining what these are, why they are important, and how you can leverage them to improve the security of your ColdFusion applications.

Fellow Adobe evangelist Harish Sivaramakrishnan has posted a Demo of Data visualization inspired by Google Zeitgeist 2011, and as he notes, "it's almost Flash like, but built in HTML, CSS and JavaScript".

The default jQuery Mobile page transitions are slide for pages and pop for dialogs. And on Android these can be sluggish and appear to flash on and off annoyingly. Turning off transitions is easy, well, once you know the code you need. The following (which is not overly clear in the docs) was given to me by fellow Adobian, and jQuery Mobile contributor, Kin Blas.

Simple, right? Well, there is one catch. The mobileinit event has to be bound before jQuery Mobile is loaded. In other words it needs to be after your code that loads jQuery, but before the code that loads jQuery Mobile. You can put it right inline, or in its own .js file, which you can include.

The Fireworks team has started a 5-part blog series on jQuery Mobile Theme Skinning using Fireworks CS5 and the CSS3 Mobile Pack extension.

Title says it all, see this message.

The following is based on a jQuery Mobile app I am working on. But, the code and details apply to jQuery, too.

The app I am working on makes frequent Ajax calls to back-end services, and so I want a busy indicator that shows the user that activity is occurring. This is actually really easy to do, once you have a few steps in place. So ...

First you'll need the indicator itself. The simplest way to do this is with an animated GIF (and, yes, that means that the indicator won't reflect the relative wait time like a progress bar would). For great free animated GIF loading indicators, go to ajaxload.info. Once you have the image, embed it in your page using an <img> tag:

I want the image centered on the page, accomplished using this CSS:

The GIF I used was 48px x 48px, so the margins are set to -half that size. That, combined with 50% for top and left ensures that the image is centered in the page. z-index is set to 100 to ensure that the image is in the foreground, and display:none prevents the image from being displayed.

Now there is an invisible animated GIF on the page. The next step is to show the image when an Ajax call starts and hide it when the call completes. jQuery makes this incredibly simple to do via the ajaxSetup() function. Here's the code:

When an Ajax call is initiated, beforeSend calls .show() to display the animated GIF, and when complete, .hide() hides the image. Simple.

My own jQuery Mobile app makes Ajax calls on multiple pages, and so I embedded the same animated GIF on each page, all using the same style. Rather than bothering to track which page is displayed to show / hide just that animated GIF, I use jQuery to show / hide all of them, like this:

.ajaxLoader finds every tag styled as ajaxLoader, so $(".ajaxLoader").show() shows all of the loader GIFs and $(".ajaxLoader").hide() hides them all.

Nice and simple!

jQuery lets you manipulate control contents at runtime, for example, you can add and items to an ordered or unordered list using code like this:

If you do this in jQuery Mobile, you must then force the control to refresh so that formatting and styles are reapplied, like this:

Simple, right? Well, not always. One of my lists contains collapsible items created using data-role="collapsible". And for some reason that I have yet to determine, when listview('refresh') refreshed the control it did not refresh the collapsible data-role, so all data was displayed, head and collapsible content, in one mess.

The solution? I had to call the collapsible() method on each list item that needed to be collapsible in addition to doing the refresh. I used jQuery .find() to find all <li> controls with a data-role of "collapsible", and then called .collapsible({refresh:true}) for each, like this:

Obviously, to use this code with other controls you'd need to change 'li[data-role=collapsible]' to reflect the HTML control you are using.

Again, I have yet to figure out why this is necessary. But, it is, and it works.

Bertrand Delacretaz has announced that the proposal to have Flex join the Apache Incubator is now open for voting.

Need legally-binding electronically signed documents on the go? Check out the free Adobe EchoSign app. Details here

Earlier this week we hosted a summit to discuss our plans for Flex and the partnership with Apache Software Foundation. In attendance was Roundrach's Adam Flater who has shared his thoughts on the subject. This one is worth the read, both the post and the comments.