I am on my way down to Atlanta (literally,I am posting this from on-board a Delta flight featuring on-board wifi, and I can feel the plane starting to descend). Tonight I'll be presenting to the Atlanta usergroup, one of my favorite groups to speak to. We'll be talking about ColdFusion and Flex futures, and more. Atlanta is the first stop for me, here are the locations I'll be visiting:

• June 8th, 2009: Atlanta, GA
• June 9th, 2009: Washington, DC
• June 10th, 2009: New York, NY
• June 11th, 2009: Minneapolis, MN
• June 25th, 2009: Toronto, Canada

Visit the links above for details and registration information, and I hope to see you at one of the events!

Yesterday's Adobe Developer Day in Bucharest was a success. Over 200 attendees attended multiple sessions, with presentations from Adobe SVP Digby Horner, Adobe Romania Director Alexandru Costin, fellow evangelists, Mihai Corlan, Miti Pricope, and Cornel Creanga, and other speakers. I presented an opening keynote session, and an afternoon session on ColdFusion. I also got to meet with local press, and took part in a live Romanian Business IT TV show (was supposed to be for 30 minutes, but we were cut off at 24 minutes because the TV station broke away for a speech by the Romanian President, oh well, I guess he has seniority!).

I am now in Prague, and tomorrow we do it all again. Once again, I am presenting an opening session, and am also presenting a session on Data Services. The event will take place at the beautiful and historic National House Smichov, and a large crowd is expected here, too.

I am in Bucharest, and today I took part in a full day Adobe Developer Day. I head to Prague tomorrow for an event there on Thursday. Next week I'll be in Moscow for customer and partner meetings, and to present at a FlexCamp on Tuesday, May 26th. If you're in either location, please drop by!

A Business Card Generator, a Resignation Letter Generator, and a Resume Padder. All very "useful" apps, and highly irreverent fun. Cheetos Office Tools is powered by AIR.

It reads like a newspaper. Updates like a Web site. And delivers like The New York Times. The new Times Reader 2.0 delivers the entire day's Times (including an interactive version of the crossword) in seconds, so you can carry it wherever you go. And it's all powered by Adobe AIR. We first sneaked this app at MAX 2008 in San Francisco, and now it's available for you to download. Oh, it's worth noting that Microsoft built the initial WPF based version of the Times Reader application for the Times three years ago, but that version is no longer available for download.

I'll be spending much of next week and the week after in Eastern Europe, starting in Bucharest where I'll get to present at an Adobe Developer Day, and then on to Pargue. Adobe Czech Republic is hosting a full day conference on Rich Internet Application development and the future of the Internet, and I am presenting several sessions. Registration is now open.

Check out the free AIR powered Time 100 desktop application to access the complete archive of past and present honorees on the TIME 100 annual list of the "World's Most Influential People".

At MAX we showed an AIR based application used by South African citizens to file their taxes. And now Polish citizens can do the same. e-Deklaracje Desktop is an AIR application offered by the Polish Ministry of Finance. The app was deployed on April 8th, 2009, and was used over 25,000 times in the first three weeks it was online.

I am back stateside. The past few days were insanely intense, but were actually fun. It's been too long since I did one of these country-per-day tours. European ColdFusion Specialist Claude Englebert and I met with about 400 developers, talking about ColdFusion 9 plans, Flex, AIR, Data Services, and more. And the response was incredibly positive (although I was somewhat dismayed by how few people had taken a look at LCDS and BlazeDS, many seem to still not understand what these are).

For those of you looking for the LCDS examples I was referring to, here is what you need.

And as a reminder, for any and all ColdFusion related questions in EMEA, Claude Englebert in your man.

Just in case you absolutely need Twitter at work and happen to have a boss who would not look kindly upon you doing so, meet Spreadtweet, the Twitter client that looks like a boring corporate spreadsheet. Ah, seeing AIR used for the betterment of mankind truly warms the heart. ;-)

[Via Mihai Corlan]

I just got back from presenting to the UK CFUG tonight. 140 developers showed up for 2 hours of LCDS, Flex, and a sneak peek at Centaur and Bolt. The crowd was great, highly interactive, and full of questions (a few of which I even answered).

And tomorrow I have to be up ridiculously early, leaving the hotel at 5:00am to catch a train to Brussels. Pictures coming soon.

I'm heading back to Bucharest, Romania! Adobe Romania is hosting a full day developer day on May 19th, 2009, with sessions covering Flex, AIR, LCDS, and more. I am scheduled to present several sessions including an opening session. Fellow evangelist Mihai Corlan has posted more details on his blog, along with a registration link. Mihai will be there, as will evangelists Miti Pricope, Cornel Creanga, Adobe SVP Digby Horner, and more. Registration is open, and some sessions are already sold out!

Yahoo! Sideline is an Adobe AIR desktop application built with the Yahoo! User Interface Library (YUI). It allows users to monitor Twitter by creating and grouping custom queries by topics of interest. It's a great example of an HTML/CSS/Ajax based AIR app, and lots of details have been posted on the Yahoo! User Interface Blog.

Tour de Flex has been an absolute hit since we released it back at MAX in San Francisco. The AIR based app downloaded numbers are staggering. But, some have wanted a Web version, and so, here it is, nearly 200 running Flex examples complete with code for your viewing and learning pleasure.

Coming out of MIX last week, The Register's Tim Anderson has posted a story on how Flash is helping to define Silverlight features and direction, and he focuses specifically on comparing Adobe AIR to Silverlight 3 running outside of the browser. This one is an interesting read.

Our partners at HD Interactive have posted a report on the Tampa usergroup meeting that several of us attended a couple of weeks ago.

Adobe AIR applications can be made to be self-updatable. Several months ago, fellow evangelist Mihai Corlan wrote an excellent getting-started article for the Adobe Developer Center entitled Using the Adobe AIR update framework which explains the basics of building updatable AIR apps, be they built using Flex, Flash, or Ajax. And yesterday, ADC published a follow-up article by David Deraedt, appropriately titled Tips for building AIR applications that can be easily updated. Between these two articles, you'll have all the info you need to build your own updatable AIR applications.

The Adobe AIR team has announced that an update to the Aptana Studio plug-in for AIR development is now available. The update includes some pretty cool features, including an integrated JavaScript debugger, and tools for generating application security badges. An article on the debugger, complete with a video overview, has been posted to the Adobe Developer Center.

This evening I presented a sneak peak at the next ColdFusion to a joint session of the Tampa Flash, Flex and AIR Developers Group and the Tampa ColdFusion User Group. The really cool thing about this event was that 2/3 of the audience were not ColdFusion users, and several commented that now they needed to take a look at ColdFusion. Kevin Hoyt presented an overview of building AIR apps using HTML and web technologies, and then did an incredible presentation on how to make Flash interact and communicate with hardware devices (including a wii controller).

The Adobe AIR team has announced the release of AIR 1.5.1 for Windows, Mac, and Linux. This release fixes bugs and adds minimal new functionality. You do not need to recompile your application to take advantage of the 1.5.1 improvements. However, if you want to take advantage of the 2 new API changes introduced in this release you will need to update your application descriptor to 1.5.1.

Fast and Furious is due in theaters April 3rd, 2009, and promises lots more of the high speed car scenes that made the original such fun, this time across Los Angeles and through the Mexican desert. But, you don't have to wait, you can download the Fast & Furious GPS Widget, powered by Adobe AIR, right now, to view trailers, connect with fans, obtain film news, and more.

SitePen has announced Queued, a Dojo based AIR app for managing your Netflix queue. The app is pretty cool, there is a YouTube screencast posted, and source code is available, too. Pretty cool!

eWeek (print edition) is running a story (which I can't find online, although I did find a related video post) on JavaFX, and has a supporting story (which I also can't find online) entitled RIA 1.1. It contains an O'Reilly based graph showing the results when they "asked 200 developers what RIA technology was next on their list to use". 200 is a rather puny sampling, and I don't understand the question (does "next on the list" mean "something you are not using now"?). Still the results are interesting:

• Adobe Flex: 24.6%
• Curl: 16.1%
• Adobe AIR: 14.4%
• iPhone SDK: 14.4%
• Silverlight: 7.6%
• Adobe Flash: 4.2%
• JavaFX: 3.8%
• Google Android: 3.8%
• Ruby: 2.9%
• AJAX: 2.9%
• Google Gears: 1.7%
• Other: 2.9%

Some of the numbers are odd, to say the least. But, based on this data ...

Adobe Flex + Adobe AIR + Flash = kicking some serious butt

Sourcebits, based in Bangalore India, has released an AIR based GMail client called GeeMail. They've also created an AIR based stock quote tracker called Live Quotes.

We're running a series of Adobe Day events focusing on Flex, AIR, ColdFusion, and LiveCycle Data Services. Adobe Day Boston is on Monday, February 9, 2009, and I am scheduled to speak. Registration is open and there is still some room left.

UPDATE: Looks like this is going to be reschedule for some time in March, sorry.