First of all, an apology to all of my “mates” down under. I promised to have my slides up last week, but… well… you know the way it goes… I’ll blame it on the jet-lag! Anyway, I’ve finally gotten the slides edited and they are now available for your downloading pleasure. Obviously it’s hard to convey in a slide what can easily be explained in an in-person setting like WebDU. And the fact that I like to actually write code during my presentations makes it even more difficult.

Therefore, I’ve gone back through the slide deck and tried to annotate some of the “live code” – and here it is. Of course, there’s still tons of information that will fall through the cracks – otherwise you’d be downloading a 300 page PDF file… So, if you do have questions or comments, please feel free to either leave a comment here, or contact me via email (the address is in the About pod on the left).

Lastly, I’d like to publicly express my thanks to Geoff Bowers and his Daemon crew for another brilliant conference! WebDU continues to be one of the shining stars on the yearly conference schedule – from the venue (um… it’s Sydney… need I say more?!), to the organizers (one of the best organized conferences that I’ve ever attended), to the astute group of speakers (you won’t find a better line-up anywhere – year after year), and finally to those that matter most, the attendees. This year, as always, you inspired us as speakers more than you can know. I appreciated every conversation – and enjoyed the “challenging” questions as much as the easy ones (like which pub is my favorite in Sydney…)!

I’ve already started counting the days until next years conference… well… actually I haven’t really… because Geoff hasn’t yet said “when” we’ll all be meeting again. But rest assured, as soon as he does, I’ll have it reserved on my calendar! Cheers!

If you’re in the business of building Rich Internet Applications using Flash or Flex technologies, today is your lucky day. You’ll want to run, not walk, straight over to Adobe Labs, where you will find beta releases of the upcoming (and newly renamed) Flash Builder 4, the Flex 4 SDK and the highly anticipated Flash Catalyst.

In addition to the downloads themselves, there are a number of resources to help you get started. Tim Buntel has a “What’s new” article and video tour of Flash Builder, along with Matt Chotin’s article about the new SDK.

And with the posting of Flash Catalyst, designers and developers alike will finally get to play with the tool that I’m sure is going to revolutionize the way that applications are built. I’ve already had the pleasure of working with Flash Catalyst for quite some time, and I’ve been really impressed – not only at the quality of these early builds of a brand new product, but also at the willingness of the Flash Catalyst team to listen to and act on suggestions, comments and criticism. Now, it’s your turn to help shape these products. So, quit reading this and get downloading!

You know what the problem with a program like Dreamweaver (or Flash or Photoshop or Illustrator…) is? It’s that the programs are “grown-up”. In Dreamweaver’s case, it’s over 10 years old – an eternity in software – and with each new version, new features enter the application. That means that we have to learn new keyboard shortcuts, new settings in the Preferences, and figure out how to use new tools. All of the newness and shininess is designed to make us more productive (hopefully), but I’ve begun to realize that at the same time, it can be detrimental. If you’re like me, there’s only so much gray matter left, and trying to pack all the new stuff in there means that I have to (unintentionally, of course) forget some things that I’ve known for years.

As I was recently preparing a session for a conference, I ran into one such example. Those who know me know that I spend most every day doing some kind of Javascript development. As such, I have to write <script type=”text/javascript”></script> an awful lot. Well, it occurred to me that Dreamweaver has a tool on the Insert > Common panel to accomplish this very thing. A single click triggers a dialog box through which I can select to link to an external Javascript file, or into which I can begin to type my script. Being able to quickly navigate to a file is helpful and more productive than typing by hand. But when I want to actually type a script myself, well, the dialog is confining. It doesn’t have code-hinting or completion, and it’s just too small. Frustratingly, I felt like I was “almost” there – if only I could bypass the dialog and just have it write the open/close of the script block for me, I’d be golden.

That’s when I remembered an old trick. For any of the elements in Dreamweaver’s Insert panel that cause a dialog to open before they insert the code into the page, all you need to do is to hold down the Option key when clicking upon the element. This temporarily suppresses the dialog and inserts the “default” code for that element into the page. In my case, just the <script type=”text/javascript”></script> with a blank line in between to begin writing my script. In fact, if you want to get any faster, you can turn the dialogs off completely. In the Preferences>General section, uncheck the option for showing the dialog when inserting elements. If you ever need a dialog, then the Option key does the reverse – opening the dialog for that single insert. Hope this helps… Happy coding!