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!

At the risk of offending some, and as a follow-on to my previous post… Stephanie and I were just discussing the topic of Twitter followers and the significance attributed to the number of followers one has. In fact, the Washington Post posted an article about the same thing.

As suggested in the Post’s article, some people (such as Guy Kawasaki) seem to think that a measure of a person’s worth is the number of followers they have. But with all due respect to Guy, Ashton, and probably Oprah herself very soon, for me and many of the people that I know, Twitter is about something much different. I think it needs to be understood that some of us use Twitter to keep in touch and communicate with people that we actually know (or, at least, pretend to know – in the virtual sense).

In the “olden days” we wrote letters to the people “in our circle of friends/family” – remember dreading the Christmas card ritual every year? Then along came the web and we began to email the aforementioned circle – and we expanded it to include those which wouldn’t have gotten a Christmas card, but with whom we had a cursory relationship. We would “touch base” every so often – but most importantly, no longer just at holidays. Instant Messaging moved the needle again – but rarely would I share my IM name with someone that I had just met at a tradeshow or conference. With Twitter, the game changed completely. As a case in point, I literally just saw a billboard on the side of the highway with NO web address! Instead it simply stated that you could contact the company “@TheCompany’sNameWasHere”.

The fact that Twitter allows literally anyone to follow my every 140 characters (unless I protect my updates which seems to defeat the purpose of Twitter), means that I regularly awake to find that I have gained 10, 20, 30 or more followers while I slept. (I hope they didn’t hear me snoring…!)

Therefore, when I get a new follower, I routinely check their “stream”. The first thing that I do is look at how many followers they have, and how many they follow – as well as to read their Bio. If you’re in my industry (web design/development, web standards, Ajax), I’ll probably follow you back. If I’ve met you in person, or you are someone who “knows someone that I know”, you’re probably gonna be on my follow list. And finally, even if I don’t know you, you’re not in my “circle”, but you’re hilarious – you’ll definitely get a follow. (I’d send a shout-out to several of those that I follow for that reason, but they might be embarrased…). However, if you are up in the thousands (in terms of people you follow), it’s VERY unlikely that I will follow you back. Why? Because you won’t ever see/hear me.

For me, Twitter is about my friends/acquaintances. The list of people that I follow is a list of the people that I would like to invite to a special party or event – or that I, at the very least, have a professional connection with. They may not be my “best” friends or closest colleagues, but they are significant enough in my world that I actually want to hear how their day went or what their significant other did, or what the dog decided to chew on today. That’s not to say that I “don’t care” if I don’t follow you back. It’s just that I want to make sure that I can hear what my “friends” have to say – and anyone following more than 500 people can’t tell me that that is possible (unless they have people who tweet for them – like Guy).