Only two short days ago, I awoke to find 30 or so Twitter notifications about new followers. This surprised me because I usually get 5 or 6 new followers on any given day. I thought this was a bit unusual, however my wonderment was short-lived. It turns out, my fellow Adobe Evangelist Serge Jespers – from the Platform Evangelism team, had taken it upon himself to compile a list of every (known) Twitterer at Adobe.

I can’t even begin to imagine how much sweat this must have cost Serge, but I am grateful to him – as I didn’t even know many of these folks were on Twitter! Amazing!

If I had a dime for every time someone has asked me “what’s new in [product name goes here]“, well, you know the old saying… And while there is a ton of information on Adobe.com about Creative Suite 4, it seems that a lot of existing users of Adobe products rarely take the time to explore the site to find the information. Additionally, it’s sometimes even more difficult to read a bulletpoint and truly understand what that could potentially mean to your workflow in terms of productivity increases.

To help illustrate the productivity advantages in CS4, Adobe went out and hired a consultant to actually “clock” the differences between CS3 and CS4. Being skeptical myself by nature, I was truly impressed by some of the results. I mean, I work with CS4 everyday, and I “feel” the difference – but actually seeing the hard data was eye-opening. As a result, the Creative Solutions Evangelism team has created a series of videos to highlight some of these specific “time savings” or “productivity increases”.

The first videos are up as of today – and more will be following over the next month and a half or so. We hope you’ll check them out:

• Everyday Timesavers: Design
• Everyday Timesavers: Web
• Everyday Timesavers: Video
• Everyday Timesavers: Photography

On a related note, I’m wondering what you value when making a software purchasing decision. Is information on a web site important? Is it more important that the information is from an independent, 3rd party resource? Do you go to conferences? Is a live, in-person seminar important? I’d love to hear from you, so comment away! Cheers!

At the recent Adobe MAX conference in San Francisco, I had the pleasure to show off Dreamweaver CS4 and it’s improved support for Ajax in the Day 2 keynote. In addition to continued support of the Spry Framework for Ajax, Dreamweaver CS4 also now provides the ability to add jQuery, YUI and MooTools web widgets to your pages. This ability, combined with the new Live Preview and Live Code features, means that you can see and style these widgets without needing to run to the browser. In fact, due to these enhancements, lots of folks who had even “given up” on Dreamweaver in favor of hand-coding are taking another look.

If you’re already using Dreamweaver CS4 and you’ve not yet visited the Dreamweaver Exchange to download any of the widgets already available, I’d encourage you to do so. You can even head over to the exchange directly from within Dreamweaver by clicking upon the “gear” icon in the Application bar and choosing “Get More Web Widgets”. By working with the OAA (Open Ajax Alliance), we’ve made it easy for developers to package any widget which conforms to the widget specification. You can read more about all of this by checking out the Dreamweaver Widget Packager on Adobe Labs.

Among the 20 initial widgets available, one of my favorites is the phatfusion “Image Menu”. This menu uses images that slide open to expose more of the selected image, which a potential visitor could then click to head off to that section of the site.

When I saw this for the first time, I was really amazed – the only problem being that I don’t use the MooTools framework very often. Instead, I spend my time with either Spry or jQuery.

So, I decided to build the same basic functionality (in a vertical orientation) using the jQuery accordion widget – which is also what I showed during the keynote at MAX. (If you’d like to try this yourself, you’ll first need to head over to the exchange and grab the jQuery Accordion widget. And if you need the files, you can download the finished version.)
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