One of the coolest things about being in your mid-forties is the fact that you can actually remember some of the best music in the world! I even still have the first rock-n-roll album that I ever bought – an original pressing of the Beatles’ “Let It Be” album. In my not-so-humble opinion, the music of the middle-to-late 60′s and 70′s far outshines almost anything being done today. And among my favorite bands of all time is/was The Byrds.

So, I loved hearing from my fellow Evangelist, Jason Levine, that Roger McGuinn had actually talked to him about Audition. In fact, Roger uses Audition all of the time – and we’re not talking about recording demos, but rather recording and mastering an entire album right in his house!

Thankfully, Roger agreed to talk about his experiences with Adobe Audition 3 and why he loves it on our own Adobe TV. If you love great music, it’s an amazing story…

Just wanted to announce that the new version of “Mastering CSS with Dreamweaver CS4” has been released and is available in your local bookstores, as well as online. And this is not just a simple update to change screenshots. Due to the fact that Dreamweaver CS4 is so radically different from previous versions and the fact that several of these new features mean that the our web workflow actually changes (for the better), Stephanie Sullivan and I have gone over the book page-by-page. In addition to a new chapter that covers just what is new in Dreamweaver CS4, we have completely rewritten over 60% of the book. We’ve also responded to reader’s requests and enhanced the supporting files, providing incremental files, so that you can easily pick up at any point – or compare your version to ours as you work through the exercises.

Happy coding!

One of the coolest demos I ever saw was an app that Brandon Hall created prior to the release of Flash 5, in which he had built a Flash-based chat client. It was really quite simple – one Flash movie with an input field and a dynamic text field, talking (sending messages) to the same Flash movie in another browser (or on another computer). When I asked him how he did it, he said, “well, I’m using an XML server”. When I said that I’d never heard of an XML server (and remember this was many, many years ago), Brandon calmly added, “well, I couldn’t find one either – so I wrote one over the weekend”.

Now most of us aren’t capable of, and probably don’t have the desire to write our own XML server. That’s why Adobe introduced the Flash Media Server to manage communications between clients. But even that has its drawbacks, as we need to purchase the server – and many of us don’t have this option as our sites are hosted by an ISP. Of course, we could sign-up for an account with a FMS hosting partner, but that can sometimes be overkill – because what we’re looking for is a simple peer-to-peer solution. And of course these days, it’s not just about chat, it’s about video chat.

Well, look no further than Adobe Labs, where we have just posted the first preview of a new technology service, code-named Stratus, that will allow exactly that – simple peer-to-peer communication (text/audio/video and more) between Flash clients, whether those are running in the browser or as an AIR application – without the need for a complicated server set-up, because we’ve done all the work for you. Very cool!

Cheers!