In our quest for world domination, we're again staging a mini-invasion of CFUnited. (As the plan progresses, we'll rename it "SeeFun", as part of our related effort to stamp our "See" product brand on everything that moves. But I digress...)

So far, we've got 3 speakers with 4 sessions:

Steve Nelson
Building Google Maps Applications with ColdFusion
Building offline applications with Google Gears
(Steve may also be doing a class on Google Gears.)

Nat Papovich
Reviving the Lost Craft of Writing Specifications

Patrick Quinn
Server Down

As an extra incentive, we'll be giving away free beer at all of our presentations! Oh, and by the way, I'm completely kidding about the free beer part. But, we may well be drinking beer at our sessions, and that's reason enough to come see us (in addition to the great topics, of course). Check out this great shot of Daryl, discussing the intricacies of database tuning at CFUnderground VII, while simultaneously nursing his beer!

Hope to see you there!

So, as of today, it seems like FlexCamp Boston is going to be one of the best values of 2007. Ok, maybe the $10 fee is a little more than that of ApolloCamp, but take a look at what all FlexCamp is going to offer. Not only does FlexCamp have some great topics for all skill levels (even for you more advanced folk), but now they're giving away tickets to 360Flex and CFUnited. That's on top of all the other prizes they have including an XBox 360, Flex Builder licenses, and other cool swag.

Even if you're from out of town, the cost of air & hotel along with the $10 fee is way below most conference prices. And I can't imagine that there are many tickets left, so you should probably register soon.

So it was brought to my attention during my CFUNITED presentation on Tuesday morning that a few slides of high interest were not viewable on-screen or in the conference book. Specifically, there's a great Viso diagram of the template request workflow as it applies to ColdFusion and the settings for Trusted Cached and Saving Class files. I've placed a copy of my CFUNITED 2007 presentation online so that individuals who are interested in viewing those more detailed slides can download the information directly.

If you have any questions at all about the material or the presentation, you're more than welcome to contact me either via email or directly here at the conference over by the Webapper / SeeFusion booth in the sponsor's area.

To those of you who attended my presentation on Tuesday morning and shared all the positive feedback with me, I appreciate your opinions and your attendance. If you missed the session, I'll be re-presenting again on Saturday afternoon at 2:45pm in Ballroom GH.

To download the PowerPoint presentation directly, just click the "Download" at the end of this blog entry.

It seems that a lot of people, including myself, are clamoring for Flash on the iPhone. I'm highly disappointed in Apple for claiming to have the "real internet" on the iPhone, but then they leave out the one standard that is on a good number of websites, and is pre-installed on a majority of new computers, including their own.

Now, does this mean I'm not interested in an iPhone? Of course not... In fact, if anyone at CFUnited wants to camp out with me at a Apple/AT&T store on the 29th, let me know. And I'm sure I'll be developing a few CF apps to run in Safari on my phone, to supplement whatever functionality I feel is missing.

Some people in the development community (including what originally started this rant) are asking what Adobe is going to do about it. First off, Adobe won't get to do anything if Apple won't let them. Besides that, there are a few things that we all need to remember about the iPhone and Flash...

1. If Apple meets it's own sales goals, it will have 1% of the mobile phone market. Also, there are no announced plans to release the iPhone outside the US at this point, and AT&T has the exclusive in the US for 5 years. Now, sure, the iPhone is getting a ton of hype, and nobody knows how well it will/won't do, and you have to admit that 1% of the market is an awful small window to target.

2. Apple is, so far, not opening the phone up to the average developer. Sure, you can build a web application for the iPhone, but it's treated by Apple like a red-headed step child. There's no way to get your app a button on the home screen, and so far off-line abilities are not present.

3. Adobe already has a mobile Flash platform, Flash Lite. While I'll be the first to admit that I'd love to develop full-fledged Flash 9 apps (read: Flex apps) on the iPhone, it would probably be a better strategy to use Flash Lite on the iPhone. The sales pitch to developers can then be uniform... Build once for Flash Lite, and deploy on most any mobile phone. Perhaps Adobe can tackle both, to appease everyone.

4. Apple & Adobe probably have already talked about Flash on the iPhone at some level. Apple knew it wanted YouTube and the "real" internet, so I'm sure Adobe was consulted early on in development. Obviously, something didn't work for one or both parties for launch, but I'm sure that if enough users complain to Apple about lack of Flash support, they will add it in one form or another. Technically, they could write their own Flash 7 engine for the iPhone, since the SDK is available, though that would seemingly be a waste of our time and their resources, since Flash 9 already has very high penetration numbers.

Hey all. Quick note about CFUnited this year. Teratech has created a pretty nifty new scheduler application. If you're going, make sure to check it out. We're looking forward to seeing all of you there. We're a silver sponsor this year, and we'll have some speaker slots, too, which we'll blog about soon.

CFUnited 2007 Scheduler Application