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February 2006 Archive

Flex 2 Beta and Free Flex SDK

Today, Adobe release the public beta for Flex 2. You can download it from http://labs.adobe.com/. This is really exciting. The beta includes new versions of Flex Builder 2 and Flex Enterprise Services 2. A list of some of the new features (by way of Christian Cantrell) are:

View source support. If you want to share the source of your app, just enable the view source option when publishing, and Flex Builder 2 will automatically generate beautifully formatted source code for all the world to see along with a “View Source” option in the context menu.
Player detection.
History management.
Automatic import organization.
Code collapse.
Outline view.
Tons of other stuff.

Also announced is that there will be a free version of Flex 2 and a free version of Flex Enterprise Services. However, there are limitations for both the free versions. You can read more about the free versions at Christian Cantrell’s blog.

Also, some more information about the beta and the free versions check the following blogs:

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 01 Feb 2006

Now available: Flex 2 Beta, Mystic Beta

The beta versions of Flex 2 (including Flex Builder 2 and Flex Enterprise Services 2), and “Mystic” (the ColdFusion update which provides sophisticated Flex 2 integration is available for download from the Adobe Labs site.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 01 Feb 2006

Microsoft release Beta 2 of IE7

Microsoft yesterday released the next stage of their Internet Explorer development in the guise of Internet Explorer Beta 2.

Having had a look through I cannot see anything that it has that no other browsers such as <a href=“http://www.getfirefox.com” target=‘_blank">Firefox already have (tabbed browsing, RSS support etc etc) bar one “feature”. The complete inability to install it alongside any other copies of IE. Surely that can’t be that hard to do can it? From a web developers point of view, it is important to ensure that their sites work in as many browsers as possible, but when companies like Microsoft make this almost impossible to do, it’s no small wonder that the internet is such as messy place to be when compatability is monitored.

As for me, well I’ll be sticking to Firefox for now for two main reasons. Firstly as a development browser I beleive it sits above all others, and secondly, Microsft ditched Mac users months ago…

Posted by Neil Middleton on 02 Feb 2006

The Browser Archive

Whilst looking more into the second beta release of IE7 yesterday, I came across the browser archive at evolt.org. This little gem appears to have most versions of most browsers from over the years, including a load of standalone versions of 32-bit Internet Explorer.

From what I can tell, there are most versions of most browsers in there (although there are some sizable gaps in the Navigator and Commnuicator arena) so now there should be no reason for a site not to work in a.n.other browser!

Posted by Neil Middleton on 02 Feb 2006

A new approach to Search Engine Optimisation?

You may have read a few days ago about the escapades of Google vs bmw.de. This got me thinking about what Google are trying to acheive by doing this sort of thing, and what the best ways of getting a ranking from it are.

Then I had a thought. Google are only trying to maintain themselves as the search engine that people want to use by removing all the sites that use dirty tricks to get to the top of the rankings. Google purely want the most useful websites to appear at the top-spot, not those that want to be there.

So how do you optimise a site to acheive this? Well, one view that I am starting to have is….don't. Do not optimise your site for search engines. Only optimise for those other people that trawl your website – the users. If you build a site that is great for the users in every way e.g. easy to use and navigate whilst providing useful unique information, Google will find you, and Google will like you more than Mr SEO'ed-up-to-the-eyeballs. Google are spending countless hours trying to find sites just like you&

On a side note&BMW made it back in.

Posted by Neil Middleton on 09 Feb 2006

Mark Drew presents on CFEclipse at next UKCFUG meeting

The UKCFUG has announced that Mark Drew, active developer in the CFEclipse project, will be presenting at the next UKFUG meeting on Thursday 2nd March 2006 in London.

Mark will be diving into the new features in the upcoming release of CFEclipse and will be showing just why all us Homesite+ and CFStudio users should now move over to CFEclipse.

Posted by Niklas Richardson on 09 Feb 2006

Feed-Squirrel.com

Late last night (Feb 13), our latest project – feed-squirrel.com went live to the masses. Whilst still very much in development (hence the beta moniker) the site has been received to a healthy response from the Coldfusion community.

Over the next few days, we will be adding a few new bits and pieces to the site, and hopefully introducing XML-RPC notification so the site can update a lot quicker than current.

Watch this space…

Posted by Neil Middleton on 14 Feb 2006

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