Desperately seeking Debbie

Tue, 16 Jun 2009 23:23:00 -0400

UPDATE: Thanks so much to everyone who sent me a note. I expected a handful of developers and received dozens! At this point I have enough volunteers. Stay tuned, though - after we complete the investigation I'll share some of the results here. Tim To help with internal discussions about the kinds of developers we're serving with a release, we use something called developer personas. These are made up, composite characters that represent a type or class of developer. To help everyone feel a connection to the developer, we give them a name, a place of employ, hobbies, the whole nine yards. Well, one of our personas for Flash Builder 4 is named Debbie Elliott, and I need to find a few good Debbies to help us out! Debbie is probably like many of you. She is a web developer at a medium sized manufacturing company where she builds mostly database apps with a web front end. She's good with SQL and uses ColdFusion or PHP for the scripting. She knows some Javascript, but wouldn't consider herself an AJAX whiz. Most of her apps run inside the firewall, so while she likes to make them look good and be easy to use, she doesn't have the services of a designer. She is interested in adding some rich content to her apps, maybe building some AIR apps, but there just hasn't been much time. She knows about Flex, but hasn't gotten around to trying it. So...does this sound like you? I need to find a ColdFusion Debbie and a PHP Debbie who would be available to try out our software. The good news is, neither your name nor your gender need match our Debbie. But I would like to find someone who falls into that general mold and who hasn't played with the new Flex beta or really has any Flex experience per se. What we would do is ask you to try to build a simple application and share your experience with us. It should take anywhere from a couple of hours to a day, depending on how well we did our jobs! In return, you'll have the good feeling of knowing you helped shape Flash Builder 4. Oh, ok: we'll try to find some way to say 'thank you' beyond just saying 'thank you.' I just can't suggest anything here. The one catch is you'd need to be available to do it in the next few days. We'd like to get feedback on your experience by the end of the week or over the weekend. Sound interesting? Send me an email with a bit of info about your skills & background to buntel at adobe dot com. Please put [Debbie] in the subject line, and I'll get in touch if you fit the persona! Thanks! Tim

InfoWorld "First Look"

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 15:29:00 -0400

Today InfoWorld posted a "first look" beta review of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder. Check it out here. Good comments on the data-centric features, " Builder 4's new data service wizard makes very quick work of importing and introspecting back-end services and binding them to UI objects[...] Just by dragging and dropping, I was able to take a standard query function on my data source, import it into Builder, and bind the result to a data grid in my Flex UI in no time at all." It's great to start hearing this kind of feedback. Let me know how you're faring with the beta. Making your ColdFusion apps a bit richer?

Buntel Blog - Flash Builder 4

Desperately seeking Debbie

InfoWorld "First Look"