Anyone wondered why the iPhone doesnt have the flash player on it?  Something so simple, small and that has so many wide spread users?  It's simple... Apple doesnt want to have competing software on it's products.

Read this for yourself and please feel free to comment your thoughts/opinions.

http://www.roughlydrafted.com/2008/06/14/cocoa-for-windows-flash-killer-sproutcore/
http://www.macrumors.com/2008/06/16/apple-adopting-sproutcore-for-web-applications/

PS: The first link talks about the Flash player being Proprietary... does this guy know about the openflash that was announced? I guess not...

I fly out this Friday to prepare for the webmaniacs conference next week.  My wife and I are doing a little site seeing prior to the conference over the weekend.  Should be a lot of fun and I am looking forward to getting away from work for a little bit and spending some QT with my wife. 

I took some time and put my "current" agenda on my google calendar.  They have a useful print option that saves the calendar to a PDF.  I have uploaded my schedule if anyone is interested in seeing what type of sessions I signed up for (see below), I may modify it a little.  I am not thrilled on some of the topics I signed up for the first two days of the conference and may make some adjustments.

I plan on posting my notes daily next week on either the days summary or a particular session.  I haven't decided, it really depends on how much time I have and how much time I want to invest in blogging all the cool stuff I hear about in the sessions and talking with other developers.  So stay tuned.

Download my WebManiacs Session Agenda

I was browsing around the Adobe Dev Net sites this afternoon during lunch and read this article "Top 10 Mistakes when Building Flex Applications" by James Ward & Jon Rose I agree with about 90% of what they were talking about.  Except for #5) "Trying to hire experienced Flex Developers".  This statement to me is just emphasizing how easy it would be for a Java programmer to get into Flex, but I really think it's a marketing comment and doesn't belong on the top 10 list.  Now if the title was "Top 10 Mistakes when Staffing for a Flex Project"  I would definitely agree it should be on the list. ;)

Overall, a good article, short, sweet and to the point.  I especially like #10 "Not Preparing for Offline Applications".  Now that we have AIR every project that is using Flex or AJAX for that matter should have a offline/desktop supporting architecture, or at least a place holder to add it in later.  In the next 2 years, users and customers will be demanding offline capability with data syncronization when the user is back "online". 

Here is an example use case:

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I know the title sounds like I am a sales guy for Midnight Coders, but I was pretty impressed with what I saw and felt the need to share this.

I was at a Boeing Flex User Group meeting yesterday that is hosted by Mike Kollen and a couple folks at Boeing.  Mark Piller (CEO of MidNight Coders) showed off the capabilities of WebOrb which is a "platform enabling development, deployment and runtime execution of Rich Internet Applications.  The product facilitates connectivity between rich clients created with Flex, Flash or AJAX adn server-side applicationed developed with .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP or XML Web Services."  Mark showed us how easy it was to start a project using WebOrb to create all of the backend services, than create a project in Flex Builder 3/Eclipse and bring over the items WebOrb created.  In a matter of minutes he created a simple demonstration that was communicating back to the newly created serverside logic. 

Mark showed two demonstrations, one with a .NET backend and one with a Java backend.  I was pretty impressed with the capability and how easy it was.  One thing I was really impressed with was it has Data Service capability out of the box.  Now its not Adobe's Data Services, its thier implementation of the concept and capability of Data Services.  The second thing I was impressed with was the fact that this is all FREE... yes FREE!  The product support of course is not free, a guy has to make a buck here and there somehow.

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So I did some research this weekend on the going rates for Flex/AIR Developers and I found this through a couple different blogs (Mazharharhasan & SeanTheFlashGuy).  HotGigs shows the average billable rate @ $100 bucks an hour. 

So I am a simple mid-west guy living in a simple town of St Louis, MO.  So let me ask people outside (or inside) that bubble, is this real? Are these "really" the going rates? What is interesting is that in 2007 the rates where $60-80 and they shot up.  I wonder if the capability of AIR into Flex had anything to do with that?