A couple of weeks ago, Adobe launched an AIR application called Adobe Enterprise Cafe:

The Adobe Enterprise Café AIR app helps you stay in touch with Adobe teams and the enterprise community, receive news, find information, and aggregate content related to the entire enterprise community knowledge base. This is great place for all partners to receive timely news and stayed informed.

I am happy to say that we developed the news section of the application in Flex using the Mate Framework, and its backend, which is powered by Mango Blog. 

A couple of development details

While developing it, we made sure that the skin was exactly the same as the original design, to the pixel detail, leaving very little of the default Flex skin. This required creating a couple of custom components, such as the scrolling list and news next/previous navigation. 

The smooth scrolling list will always keep the currently selected item on view when switching items, so if you scroll and then move to the next or previous item, it will quickly scroll to that position. 

Backend

The news are fed by a Mango Blog install. We developed a couple of plugins to rate the posts, move old posts to the archives, get Adobe.tv video URLs, get top posts, and more. Thumbnails, product (LiveCycle, Acrobat, ColdFusion, etc) and links are managed by custom fields, and all of the custom fields are shown in a user-friendly “custom panel”. All communication is done via Remoting.

Install the app