Miscellaneous

Hello everyone, I wanted to introduce myself as the newest member to join the ranks of ASFusion. I was hired on November 1st as a designer and front end developer, and I am excited to work with a team of people that really understand how the web works, and has a good sense of how to make the impossible happen.

About me: my name is Mark Aplet. If your familiar with Mango Blog, then you may have already heard my name before--or perhaps my username (visual28)--I design and develop themes or "skins" for Mango Blog users to dress up their blogs. I have also developed a number of free plugins for mango blog that are available from my personal website. I have been fairly active in the Mango Blog community since I was introduced to it about two and a half years ago. So if you have a theming question, I am a pretty good person to ask.

I have been working in the design industry for about 10 years. Then specifically in web design for about 7 plus years. In that time I have taught myself html and css, and even a little ColdFusion. In fact my very first ColdFusion app was MyCFNuke (no longer available). The ColdFusion clone of PHPNuke. I don't conceder myself to be a ColdFusion programmer in the least. I know my way around CF, but feel more at home in HTML and CSS. Languages that I hope will be put to good use while employed here at ASFusion.

When I am not designing or developing websites, I enjoy getting out of the house with my wife (BFF) and or family pet Henna--a very energetic golden retriever--for a trip up to the mountains for some camping, fun in the snow, or an all out off-road adventure in a heavily modified 1942 Jeep rockcrawler.

2010 brought a lot of changes to us and a big move. In December last year, the lease for our old of fice expired and we thought that we could change the scenery too. So we decided to go back to Los Angeles, after several years living in the Orange County. 

Hello everyone, this being my first post, I would like to introduce myself as the newest addition to the AsFusion team. For those of you who don’t know my name from the surprisingly popular Flex Gangsta video that I whipped up for the 360|Flex San Jose Conference, it’s Jeremy Saenz!

I kind of just fell into the developer world about six months ago, and I have never turned back. I love designing and developing UI’s, hacking audio code, mixing and writing music. I love the Flex developer community, and I love participating in it, so be sure to check in here at AsFusion for some pretty sweet tutorials and resources for Flex. Don’t hesitate to talk to me... I am a very friendly guy! Do you like music? Wanna jam? Wanna be my friend? Hit me up on Twitter.

360|Flex conferences are well known for their openness and transparency, they even tell you how much they make! In that spirit, speakers at 360|Flex Atlanta started to share their session survey results.

I received my results for 360 San Jose, and I'll share them with you. A lot of people told me during the rest of the conference that they enjoyed the session, so I was hoping to get good numbers in the survey ;)

cf.Objective() was a great conference, thank you to the organizers and speakers! I was not able to attend to as many sessions as I wanted, but just being able to talk at the lounge with super-smart people was worth enough (Chris Scott, Maxim Porges, Brian Rinaldi, Andy Powell, and many others). I had the feeling that anyone I would talk to would have something interesting to say or something I could learn from. I haven’t had that feeling for a long time, and it was great.

I think my session went pretty well, thank you all for attending. I had been preparing for the presentation for a few months, and thanks to Sean Corfield, who asked for drafts, seconds drafts, release candidates and final versions of the slides, I had the general flow of the talk long ago. There were, as always, last minute changes, particularly because we added features to Mate and changed the names of all the framework tags the week before cf.Objective!

While I am looking at the mere 7 billable hours for the whole week, I can't help wondering why I enjoy developing open source software so much. A quick recap of the week reveals: making the distribution packages and testing the upgrade scripts for the new release of Mango Blog; fixing last minutes bugs encountered while testing the packages; answering questions in Mango's forums; making a new example and writing a tutorial for the soon-to-be-released Mate framework; writing missing documentation for Mate; working on the cf.Objective() presentation about Mate; preparing the audio files for the ColdFusion Weekly roundtable about Flex frameworks... Mmmh... Can you spot the pattern here? Most of my time was spent working on personal, open source projects.

 

It seems that 2008 will bring a lot traveling for us. First, I will present a session at cf.Objective() in early May and then I will present at WebManiacs towards the end of May. We also hope to attend 360 Flex in Atlanta and most likely 360 Flex in SoCal closer to home.

The Orange County Flex User Group just had its first meeting, and it was standing room only!  We had a dozen RSVPs but over double that number actually showed up!  Space was tight, but everyone was excited at our kickoff meeting, which went over 2 hours.  Laura gave an introductory presentation on Flex, which was a springboard for a lot of lively discussion and debate throughout the night.  What made the discussions interesting was hearing different perspectives from our diverse audience, which included people from Flex, Flash, ColdFusion, Java, .NET and other technologies.

I just got back from Adobe MAX and WOW! It was my 1st MAX and my 1st time in Chicago, and I met so many wonderful people at the event. Adobe put on a very good show! There were a lot of sneak previews of things to come and I took lots of video that I have to sort through and post up, so stay tuned! In the meantime, take a look at the opening video of the keynote address. Can you spot our very own Laura Arguello?

We're pleased to announce the formation of 2 new user groups in Orange County, CA (aka "The OC").  They are the OC Flex User Group and the OC ColdFusion User Group.  For those not familiar with the OC, there is a high concentration of technology companies and high-tech industry and research here, that has earned the area the title of the "Silicon Coast".  The area does get overlooked sometimes because we are sandwiched between our much larger neighbors, Los Angeles and San Diego, so it's nice to have user groups serving our very active local developer community here.

You know what they say about all work and no play! We've been very busy here with projects and deadlines, so it's nice to take a little break and post something fun and revealing! We've been getting ready for next week's Adobe MAX conference in Chicago, and Nahuel had T-shirts made to help us promote Fill Colors. Check out the cool design and us modeling our new shirts. 

As my first post, I'd like to introduce myself as the newest member of AsFusion! Laura and I have been friends and classmates for years and I'm excited to be joining Nahuel and Laura as they take AsFusion to the next level. I'm not a Flash or CF developer, but I'll be helping them manage their projects and posting regularly to the blog to keep you apprised of all the latest and greatest going on here! 

Laura and I just came back from the Adobe on AIR Bus Tour when they stopped in LA.  Adobe is promoting their Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), formerly known as Apollo, which is in Beta right now and the 1st release is expected soon.  For those who aren't familiar with AIR, it's technology to allow you to deploy rich internet applications to the desktop.  To give you an idea of the kinds of fun stuff you can do, I shot a clip of a great demo by Lee Brimelow: