Since the integration of the Flash and PDF ( since ColdFusion 8 ) platforms, more and more developers are flocking towards ColdFusion again, and it is seen as a great alternative to meet business needs quickly and effectively, and more and more businesses are hiring ColdFusion developers because of that.

Read more about ColdFusion 9′s key features and download links…

Some of the Coldfusion 9 features include:

• ColdFusion Object Relational Mapping (ColdFusion ORM) – a powerful Rapid Application Development (RAD) solution for building data-centric applications
• Offline application support for AIR applications
• Enhanced Flash remoting capabilities
• A broader set of Ajax controls that leverage the new Ext JS 3.0 library
• Improved PDF functionality
• Integration with other products and technologies such as Microsoft SharePoint and OpenOffice
• Server Manager – an AIR-based desktop application to centrally manage multiple ColdFusion servers from a single location
• Powerful search capabilities using Solr, an open-source enterprise search server based on the Lucene Java search library
• database enhancements and significant performance enhancements such as, granular control over caching, in-memory file capabilities, and improved clustering
• many language and CFC enhancements

You can download the ColdFusion 9 beta here, the ColdFusion builder beta can be found here (Adobe Labs membership required). As always, these are betas and may still contain a ton of bugs, so make sure you backup and existing projects, just to be safe

This new player will enable developers and integrators to create rich, expressive applications targeted to the latest version of Adobe’s Flash technology, with the ability to distribute their apps including the runtime installer to millions of open OS mobile devices with a streamlined workflow and reduced time to market.

For now, the distributable player is only available on Nokia S60 and Windows Mobile devices, but more devices are to follow very soon…

An integrated, updatedable solution

The runtime is part of a solution that includes the Flash Lite 3.1 Distributable Player and Adobe Mobile Packager, with authoring support provided via Adobe Flash CS4 Professional and Adobe Device Central CS4 (or via Adobe Flash CS3 Professional and Adobe Device Central CS3). Adobe Mobile Packager is a desktop tool enabling developers to transform an swf file into an install-package for S60′s and Windows Mobile devices.

The distributable player works in a similar way to Adobe’s Flash 10 Player – once installed and if you have a mobile device that allows OTA (over-the-air) updates, the application will update itself, ensuring that every user has the latest version of the mobile player installed.

The distributable player solution allows you to create rich mobile applications that:

• Target the latest Flash Lite player, by mimicking the successful Flash Player desktop model of content triggered downloads but for applications. Developers no longer need to worry about whether the device has the latest Flash Lite runtime.
• Reach millions of open OS smartphone users in the US, UK, Italy, Spain and through free direct-to-consumer distribution, new off-deck aggregator partners (GetJar, Thumbplay, Zed), or your existing distribution channels.
• Improve end user experience through easy installation and visual icons for Flash Lite applications.

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Easy distribution and marketing

There are several ways that a user can discover the application you developed, depending on the distribution channel, some examples of how the consumer may discover the application are:

• Catalog of one of Adobe’s Aggregator partners such as GetJar, Thumbplay and Zed
• Your own/the aggregator/other distribution channel desktop or mobile website
• A print or TV ad, with an SMS shortcode or web address

At the moment, Adobe’s Flash Lite solution is only available on Windows Mobile and S60 devices in India, Italy, Spain, UK, and the U.S., however additional countries will be added over time.

If you would like to give this new distributable player a try and work on your own mobile Flash application, why not have a look at the link below.

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Related information:

• Adobe’s Distributable Player Solution information (Abobe Labs)
• Download the Distributable Player

And to make sure you have plenty to look at Google added 20 content layers containing information from the world’s leading underwater researchers, ocean explorers and scientists.

The virtual earth is coming more and more alive…and new layers for travel websites are already in development!

At the launch event in San Francisco, former vice president Al Gore said:

[...] you can now dive into the world’s ocean that covers almost 3/4 of the planet and discover new wonders that had not been accessible in previous versions.

Following up on this new update to Google Earth conversation organisations are hoping to raise awareness of issues threatening underwater life. Head of the global maritime programme at the IUCN (International Union for the Conversation of Nature), Carl Gustaf Lundin, said:

With this, everybody can see the unbelievable beauty of our marine life, and how incredibly threatened it is. We hope this major technological innovation will get the public more involved in marine conservation and encourage governments and businesses to stop driving ocean species to extinction.

Additionally, the latest update add these features to Google Earth:

• GPS tracking
• Virtual time travel (observe changes in satellite images, such as Lake Chad’s river-bed or the 2006 World Cup stadium)
• Updates to Google Mars’ 3D terrain
• Improved ability to record tours and placemark controls

You can download Google Earth here.

First commercially used layers around the corner?

With the release of Google Earth’s ocean layers the travel industry (in particular maritime travel) is looking forward to cashing in on the new update to present tours in even more detail and interactivity. I cannot go into any more detail (NDA and all), but look out for a travel company dealing with boat and diving tours, something tells me you will be amazed by the level of detail and interactivity

Continue reading after the break for some strategies on how to invoice for your web design or web development work…

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When to invoice

When to invoice depends entirely how long the project is and how comfortable you and the client feel. Obviously if a project takes only a week or two then you won’t need to worry too much about when to invoice or how to split your invoices. But say for example you are working on a bit of a longer project, say a fully bespoke website, taking about 3 or 4 months. It makes sense agreeing a payment plan then. As a general rule of thumb in the design industry you may want to work on 3 payments – first payment after agreed sitemap, prototype or visuals, second payment after the development is just over half-way, and third payment once the project is going live. That way you ensure you have a somewhat steady money-flow to pay your bills, and it may be easier for the client to put the money through their books as well.

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Keeping on top of things

It is always important to keep on top of everything that involves money. Office rent, electricity and water bills, payments for outsourced work, office supplies, projects and project stages. “Well, since I work from home I won’t have to worry about some of those things”, you may say. Wrong, even that is cost. You pay rent, you pay electricity (or pay your parents / spouse for paying the bills for you), but it is cost. So keep track of everything, at the end of the day you want to know how much you make in a month, right?
Aside from costs, it is important you also keep track of project dates, when does what need to be agreed on or signed off, when is the preliminary live-date? Is the client going on holiday?
Keeping tracks can be done in a number of ways, be it a notepad, excel sheets, or fully fledged accounting software or project tools – as long as you can keep track and not lose the notes you are good to go.

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Payment terms – and agreeing to them

So now you know roughly what your outgoings are and how much you will be charging for your project or project stages, now is the time to formally agree to your payment terms. Standard payment terms are usually 30 days (though some companies I worked for prefer 60 days) after project delivery or after each key stage, meaning the client has 30/60 days to pay you after that date before you will charge interest. The current interest rate is 13% (which is calculated by 8% late payment interest rate plus 5% reference rate from the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act 1998).

If you do not want to go down the route of a formal contract then at least make sure to write an email to your client outlining the project stages, payment stages and late payment terms and get the client to respond to the email that he / she is agreeing to it! If there is no paper trail then you will have a hard time in court (should it ever come to that).

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How would you like to get paid?

There are 3 options on how to get paid, though only 2 are advisable:

1. Paypal – this is probably the most preferred option by smaller agencies or upcoming freelancers, but also the least advised one, simply because it is expensive: if you don’t have a merchants account you lose around 5% of your money in fees, and even if you have a merchants account, you’ll still lose up to 4% by using this service. I really recommend staying away from this option
2. Cheque – preferred option for freelancers and smaller businesses. All you need to do is give them your name or company name and to post it to you. It is reasonably quick and easy, and all you need to do is walk into your bank and pay it in.
3. BACS – my preferred option: BACS stands for Bankers’ Automated Clearing Services and means direct bank transfer. This option is also preferred by many medium-to-large sized businesses and is becoming more popular with smaller businesses as all they need to do is inform the accountant to pay X to person Y and not having to worry about it any more.

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Your first invoice

Whichever route you take (pay in one sum or pay in stages), you will need to write a formal invoice. Each invoice should have an invoice reference number, the postal address of the client, your postal address and email address, a job description, the amount with a VAT breakdown and – if you are a limited company – the registered office address, company and VAT number. The FSA has some nice information about invoices. You will also need to add a bit of spiel on how you would like to get paid, such as bank account or name for the cheque.

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Late payments

Unfortunately you will have one of those clients sooner or later who will not pay on time. Keeping a cool head is important, after all it could just be an omission from the accountant. A good approach is calling the client after 7 days of the invoice being due to check if everything is okay and remind the client that there is an invoice due. If payments are a week late then I usually tend to ignore late charges, as it shows the client that errors are only human and you’re still providing a good service.
When it comes to late payments things will change a bit more drastically. If payment is over a month late when you should send a repeat invoice, together with a reminder that the client will be charged interest. Month two is where it gets interesting, if the client still has not paid you can also demand a debt-recovery charge (usually 5-10% of the outstanding fee). Either way, make sure that you word this carefully, a threatening tone can backfire! Keep calm, write professionally. Neither of you want to make this legal at this stage.

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Legal actions

Month three has arrived, and you still haven’t been paid? Then it is time for you to go legal. Send the client a repeat statement and invoice with interest and debt-recovery fee, and threaten with legal action via the small claims court. Send the letter or email, and call a day after the email / letter would have been received (if you write a letter, make sure you use recorded delivery as proof) and speak to your client about this. Give them 10-14 days, then call again. If there is still no money in your account you will need to take legal action.
In any case, you will now need to plan out your claim. The Claims information on the HMCS website will guide you through the proceedings and required documents and give you advice on how to proceed, what you need, and who to speak to if you have any questions.

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Getting your money at long last

In most cases you have the proper paperwork and paper/email trail and you will win the case. Well done! Now it is time to speak to a debt collections agency (after the court case you will sometimes be given a recommended agency by a clerk, or you can go to the HMCS website and find out more about debt collectors in your area) who will take matters into their hand to make sure they get you your money and the court fees – and of course their share. Don’t worry about their costs, they will get that from the client. And you’re done!

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Final words

In 99% of all cases invoicing is a pretty straightforward thing, clients are usually very good when it comes to paying their debts and in my career I only came across 5 clients who were a bit of a pain to deal with. Always remember, if anything goes wrong just keep calm, stay professional and make sure you have your bases covered: the client agreed to the work, you outlined the payment information and terms and you have done as per agreement. No one wants to go through courts, and clients will pay reasonably quickly the moment you mention ‘late payments’ and ‘legal proceedings’.

Last time I wrote about this Yahoo / Flash mashup I connected the Yahoo map’s API through Flash and PHP to a MySQL database and was able to write / read from the entries. My next goals were to integrate a user-login, adding links, implementing moderation and a Flash image uploader script.
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Integrating a PHP uploader script

A very important aspect for both users (and our clients) is to be able to ‘take part’ and ‘be part’ of shaping the user-generated content area of a site, to leave their mark. Naturally, images and content are the weapons of choice, as such the next step was to work on an image-uploader. The task:

Develop an image uploader script through Flash that would allow users to upload an image from their desktop, store it online in a writeable folder on the server and reference to it from the SQL database and display the image for the relevant post for the relevant user.

This wasn’t such an easy task. I had a good look around how Flash tutorial websites I usually frequent handle image upload. After some working I managed to get the PHP side of things working – which also had its own issues to start with, it would not update file names properly (see image to the right, click to enlarge)! After some fiddling around I managed to get the php script to work, and if you like you can download it here:

Please download the file here: fileupload.zip (~800 bytes)

What the script does is it defines the maximum file dimensions (180×300 max in either direction) and uploads the file to a temporary directory (/tempstore/) before giving it a timestamp and name-change and putting it into the /images/ directory.

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Connecting PHP with Flash

This was a bit (okay, a hell of a lot) more complicated: through the variables ‘FileReference‘ and ‘browseListener‘ and a couple of other event listeners I managed to tell Flash how to use the “Browse…” button and how to handle the uploaded image. At the moment the Flash file uploads the image to the database correctly, but it will break if the image does not have the correct size, so I need to work on getting the image-resizer to work. Once that works I’ll upload the source as well.

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Sneak Peak for the image-uploader (snapshot of 9th July 2008)

The main uploader:

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The uploaded image and adding information:

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…and the result:

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Conclusion and next steps

Well, so far it is looking very promising with the image-uploader! Obviously we are still some way to go with it, but I think the project is starting to take shape! Integrating browse and upload functionality in Flash took some work, but thanks to ActionScript 2.0′s event listeners it worked out reasonably well and connected to the database. Obviously we are still taking about only one user at a time, so I would need to review the php code at a later date to also make sure there is a folder structure per user present, but that should not be too much of an issue. Watch out for the next entry on this mash-up, by then I will have the uploader finished and maybe add the ability to upload multiple images to show a slideshow, we will see!

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Lastly, if you enjoyed the article – or just the flash map – then please leave a comment, I would really appreciate it, as it gives me always another boost to write more

Yesterday Google announced an update to their search engines with the help of Adobe Labs. Read more about this new development after the break.

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So how does it work?

As part of their Open Screen Project Adobe has released a technology to both Google and Yahoo that enables the engines to crawl and index swf files.

Adobe Labs developed a Searchable SWF library for Google to develop an algorithm for search engines that explores swf files in the same way that a person would, by clicking buttons and entering input strings. The algorithm then remembers all of the text that it encounters while going through the file, and that text content is then listed and ready to be indexed.

In addition to that, any URL linked from the flash file will also be indexed in the same way as normal text-links would. Please note however that this only applies to static and dynamic text, text that was “broken down” in Flash to an outline will not be found and indexed.

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Limitations

A few limitations remain in Google’s ability to index SWF files:

1. Google’s crawlers do not execute some types of JavaScript. So if a web page loads a Flash file via JavaScript, Google may not be aware of that Flash file, in which case it will not be indexed.
2. Currently Google does not attach content from external resources that are loaded by your Flash files, meaning if a Flash file loads content via XML, HTML or another flash file then Google will separately index these resources, but it will not (yet) be considered part of the content of the Flash file.
3. Flash files using bidirectional languages (such as Hebrew or Arabic language) are currently not indexed as it provides a difficulty for the algorithm at this point in time.

Having said that, Ron Adler and Janis Stipins (Google) already commented:

We’re already making progress on these issues, so stay tuned!

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Good times for the flash designers and developers, however, making your Flash files visible is one thing, actually making a ranking difference is another. I would think we would have to wait a couple more months until Adobe’s library and Google’s algorithm improve indexability and deep-links, and then we’ll see how we go from here.

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Additional reading:

• Adobe’s Open Screen Project
• Google’s Weblog
• Adobe’s SWF searchability FAQ