Wow … September came and went. There was just too much going on. I got back from my Caribbean Cruise – Puerto Rico, Aruba, Curacao, St. Maarten, and St. Thomas – and it was already the 10th of September! The cruise was nice, however there was too much to do when I got back. I immediately got back into coding mode – I’m working on three different start-up ideas right now – and several contract development projects.

We completed our first cut at the Adobe Developer Desktop – an AIR application – that we built for Adobe. The intention is to create an extensible application in AIR that Adobe developers can use to track outstanding bugs and issues, report bugs to Adobe, and access other information quickly. It’s been fun, and we’re continuing to extend this application.

I also took off on the road for three conferences that were very interesting. The first two were in New York – the Millennials Conference, and then the Tweens Conference. The Millennials are people born from 1982 to 2000, and the Tweens are a subset of this group that were born from 1995 to 2000. Both conferences were impressive, and if you want to hear about some of the topics discussed we talked about it on one of our latest ITConversations podcasts – Technology Travels. The core thing that I realized is that our youngest generations growing up in America are becoming fully integrated into the Internet. To them … the Internet just *IS*. It has always been here for them … they are using it daily … it is an extension of who they are … their community already includes “close friends” that they have never met in person. It is extending their world.

I then went on to Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago. I had gone last year, and so this was my second year seeing what Adobe is up to … and to me it is very impressive. Adobe announced and demonstrated a string of new products and projects … on top of the new Flex and AIR development foundation that has been growing. There were too many things to think about … but Adobe seems to have a lot of momentum, and is pushing hard to become a cross-platform solution for developers, corporations, and end-users. Some of the cool things that the showed and talked about:

• RIAForge.org – Open Source Projects built on Adobe Technologies
• OSFlash.org – more Open Source Flash
• Red5 – the Open Source Flash Server
• Spaz.AIR – a cross-platform twitter client written for AIR
• Agile Agenda – an AIR Agile project management tool
• Digimix – an amazing audio mixing application written for AIR (demo)
• Buzzword – a truly impressive web-based Word Processor … Adobe bought these guys!
• MTV Adobe AIR Challenge – developer contest
• … and more.  I’ll post more in a future post …

One other thing that was really fun about New York and Chicago … mass transit.  In New York I stayed with a friend who doesn’t even own a car anymore.  It was actually fun to ride the trains and the metro … back and forth without ever having to sit in traffic.  Chicago was the same … I took the train from the airport to my hotel downtown.  Adobe ran buses from the hotels to the convention center.  It was nice to not rent a car …