Some Flash related stuff:

• Swf_fu – a neat little Rails helper for embedding SWF files in your applications, especially handy if you’re using CDN’s
• Ruby-ImageSpec – Another tiny, but handy utility which gets you the dimensions of a given image, or flash file, very handy if you’re using SWFs in a CMS, and want to avoid the Firefox 100% bug
• HTML5 – The momentum against using plugins in the browser appears to be growing. The XHTML 2 Working Group is shutting down at the end of this year to focus on HTML 5

And some people talking out of their arses:

• An argument against selling different versions of your product – which only works in the M$ case, the epitomy of evil. The 37signals argument just fails completely. More resources = more cost to them.
• Jacob Nielsen claiming masking passwords is bad – which is fine if you don’t mind having any security

• Worldwide Firefox Downloads – How much bandwidth do you burn every second?
• BrowserCMS – The best Rails content management system in the world, probably.

• Cappuccino – A Javascript / Objective-J framework for writing web applications. Seems to be pretty cross platform too.
• Another AJAX platform at Ajax.org, and this one looks to be pretty good at charting
• Firefox 3.5 – that’s all you need to say really…

• Upgrading OSX to Ruby 1.8.7 – if you haven’t already, 1.8.7 is a worthwhile and fairly easy upgrade.
• Textmate bundles have moved and it’s now on GitHub!

• A Quick Primer on Sharding for Ruby on Rails – A nice little guide on sharding and what it’s good for. If you want to get mega, read this.
• Scalr.net – A nice little tool for managing a web cluster on Amazon’s EC2. Also available on Google Code
  
• SQLiteManager – A nice little GUI for your SQLite databases

• Paper Trail – A simple application auditing, versioning plugin for your rails models. Stupid simple to integrate
• Runway App – A nice little GTD focused application. I’ll give it a go for a few days and see how it flies. Free for Beta
• Capazon – Amazon’s EC2 through Capistrano. If this works, it’ll make me happy.

Both have been well covered in the media already, and Catalyst (or Thermo as it was known) is heading for it’s third year of being demo’ed at Max, without a release.

“Design in Mind” was one of the core themes for this release, and these tools, together with the updated Flex 4 SDK, deliver on that to make it easier than ever create high fidelity, rich Internet applications that target the Flash Platform.

Andrew Shorten’s also released a little tutorial that you can work through to familiarize yourself with the tooling. In this tutorial Andrew shows you how to build an employee address book application that lets users enter search criteria and view a list of results fetched from a database (via a ColdFusion service), from which they can select an employee to get their full contact information. The completed application could work either as a browser-based application (using Adobe Flash Player) or a desktop application (using Adobe AIR).

So, if you haven’t already, head over to the labs and check them out, they are certainly interesting tools.

But that’s not why I’m writing this blog post.  Something I’ve noticed this year is the complete absence of any Adobe conferences containing ColdFusion content in and around Europe.  Aside from Scotch and the odd ColdFusion camp here and there, there’s nothing.

For the Americans this is a very different story.  For instance, there’s the Adobe MAX conference in October, CFObjective() a couple of weeks back, CFUnited plus a host of other smaller localised ones.  This goes to show a common problem with software companies based in the states – the belief that the world stops when you hit the US coast.  Admittedly, last year there was an Adobe MAX in Europe (and Japan), but this year, they’ve been binned, and Adobe are expecting everyone to go to the LA event instead.  However, for nearly everyone outside of the US this is an incredibly expensive proposition – nearly always costing into the thousands just to attend and have somewhere to sleep for the night.

So, for those of you who may not live on this continent, please note that without the valiant efforts of FuzzyOrange and the Scotch team, we would have absolutely nothing in the UK (or nearby) until towards the end of 2010 (assuming MAX comes back).

Therefore, if you live in northern europe, and can make any of the venues next week, please buy a ticket and attend Scotch – as it’s the only chance you’re going to get for a ColdFusion orientated conference this year.

Whilst standing in the queue of other loaners I found myself stood next to a “Community” board, which from what I could see consisted of letters sent in by “happy” customers.  Most of these letters were praising the service they had received and how great the company was.

Now, a couple of things crossed my mind at this point – firstly, who the hell writes these letters (aside from old people with time to burn), and secondly, why do they write them?

If I went to a car rental place, and I was treated kindly and quickly, and given a clean car in good condition for a reasonable price with no problems whatsoever, I would consider that the car rental place had done their job, not gone above and beyond, and definitely not enough to warrant cracking out the Basildon Bond.

This then brought me to a relevant assumption – as developers of web applications, we never get any gratitude from our users, we only get the abuse.  (Hear that tiny violin playing then?)

The reasoning behind this is simple – if our application is quick, responsive, and functioning completely as it should, it’s doing just that – working as it should.   Hardly praiseworthy now is it?

Now imagine it’s not doing these things – but merely annoying your users by taking ages, returning errors and having an appalling Apdex score.  You, as a user, are going to get grumpy, and then chances are about 1-5% of you will crack open an email and complain.

Therefore, it’s pretty safe to say, that if you’re hearing nothing from your users, then everything’s OK – you’re doing what you should.

But.

Let’s imagine that you’re normal and you do get the occasional old duffer write in and have a moan that your ACME Widgetron isn’t functioning as it should – chances are that there are as many as a hundred other old duffers who have issues, but can’t be bothered to write in, they’ve just buggered off elsewhere.  Wouldn’t it be great to find out what their issues were so you can rectify them?

This is where products/services such as UserVoice come in.  Firstly, these systems provide a low friction mechanism for your users to have a moan, and once they moan, you get to see their collective whining and not what problems you need to sort out soonest.

Secondly, these services also manage to give you some other information that would normally be reserved for the gratitude queue. By their absence, you can see what aspects of your application people are happiest with.  If it’s not mentioned in the list of changes your users are submitting, it’s safe to say their probably perfectly happy with it.

Therefore, if you’re building a web application, be it for you or your clients, you should always looking at including some sort of feedback system as a priority – not only is it there for the customer support aspect, but also to tell you what people think of your application.  But remember, people only tell you the bad things, it’s always good to remember that all the ones that are saying nothing are probably perfectly happy.