Daniel R., if you are listening, I know that you don't know me, but I owe you a beer.

This afternoon as I was working on my 360Flex presentation and example code I became very, very frustrated with NativeWindow and Window and all the various similarities and differences in the options for creating and manipulating this much-used feature in AIR. So I thought, "Let's Google this bugger and see if there is a chart out there that can help."

No charts, but I was intrigued by a link to Daniel's site: AIR Window Explorer. You've seen the Flex Component Explorer and the Flex Style Explorer, well, Daniel's app is in the same vein. Decide on your Window options, create and open the window. Click on the "Show Code" button, and you will see the code used to create the Window. Nice! This application isn't perfect, mind you, but it does give you a a good idea of what you can do with the Window and NativeWindow classes in AIR.

So, for saving me an hour (and a lot of frustration) today, I owe Daniel R. a beer. Not a crappy beer. A really great beer.

Hopefully Daniel will be attending 360Flex in August so I can repay him properly.

This week has been totally user group overload for me.

Tuesday we had Ryan Taylor present "Intro to Flash Player 10 and Pixel Bender" at the Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta. Ryan always wows us with his giant brain full of math. The part of his presentation that I thought was most interesting was his examples of Pixel Bender, the tool kit that lets you (yes, you. It looks like it's that simple) script filters and effects for Flash. Ryan has posted his presentation and demo files on his blog if you want to take a look.

Wednesday had me visiting the Atlanta ColdFusion User Group where I was pummeled by comments "Where the heck have you been?" and "You didn't RSVP!" Mea Culpa, my CF friends, I have been neglecting you badly. But tonight's meeting was a must-see event; John Mason gave us an overview of "BlazeDS for ColdFusion Developers" and he did so without showing a chat example (thanks for taking the high road, John). He replaced the unfortunately stereotypical chat messaging example with the much more pertinent ColdFusion error message widget example. John's presentation will be posted on his labs site.

Tonight should also be fun as Michael Hagel has arranged for the XD Atlanta User Group to have a "Summer Social Gathering" at STATS Atlanta, you know, the place where all the 360Flex parties were held (and the only place you could have seen me during 360Flex because I was too busy at work to attend sessions :-( ). It should be great. By the way, Michael, the site is looking great!

See you there!

I am so glad that I know Ryan Taylor. Every now and then, Ryan will contact me and say "Hey, when would you like me to present?" I always seem to reply "Next month!"

Tonight, Ryan will be presenting some of the new features of Flash Player 10, currently in beta, at the Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta and Flash Meetup Atlanta meeting. You should attend.

Matt Kerner popped up on my IM client with a long, expletive-laden rant (and he's actively religious, so I started paying attention immediately) about brushes in Fireworks CS3. It seems that he has a workflow issue with Fireworks that involves him moving from Photoshop and back to Fireworks all because he needed to use a specific brush that isn't available to him in Fireworks.

Wow. Who knew that is so simple as a *.abr file could effect someone's sanity. So much so, Kerner made a logo. So much so, he made t-shirts available.

If this was Flex or the Flash Player, I'd be suggesting that you go vote on the issue. Since we don't have that available, if you would find it useful for brush files be easily transferred between Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, In Design, and After Effect, leave a comment here and I will make sure that Adobe hears you.