I’m now a member of the Adobe Student Rep program and will be promoting Adobe Flex and AIR to the students and colleges for building Rich Internet Applications. 

I see a lot of opportunity for using Flex/AIR in both the Computer Science and Journalism departments and will be raising awareness across the campus through demonstration events and workshops. I will also be exploring the possibility of starting a campus club that focuses on learning and promoting these types of skills including Flex/AIR, Flash, graphic design, and web development.

I’ll be posting code samples, tutorials, and more here in the future so keep checking in!

Adobe has released a suite of web tools that allow users to collaboratively write, share, and publish documents online. The tools include Adobe Buzzword, ConnectNow, Create PDF, Share, and My Files.

The features for each are below:

Buzzword
Shared document authoring
Ability to export to PDF
Rich document styling

Adobe Connect Now
Screensharing: Share your desktop and invite attendees
Webcam: Show off your face to your attendees
Shared Notes: Share notes with other attendees
Annotations: Write annotations on the screen (will freeze-frame the screen during screen share)
Chat: Private/public chat capability

Create PDF
Upload up to 5 files and create a PDF to be downloaded or saved to the web for access via “Your Files”

Share
Upload or create documents to share with others

Your Files
Store your files online to access anywhere

Acrobat.com on the desktop
If you want to have these tools on your desktop, you can download the Acrobat.com suite and run it using Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR).

Personally, I enjoy using Buzzword for writing long documents, like business plans, which require multiple people. I know some people (like mehwolfy) have had issues with disappearing documents on both Google Docs and Zoho Writer and hopefully the same problem won’t plague Acrobat.com. I’ve been using Buzzword since it was a standalone application released last year and none of my documents have gone astray.

The Buzzword WYSIWYG interface is great for creating stylized documents. Check it out below.

As far as presentations, Acrobat.com doesn’t allow you to create presentations like you would in Google Docs but you can create or share PDFs. I typically create my slides in Photoshop and then export the layers to a PDF. Why? Check it out for yourself: Open a PDF in Acrobat Reader and go to View > Full Screen Mode. Voila! you have a presentation without the hassles of different operating system or program verions (.ppt vs .pptx anyone?).

And finally, as a Flex developer, I have to point out that Acrobat.com is built in Flex. One can only hope that the Buzzword WYSIWYG editing interface will be released as a Flex component in the near future to add rich document editing functionality to more web applications.

The Twelve Horses gang is in Salt Lake City for the RIA Dev Shed.

Check back more today for live updates.

I’m currently building a Flex/AIR application at work that allows us to integrate with Salesforce.com in order to manage projects and employees.

1:30: Listening to Louie Penaflor. He is presenting on Flash Media Server (FMS). Flash media server offers a lot of opportunity for providing scalable streaming video. It sounds like Scott wants to create a video conference tool in Flex and utilize FMS.

2:49pm: Currently listening to Shelley Browning. She is presenting on Flex Charting and data visualization. The Twelve Horses project management application will have a lot of graphs, charts, and dashboards.

Below: Steve Spencer outside a RIA Dev Shed 2008 session room