These are my notes from the MiniMAX SE7EN conference.

ActionScript 3 for Dummies

ActionScript used to be much simpler. Went from assigning AS to an element, to assigning it to the keyframe, where you would assign a function to an event of an element, to now creating an event listener. Following the same route as JavaScript. Nice. Events are made to be more like JavaScript as well.

New Adobe CS3 Photoshop Feature: Stacks

Can autoalign layers from multiple photos, and then remove unwanted people, i.e. in a scenic shot, with very little technical skill required! Open your files, execute script “Open files into stack”. Even an option to attempt to automatically align images. “Set stack median”, and it will automatically remove anything that exists in one photo but not in the others.

Using Spry

AJAX framework by Adobe. Easy to use. Can provide UI widgets, visual effects, XPath filtering, load and display data dynamically with minimal work.

After including the required JavaScript files, you can pull in data with on line of JavaScript. Then, just define Spry regions in your HTML. That table will then automatically listen to that datasource as it changes. The way you bind data to HTML elements is also very similar to FLEX.

Sorting? A single method call. Marking a column has a certain data type? A single method. Everything is quick.

Example: Demonstrated an AJAX call to XML with one line of JavaScript and just a couple lines of HTML, and wrote it in four minutes. Excellent!

ColdFusion 8 Gems

You can clear template cache via Admin API. No longer all or nothing. You can clear specific caches.

<cfdump> enhancements! Expand/contract items in the dump. You can do show=”list,of,fields” or hide=”list,of,fields” to show or hide just those records or items in the dump! Very nice! You can also do output=”filename.txt” and it will write the dump to a text file!

Testing for array element existence. Do this with ArrayIsDefined(myarray,3) to check if there is a third element in the array.

Per application settings. Finally can use cfqueryparam in a cached query. Implicit array and structure creation! JavaScript-style operators, i.e. i++. Pass tag attributes as a collection (attributesCollection). onMissingMethod for CFCs. onMissingTemplate in Application.cfc. Easily refresh WSDL for web services. CFFunction supports more return data types like wddx, xml, etc.

Tons of great stuff!