I'm speaking at the ACT Adobe Products User Group in Canberra tonight about AIR and have been busy building some interesting new demo applications, see screenshots below, that I hope will inspired developers to go off and build more AIR apps.

My personal experience of Qantas' new Frequent Flyer store has left me regretting using it, I should have kept the points for flights instead. You would think that an international services company that's been around for some time would know how to do it's job but that does not seem to be the case for Calson Marketing whose business it is to run the Frequent Flyer store for Qantas.

Friday week, August 1st, I'll be leaving my present job to join the ranks of the self employed as a developer/Adobe zealot for hire. Well, actually "for hire" may not be 100 percent correct as since I handed in my resignation a couple of weeks ago I've been approached by someone within the local Adobe community with an offer of part time work, watch this space for more information as it comes to hand. I'll still be doing some work with webqem, delivering their developer training - i.e.

One of the great things that happened at WebDU this year where the trading cards.  Collect the right ones and bend, fold and write on them and they could be handed in for fun prizes, the winner receiving a copy of one of the CS3 suites. Like some I didn't hand in my WebDU trading cards, instead I've gotten mine signed by the folk on the cards and have photographed the series and uploaded it up on Flickr. They're here with the other shots that I took this year: http://www.flickr.

I spoke at the Sydney Adobe AIR Camp on Tuesday and for my session built an AIR app that I now think I'll turn into a complete application.  It's currently for Mac only and runs on the Dock, it's icon only and when it launches you see a question mark overlayed on the envelope icon that I'm using. The app connects to your Gmail account and pulls back the quantity of unread mail, setting a new icon with an overlay of the quantity of unread messages.

I've just discovered that you can use Google Apps to do the mail hosting for your domain for free, for up to 100 users.  Others have already written about it - I've found an excellent guide for migrating to it from various email clients and accounts that appears to be very thorough in detail. I'm currently paying for the hosting of email for my domain and I've got to say that this is very tempting.