Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Lightmaker have recently completed an ambitious project for the National Health Service (NHS) Blood and Transplant service in the UK that I wanted to highlight here – entitled the “Wall of Life“, it aims to raise awareness of organ donation and sign-up thousands of new donors to the national register.

The site, which has been built using Flash, presents visitors with an image of a child whose life was saved by a heart transplant – zooming in on the image reveals however that it is constructed from up to 60,000 photos of people who have pledged their support for the campaign.

We’re used to seeing these ‘deep zoom’-style experiences now, but what’s impressive here is that the mosaic image and underlying image tiles are dynamically recreated every four hours so as to include people who have recently pledged their support – this produces a whopping 1.6Gb bitmap image, the data from which is then processed by a custom ColdFusion backend and served up by Zoomify Enterprise Server, rendering the final experience using Flash Player.

An impressive result that is worth checking out – you’ll see that there is still some way to go until the mosaic is full up, so if you’re prepared to support the campaign and live in the UK you could always help out and upload your photo to the site.

Update: There is also a Flash-based widget that you can share to help spread the word about this campaign – I’ve included it below:

As part of my learning process with the beta releases of Flash Catalyst and Flash Builder I created a simple version of the Employee Directory application that we use inside Adobe to find information about employees.

I’ve written up the process of building this application and it’s now available on the Adobe Developer Connection site as a tutorial. If you’re interested in walking through the process of importing a design into Flash Catalyst, converting graphics to components, creating states and transitions, adding interactivity and then moving to Flash Builder, to connect to a ColdFusion or PHP back-end to retrieve and display data using the new DCD (Data Centric Development) features then I’d recommend it to you.

This is the application that you will build by following the tutorial:

You can access the tutorial and download the sample files here.

If you have any feedback or suggestions for future tutorials then please let me know.

The organisers of Scotch on the Rocks are taking the annual conference on tour next week, setting up in London on Monday (1st), Manchester on Wednesday (3rd) and ending up in Edinburgh on Friday (5th).

There is lots happening in relation to the Flash Platform this year – new releases of the Flex framework, Flash Builder and ColdFusion and completely new tools in the shape of Bolt (the code-name for the new ColdFusion IDE) and Flash Catalyst.

Scotch on the Rocks is going to be THE place to be next week if you want the latest news on all these releases… Terry Ryan, Adam Lehman and Serge Jespers will be at each of the events from Adobe, together with a host of additional speakers including Mike Jones, Peter Elst and Tom Chiverton.

Registration is still open, and it only costs £49 + VAT to attend one of these events – with the current economic climate, the organisers even created a “Manager’s information pack” that you can pass along to your manager to help get approval for a day out of the office

What are you waiting for? Register now…

Ben Forta, Director of Evangelism at Adobe, will be presenting at the UK ColdFusion User Group meeting to be held on the 21st April at Adobe’s central London office.

If you want to see some sneaks about the future of ColdFusion, as well as learn about Flex, LCDS and AIR then you can get more information about the session and register here.

Adobe, together with a number of our partners across Europe, are running a series of half-day workshops to help you get up to speed with building applications using ColdFusion 8.

In addition to getting a general overview of what’s new in the latest version of ColdFusion, there will be more in-depth sessions on building ColdFusion-powered Rich Internet Applications with Flex, using ColdFusion to create AJAX-based web applications & PDF documents and using the ColdFusion Server Monitor to fine-tune applications for high performance.

The dates/locations confirmed already are as follows – download the linked PDF document for more information and for the registration form:

• Cologne, January 20th – Register
• Amsterdam, January 22nd – Register
• Brussels (NL), January 27th – Register
• Brussels (FR), January 28th – Register
• Paris, February 3rd – Register
• London, February 5th – Register

The team is working on additional dates for Barcelona, Zurich, Milan and Stockholm – I’ll update this post with additional details when they are confirmed…