It looks like the online Office wars will soon be heating up. With the emergence of Google Docs and Adobe Buzzword for online Word docs as well as other lesser known names like Zoho, comes a new entry from an old player. Sabeer Bhatia co-founded Hotmail has a new venture named Live Documents and it is an online competitor to the Microsoft Office suite and the good news is that like Buzzword, it is built on the Adobe Flex framework. That must really hurt in Redmond, WA

There is no public beta yet, but it should be interesting and with the power players that are entering this space I would assume a possible acquisition target pretty quickly after its launch. Remember that Buzzword didn’t even make it to a public launch before being aquired by Adobe.

Not sure how many actually use the flash.system.Capabilities class you can gain a lot of very useful information about your users.

Run this demo

View/Download Source

HJGraduation.com has been a project that I have been working on for the past 6-8 months. It is an e-commerce/brochure application for the Fine Papers and Cap & Gown divisions at Herff Jones. It is a Flex 2 application powered by LiveCycle Data Services 2.5 with Java/Hibernate on the back end. The SQL database work was done by Brent Johnson, the designer of the application was Bill Davis, all of the Flex/AS3 and Java work was done by me.

You can also visit the application at HJGraduation.com. Only some of the high schools are enabled for e-commerce, if you would like to see an example with pricing enabled (note that Schools are turned on and off daily and these 2 were on as of today), try choosing
Alabama / Athens / East Limestone High School
or
Ohio / Wadsworth / Wadsworth High School.

Here are a few screen shots showing some of the functionality.

School Selection Process

Category View:

Product View:

Package View (note the upgrade and downgrade per item choices):

Product View (note the multiple image view thumbnails)

Product View (note the nested decisions that effect the image shown)

Product View (note the renderer used for the mini image in the combobox)

Cart View

Checkout Process

Doug McCune posted a blog entry named Google Sucks at Flex in response to the SearchMash Flex application that they recently posted which I wholeheartedly agree width.

Compare this application to the newest release of Buzzword (recently acquired by Adobe) and you will see how awesome a Flex application can be.

Buzzword is one of the coolest Flex applications ever and there is very good reason why Adobe acquired this company. The addition of the Buzzword AIR desktop application will revolutionize document editing and sharing. You can sign up for a free Buzzword account now at http://www.buzzword.com

I just added Flex Chat from Chatopica ( the guys from SearchCoders ) as a plug-in to this blog. Enjoy!