I've just returned to London from MAX 2004...what a conference! The announcement of the availability of Flex 1.5; cool demos of Blackstone, Flex, Flash on mobile devices; and a sneak peek at what's in Flash 8 were among the more notable announcements and content at this year's conference. For a more in-depth summary of the conference, take a look at April Fleming's article in this month's issue.

While I was at MAX, I was able to have a private round-table interview with the Blackstone development team. We discussed the motives behind the features in Blackstone, what it was like to build Blackstone, what they would like to see in the next release after Blackstone, and about the development community and how they can help. You can read the results of my interview in this month's Community Focus column.

Also at MAX, I did a lot of brainstorming and bounced ideas for the magazine off of many developers. I also got a ton of positive feedback about the "deep focus" issue we ran a couple of months ago, so I'm pleased to announce that I will make every effort to make that the permanent format for CFDJ starting in January 2005. I have created an editorial calendar for next year, available at www.sys-con.com/coldfusion/writers.cfm. If you're interested in writing about anything related to any of the calendar topics, simply bounce the idea off of me and hopefully I'll get you into the schedule. I know this will make many of you happy...but possibly not as happy as what I have to say next. I went to MAX with a mission: to get more Macromedia staffers involved in CFDJ. The ColdFusion team has made it clear that they thrive on customer feedback and that they like interacting with the development community; so I set out to try and give them another forum in which to interact with the community. Mission accomplished!

The Blackstone development team has agreed to write articles all about the new features in Blackstone for a future issue. This issue's publish date will coincide with the public release of Blackstone. Who better to explain each feature than the person(s) who actually developed it? So, in the not-too-distant future I will be handing over the bulk of the articles to the Blackstone development team for a special "Blackstone" issue. Of course, I still expect to run plenty of articles in subsequent issues that are written by developers about these new features, but letting the Blackstone team introduce them to us will be a treat. In addition, I'm talking with them about introducing a regular "Ask the CF Team" column in which readers can submit questions about ColdFusion behavior and problems that they'd like explained/answered by someone from the ColdFusion development team. It's not a substitute for tech support - the Macromedia developers will respond to queries with one or two paragraph explanations.

I have ideas for other regular columns that I'll throw out for comments right now (please e-mail me and let me know what you think). Awhile ago I wanted to start a regular column to give a voice to CFUG/MMUG managers. I didn't get much response at the time - maybe now I'll get a better response? Another idea I had is for a regular column that is based around a case study of how ColdFusion and/or other Macromedia product(s) enabled a company to do great things. Being able to show our bosses and/or clients how CF saved the day at a company is very useful when you're trying to convince them to upgrade and/or simply use ColdFusion on a project. I've also been thinking about starting a regular server administration column - focusing on securing, optimizing, and administering ColdFusion. I have other ideas, but these are the ones I'm concentrating on at the moment.

So there you have it - a glimpse of what is and what may be in store for you in future issues of ColdFusion Developer's Journal. I for one can't wait to get more Macromedians involved, nor can I wait to get the magazine on focus each month and introduce some more new columns. As always, please let me know what you think and submit any feedback or ideas you might have to simon@horwith.com.