It has been far too long since I’ve blogged about Merapi, so I thought I would share what’s up with the project. First off, the next release has been coming soon for far too long. That is my responsibility and I apologize to everyone that’s been waiting on the new build. However, there is good news! The new release is now live on the site. Go to www.merapiproject.net and check it out. You can sign up for an account if you aren’t already.

It’s really great to see the Flex community cranking out cool examples with a technology that you’ve created. This is most definitely the case with the recent “Cocomo ready” Air Wiibot. These guys mashed up Cocmo, Flex, and Merapi to control a Lego Mindstorm robot with a Wiimote. So what’s Cocmo for? They’ve used Cocomo for live video conferencing as well as the ability to control the robot remotely. So, if my friend Jordan happened to have Nathan (our Lego Mindstorm robot) at her house, I could fire up this app at my house and control Nathan remotely using a Wiimote… really cool stuff. Here’s the YouTube video:

MAX Recap

For those of you that missed MAX there was a lot of Merapi action, here’s a quick recap.

First off, Tour De Flex.

Tour De Flex is an application created by Adobe used to explore components in the Flex community. Adobe used Merapi to connect the Eclipse plugin portion of the application to the Tour De Flex AIR application. You can get Tour De Flex at: http://flex.org/tour and read more about the Merapi integration on Holly Schinsky’s blog here: Flex/AIR to Java Communication Using Merapi.

Moving right along… There were a few new demos and a couple of Merapi announcements at the sessions we gave at 360 | MAX. One of the first demos I showed was Outlook integration. Here’s the YouTube video:

The next new demo was Excel integration. If you pay attention to the video on this one you will notice one of the announcements we made at MAX, Merapi is now in the browser! In this demo you will see a Flex browser application interact with Excel:

Thanks again to Universal Mind and Adobe for supporting me at MAX.

Coming up…

FlexCamp Chicago 1/23, FlexCamp OC 1/31, and 360 Flex | Indy 5/18-20 (probably)

I’ll be presenting at each of these conferences (assuming Tom and John let me in again.. they have yet to announce speakers)

There will be some especially interesting announcements at FlexCamp Chicago. Make sure you turn out if possible, otherwise, watch the blogosphere for the recap.

Thanks to everyone who has been using Merapi and giving us feedback on the framework. The creativity, ingenuity, support, and patience from the community has been excellent.

Enjoy the new release!