So… I hear on CFTalk that Macromedia have a new Developers Resource Kit (DRK) in the works. The news comes not from an official macromedia.com address, but from ColdFusion Jedi Master Ray Camden which is good enough for me.

Hmm… DRKs are not available to purchase. They’re only available to subscribers to Devnet, the subscription service which Macromedia is in the process of killing off – so you can’t subscribe to it. Previous DRKs are not available to purchase either. So essentially, there is content on the DRKs that is known and publicly discussed, but the vast majority of Macromedia customers cannot access or purchase them. That just doesn’t seem like sensible business to me.

Why does this piss me off so much? I would very much like to use the Pollster Flash/CF polling app on a client’s site – and I have DRK4, where it first appeared. But I can’t get it to work properly, and the DRK5 version, which is supposed to fix all the bugs in the DRK4 version, I can no longer purchase. I’ve looked around for an equivalent but nothing that works in CF. My Flash skills are not up to the job and anyway, the client’s budget does not extend to custom programming the entire job from scratch.

It’s things like this that make me want to scream. So if anyone knows of a Pollster clone – or any pretty-looking CF polling app, even if it’s not actually Flash – please let me know. If doesn’t have to be free either, just reasonable – if it solves the problem, I’m happy to pay for it.