Last Night's Flex and AIR Pre-release Tour in Atlanta
I thoroughly enjoyed last night's Flex and AIR Pre-release Tour event here in Atlanta. There were a ton of people at the event and I believe that everyone had a great time. It was exceptionally great to see some faces that I had not seen in years (more than ten years in a couple of cases). As always, getting to see everyone was great.
Special thanks to John Mason, president of the AFFUG and to Adobe for setting up everything.
The thing about Ben Forta, the presenter at last night's event, is that you don't want the event to end. Ben keeps relating relevant information to you about whatever the event's topic happens to be. Ben is a wealth of information — that is, the information that he can reveal at an event, not that people didn't try to get release dates out of him — and I know that whenever Ben comes to town that it's a must see event.
I am truly excited about Flex 3. I've been using Flex Builder 3 full time since the first public release and have been enjoying the experience. I do not have a specific favorite Flex 3 feature, really. I just love all of the efficiencies they have put into Flex Builder; things like smoothing out the designer/developer workflow (while we wait for "Thermo"), code refactoring, and a few wizards that I have found surprisingly useful. I think the feature that will have the most impact on Flex developers in the long run will be what Adobe calls Persistent Framework Caching. That is the feature that allows for reduction of application size by making the Flex runtime library available separately for download. If your user has visited another Web application that uses Flex 3, they will not have to download the Flex library as it will be called from the browser's cache. Adobe says that this can reduce the download size by up to 500k.
As for AIR, I've really enjoyed using it. I have been lucky enough to have already used AIR in client work (yes, before AIR has been released — I know, it's crazy). The SQLite engine is great. Being able to read and write files on the system, associate file extensions with your AIR application, and being able to use native windows and the system tray or dock are all great features. Sometimes they remind me of the work I did years ago using Flash MX and Screenweaver and/or SWF Studio Pro (which are still very valuable given some of AIR's security restrictions).
All in all, last night was a great way to re-energize me for the upcoming final release of Flex 3and AIR.
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Congrats to Local Award Winners Kenny Bunch and Alan Queen
I think that Kenny Bunch is an amazing guy. But, let me just say that somebody needs to promote him more because he is too damn shy to do it himself.
I was quite pleased to hear that Adult Swim received an Honorable Mention in this year's MAX Awards for their Adult Swim Interactive Video Commentary. What struck me as odd was that I know who did a lot of that work: Kenny Bunch and his company, Dreamsocket. And although the winner of the video category, HBO Voyeur, was great, I hope that Adobe, the MAX Awards Judges and the industry at large is paying attention: in my opinion, the interactive video experience that Kenny Bunch put together for Adult Swim is the future. Keep up the good work, Kenny.
Meanwhile, Alan Queen won the Wild Card category in the the Adobe AIR Derby with his entry Digimix, an AIR application that allows you to create and mix audio files. When Alan first showed this application at the Atlanta stop of the onAIR Bus Tour back in August he made the entire Adobe team speechless. Well done, Alan.
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Adobe Integrated Runtime Bus Tour Comes to Atlanta
In case you don't know, Adobe® AIR™ (formerly known as "Apollo") was released for prerelease on the Adobe Labs Web site this past Monday. AIR, which stands for "Adobe Integrated Runtime", is a product that will allow people to leverage their Flex applications to run on the desktop, as well as to create new desktop experiences with Flex. To use AIR, you will need to also download the Flex Builder 3 Public Beta which contains the AIR extensions that allow you to build for the AIR runtime.
Now, if you are like a lot of the people I know, you'll be saying to me "Leif, do I look like I have the time to beta test today?" Well, if that is the case then I have two items of interest for you.
1) The Adobe Integrated Runtime Bus Tour
The Adobe Integrated Runtime Bus Tour that will be heading to Atlanta on Tuesday, August 14. Since this is a big event, and Adobe has invested heavily in this tour, we will probably use this event as our August meetings for the Adobe User Group of Atlanta and the Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta.
You must register for this event!
To give you a couple of details about this event, they are holding this event at the Fabulous Fox Theatre, which is a very nice place to hold an event.
You will have four options for attending: day sessions (10:00 AM - 5:30 PM), evening sessions (6:00 PM - 9:00 PM) and all-day attendence (10:00 AM - 9:00 PM). The agenda includes Adobe employees Mike Downy, Mike Chambers, Kevin Hoyt, Daniel Dura and Christian Cantrell — all of whom are powerhouses inside Adobe.
2) AIR Preview at the Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta July Meeting
If you can't wait until August 14 and are interested in getting an overview of what you can do with AIR you could attend next month's meeting (July 10) of the Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta. I'll be showing off some of the basics of what you can do with AIR and show the development process of a simple AIR application from beginning to deployment.
I'll be updating the AFPUG site as I complete my presentation. Please RSVP.
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