I spent over an hour tonight with Steven Webster and the entire Adobe Consulting team having a very candid discussion. I also spoke with the CEO of WebOrb who had emailed back and forth a bit with our team back when we were struggling with a .Net to Flex class issue.
I mentioned that we were having very long build times. First of all, they said to speak to Matt Chotin, who I also spent time with today but prior to speaking to Adobe Consulting team. Apparently Matt is heavily looking into compile time issues in Flex.
Secondly, AC mentioned that there is a known issue using embedded fonts, which I know we are using in our app. Apparently using embedded fonts increases build times quite a bit. They are looking into resolving this.
Tomorrow I will try to discuss with Matt to see what other ideas he might have.
Also, after several sessions with the flex team and talks by the flex team members, it has become apparent that Flex 3 is offering MAJOR performance improvements. Also, and invaluable feature in Flex 3 is the new profiler – which allows you to see exactly what classes are taking up CPU resources and to what extent, etc. Also a pet peeve I’ve had with Flex all along has been replaced by another awesome feature – code refactoring – now if you change a function name, it will refactor all your code for you – no more find/replace to do it manually. It’s all very, very cool…
And apparently tomorrow in the Keynote speech we will get to hear some details about a (so-far) hush-hush project many of the Flex team members are working on code-named Thermo.
Oh, and I finally got to find out what the heck the Yahoo ads were all talking about, with this weird motto ‘Show us your Kung Fu’. From Day zero I had been seeing this in print in their ads, but no idea what they meant. In the community pavillion today I stopped at the Yahoo booth and noticed some cool shirts with that same motto, ‘show us your kung fu’. So I asked them, what do I have to do to get one of these shirts? They said, ‘show us your kung fu!’. I still didn’t get it; I was confused. Did they want me to wow them with some amazing Flex code? ‘kung fu coding’? Some weird sort of analogy? Then I thought, hey, are these guys being literal?
‘Do you mean, like martial arts?’ Yeah, that’s what they meant. So I asked, what do you want me to show you? They said do a roundhouse to our head! I said,
‘How about a jump spin crescent kick?’ Their faces changed,
‘Oh man, you mean you can do real kung fu?’
I just started stretching, they started gawking and grabbed a camera. I didn’t realize they were going to film this. They even wanted to tape me stretching. I did it real fast – I should have stretched properly but this was all unexpected, it was almost like a street fight (i.e. the spontaneity of it), except if I hurt any of these guys I would probably get booted out of MAX. So I did a jump spin crescent, hook kick, axe kick…they ate it up. hahah…I was wearing the shirt of my client, Ajmal Pictures – free marketing for them. Apparently the video will be posted in a week or two on the Yahoo! Developer Connection. Man, I don’t do AJAX…I would never have checked the web site except for this.
Oh, and they said they would give me a second shirt if I would go to the google booth and do the same thing. I was confused again…I guess I didn’t get their humor…they wanted me to go kick the google guys in the head. Wow, didn’t realize the competitiveness was that brutal…but then again, I use google, I don’t Yahoo! 
