Conference / Organization
What, no name tag?
I guess this is an area where stuff I had been taking for granted, from my experiences at MAX, and now 360 Flex, kind of stood out. We might tend to think of name tags as a bother, but part of the reason we attend conferences is to network. There seemed to have been no thought given to the networking aspect at all at Capital Flash Camp. Don’t get me wrong, we don’t need fancy lanyards and stuff – a simple sticker you write your own name on would have been sufficient. Then again, I guess that forces folks to try and open their mouths and actually ask each others names…not such a bad thing, eh? So, was this an oversight or actually a clever, well designed ploy to encourage folks to get out of the closet and actually develop social skills? Either way, it did get my attention.

There was also no swag…not at the registration desk, anyway…kind of a disappointment. I don’t count Adobe pens and stickers left over from 360 Flex as swag, sorry…aren’t conference shirts a defacto standard?

Attendance wise, I was actually pretty disappointed. The conference was held in a relatively small area, with all the talks being held in a single, small auditorium with a huge curved screen. However, the number of attendees might have made the place look vast. There were maybe only fifty attendees in the beginning, and for some reason as the conference progressed that number continuously dwindled. I left early myself, with two sessions and the giveaways still pending, but at that time there might have only been twenty or so folks left.

Speakers / Presentations

I walked into the conference in the middle of @jefftapper ‘s presentation Flex 4 for Flex 3 Developers. Jeff’s presentation was excellent, and I definitely plan to go download his lecture notes since we are at the beginnings of a flex 3 -> flex 4 migration, ourselves. Of particular interest is the list of mx components that were not ported to the spark space at all, such as DataGrid and ViewStack. One of the first questions I posed on twitter as we started migrating our code to the spark space was, ‘are we supposed to mix mx and spark components by design?’ I got a bunch of tweets in response referring either to custom components folks had built in the spark space or on how to mix mx and spark components. Jeff’s response was that he felt that Adobe hadn’t done this themselves yet due to time constraints. Ah…

Next up was @queencodemonkey on Greenthreading in Flex. I already saw her presentation at 360 Flex, but as I told her, it was one of the best presentations I had attended, with regards to stuff I was able to take back to my team and say, ‘hey, this is something we should look into with regards to what we’re currently doing’. So it was enjoyable to see it again, and a good review of the concepts and applications. I also made a note to go and read an article she referred to by @ jesterxl on loading massive amounts of data in the Flash player, and they both were kind enough to tweet the link to the article.

Next was The Art of Storytelling by @christiansaylor. It was a nice change of pace from the technical presentations, and indeed, he is a great story teller himself. I kept thinking that his presentation style was highly reminiscent of Steve Jobs, and when one of his slides was a huge photo of The Evil One (as one audience member called out, lol) it pretty much cinched it in my mind that was a source of influence for him. In a good way…

Christian also convinced me to take a closer look at Audi…

Towards the middle to end of the presentation, I kind of felt like it was tending towards a sales plug for Universal mind, but then again, they sponsored and organized the event, half the speakers were from their company – so what could you expect? In the least, at least this presentation was pertinent and well done, unlike the eBay sponsor presentation at 360 Flex, which had me wondering if anyone, really, ANYONE in the entire audience cared an iota about what the speaker had to say or if what he spoke on had anything at all to do with real business problems faced by anyone in the audience.

next was lunch…

The Food
What can I say, without getting too insulting? Meh. Not a highlight of the conference. At 360 Flex, they had good food, but it would run out before you could actually get any. For some reason, I found that more appealing than food you got but didn’t find appetizing.

More Great Speakers
@carlsmith spoke on the importance of listening to your audience in It’s a Matter of Trust. Frankly this was by far the most entertaining session, hands down. The volume and amount of laughter in the audience was a clear indication of that. He brought up twitter a lot in examples of customers complaining about the service of companies, and the successes and failures of companies leveraging twitter to satisfy customers. The bottom line of his presentation: treat your audience as people, not as statistics.

The last session I attended before ditching was Introduction to Flash Catalyst by @adnaanahmad. Adnaan’s presentation was great, especially considering it was his first conference presentation, ever. I think the audience was hungry for more on his demo side; the background info etc. is all good and well, but that’s stuff folks can read about later or have already done so, the demo is what really engaged us. He also made a pretty good case considering there was only one designer left in the audience at that point and the rest were developers.

You can find a small slideshow of the photos I took at the conference here.

By now Adobe has announced Flash Player 10.1 and Adobe AIR for Android at the Mobile World Congress (funny, we just completed a web redesign for a client who is a sponsor of MWC, centered around the event, but I had no idea about Adobe’s role there). This demo of using Adobe Connect on the Droid by Kevin Hoyt says something totally contrary.

Here we have a real business case scenario that Mobile Safari can’t compete with. Sure, maybe they will make something comparable to the iChat capability of screen sharing available on iPhone one day, but here it is, Adobe Connect, running on a Droid, now.

Personally, I have always been of the opinion that Apple will allow Flash on their mobile devices when, and only when, it will make them more money. Currently they have pretty tight control (jail-breaking aside) over what can be run on their devices, and all money to be made from application development flows through Apple’s iTunes store. Would having AIR on the iPhone totally upset that? Of course. Until, and unless, Apple perceives they are losing economic ground due to competing platforms, they aren’t going to change their stance.

Overall, I think Apple’s stance is actually very healthy for the market. It has driven Adobe to work really hard to improve the full version of the Flash player (as opposed to Flash Lite), which is great for developers who don’t want to have to develop a separate code base just to support their applications in the mobile world (having to revert to ActionScript 2, which is pretty much a different language altogether, when you have been living in the AS3 world, is uninviting to say the least). By improving Flash, they have made it more viable for running on mobile devices as well as for application development. It has also given an opening to every other maker of mobile devices to step up to the plate and compete with Apple by offering what Apple doesn’t, on their devices.

I think Steve Job’s demo at the January unveiling of iPad said it all…throughout the demo, he kept hitting those blue lego boxes due to lack of Flash support, and you can hear the audience laughing out loud every time. I couldn’t resist putting together a few screen shots.

So here’s a list of some solutions for client-side PDF generation from AS3:

Some items of very specific interest to mobile developers:

-Flash Player 10.1 was announced, which has been greatly optimized for running on mobile devices – no more flash lite, we are talking about the full flash player on mobile phones, and quite a few of the leading mobile phone manufacturers have joined the Open Screen initiative as well as announced phones that are being released with Flash Player 10.1
-Flash CS5 was announced with compiling direct to iPhone native applications. Flash CS5 will be available for public beta later this year on Adobe Labs
-several games are already on iTunes store that were developed with Flash CS5, including these free ones:

-Shibuya try and buy service was announced, which, to me, seems like a big, big potential competitor to Apple’s iTunes store, and from all the complaining we’ve heard from the iPhone developer crowd, it seems a LOT more developer friendly than the iTunes model

-this talk goes into depth on using the newly announced Flex mobile framework to develop mobile applications with Flex (yes, for iPhone, too):

Whew…iPhone development with Adobe Flex…something we have been asking for, dreaming about, and eagerly wishing for (all the while thinking the only way to get native apps on the iPhone would be to code in Objective C)…now it looks like it is a reality. There is a ton more that could be said on this topic, and definitely on Adobe MAX ’09 in general, but you can dive into the above links for plenty of that first hand. One last thing…the Max ’09 Flickr group

Sometime after MAX ’08 I decided to get Juan Sanchez’s flex book, Creating Visual Experiences with Flex 3.0. Juan’s background is in User Experience Design (UXD), so it was refreshing to get a flex book with some UXD perspective for a change – so many of the flex community are ex-Java guys, and no offense guys (some of our best Flex developers came from the Java world), but the Java perspective can get a bit, ahem, dry after a while. As far as the content of the book goes, Appendix A, Skinning and Styling Diagrams, by itself is valuable enough to make this book a must-have reference on any flex developer’s bookshelf. Juan mentioned somewhere (his blog?) that a lot of folks were requesting posters to be made of these diagrams and that he was in fact planning to make these available. (What I want to know is, can I get mine framed?)

The level and approach of this book is the epitome of what a lot of us wish the Flex docs from Adobe would be closer to. Having this book about thirty projects ago would really have made our lives easier in quite a few places. Then again, when has there ever been a comprehensive resource for an alpha product? That’s where we found ourselves when we made the transition from developing RIA’s in Flash to developing them in Flex. According to the team handling the Adobe documentation for Flex, they have been short-handed, and understandably so as flex developers are still in incredible demand yet very short supply. At least, that’s what they told me in ’07; I have to wonder what the status of the situation is after the massive layoffs by Adobe in between MAX events. Regardless, even after having to learn a lot of these things the hard way in Flex, there was still quite a lot of good information in this book even for advanced developers. Animation, easing, skinning – just a few of the topics that are covered in depth.

Juan and Andy also took care to include lots of colorful images in their book, which they make heavy reference and use of. Ahem. The book is printed in BLACK AND WHITE. Not a drop of color anwhere, except for some sickening purple tint on the front cover. Almost every chapter, I found myself grimacing as the authors write, for example, “…in this case, red projects a negative relation…”. Red? Where? It seemed like they had no clue from the publisher that their book was going to be published in B&W, and, after asking Juan about it over Twitter, that was indeed confirmed – they only found out at the last minute. Oh, sure, they offer a free TRIAL subscription to the book on Safari when you buy the hard copy, and supposedly in the e-version on Safari the images are in color. If I wanted to read it online, I wouldn’t have bought the hard copy! I’ve done the Safari trial run before when I got a year subscription for purchasing Komodo for my perl development needs. Honestly the model of paying continuous rent for my books, especially in this case where I’ve already paid for the book in full, just doesn’t jive with me.

At the end of the day, the content of the book makes it a worthwhile buy, despite my feelings of being ripped off by the publisher. But this kind of experience definitely gives good argument for self publishing. I bought the book because of who the authors were – I would have still bought it, at the same price or even more, had they self-published….
With all the media coverage on the downfall of the newspaper industry, and the publishing industry in general, I feel companies like Blurb are well positioned while companies like Addison Wesley are doomed to failure as long as their only concern seems to be maximizing their profit margin whilst ignoring the needs of their consumers.

update: According to sources at Adobe, they’ve been having issues with the MXNA feed aggregator not automatically updating feeds. This update is a test to see if updating the blog entry is enough to force an update to MXNA using the ping URL mechanism…
And, apparently using the ping URL works.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=DkqtklABgGQ

The demo is by Robert Cooper, creative director of some company (couldn’t quite make out the name from the video, guys that would have been a great plug for your company even though you had nothing to do with creating it) and the technology is the ‘GE Plugin for Smartgrid.com’ according to him. I wanted to play with this for myself so I went to SmartGrid.com but didn’t find anything about a 3D plugin or the demo, so after a bit of googling around I finally found it here.

(updated to force aggregation on MXNA)

You print out a piece of paper according to the instructions, hold it up to your web cam, and on your screen it becomes an impressive interactive 3D model you can manipulate with the paper in your hand. Very, very cool. Kudos to the team behind this, whoever you are. Apparently they created it with the FlarToolKit. FlarToolKit is an AS3 library based on ARToolKit / NyARToolKit I wish GE would have credited the agency who designed and implemented this, or even let us know if it was an internal team. I don’t think it takes away from their brand identity, rather it would strengthen it by showing they care about the team(s) behind their presence.

Update: the video above was removed, but here’s another one on YouTube demonstrating the GE AR demo:

Creating New Components in Flex 3 and Beyond with Deepa Subramaniam: I was afraid I’d be bored in this session, because I thought I had component development pretty much figured out. I was wrong. In the first half of the session, Deepa covered a lot of things I didn’t know about developing components in Flex 3. There was so much new info for me in the first half, I almost wasn’t ready to absorb the second half, which was about developing components in Flex 4. If anything, the material in this session could have been spread across two full sessions with no time wasted.

Understanding the Flash Player Security Model with Deneb Meketa: This one had lots of good info about why the Flash Player permits or restricts various security-sensitive operations.

Building High-Performance Applications with Adobe AIR with Oliver Goldman and Optimizing Adobe AIR for Code Execution, Memory, and Rendering with Sean Christmann: These were back-to-back sessions on Wednesday afternoon and they complemented each other well. The first session dealt more with the process of optimizing an app, and the second session focused more on the code-level details of speeding an app up. Both sessions also had good info for anyone who does good old Flex without AIR, too.

What’s New in Flash Player 10 with Emmy Huang: Lots of Flash Player 10 features were introduced in the conference’s general sessions, but this late Wednesday session gave us a chance to see them again, and in more detail, and ask questions.

Testing Your Flex Applications with Michael Labriola: This session gave a great overview of the different types of testing (unit vs. functional vs. integration) and the tools out there for each type.

Introduction to BlazeDS and LiveCycle Data Services ES with Christophe Conraets: This session gave a good overview and helped me clear up a few misconceptions I had about these technologies.

Of course, I only attended a small fraction of the sessions and labs available at MAX – there were so many choices for each time slot. If I had to do it over, though, these were the sessions I wouldn’t dare miss. YMMV!

Perhaps a more realistic vision of future politics will involve a large multiverse leveraging Cocomo, LiveCycle, and the flash platform, though.