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.

Back to the topic of Balsamiq – one feature I found I would have really liked would be the ability to create my own components – currently you can only use the ones that are given by Balsamiq – or even to have more control of the customization of the existing components. To their benefit, though, they do offer to make more if the use is general enough, if you just ask, and they say they update the application (which is an Adobe AIR app, btw) on a weekly basis. I think I would have also liked a freehand draw tool – I use a Wacom and would have liked the luxury of being able to write on top of the mockup as I wished. On the other hand, Balsamiq exports and saves to an XML format – so I can see the need to limit components to a pre-defined set of components. You can also re-use user defined components, which are really just Balsamiq Mockups themselves. The place to get those is Mockups to Go. I’m not sure if it was just the time I happened to be trying to access that site, but it seemed incredibly slow to me. Three of the ‘portlets’ on the right side of my wireframe are sourced from there…that definitely saved me a bit of time.

The best intro to Balsamiq I can recommend is to watch the intro video on their site, where they quickly make a mockup of iTunes. There is also an application called Napkee that lets you turn your Balsamiq Mockups into an interactive flex app – I guess that would kind of be on par with Catalyst, except you wouldn’t get the kind of round tripping you get between the CS4 suites and Catalyst. I didn’t play with Napkee but I get the impression it can’t export to the FXP format that is standard in Catalyst, Flex 4 and CS4.

Other features I would like to see implemented in Balsamiq:
-double-clicking on a group should let me edit the group. I guess that’s something I’m used to seeing from some of the Adobe apps such as Flash. A little irritating to me to find that doesn’t work here
-ugh! that purple color when I select a group – is there a way to customize the color prefs? It hurts my eyes…
-I would like the ability to zoom in and out of the mockup. There are no resolution settings, rulers, or guides. So you can imagine that a wireframe done quickly on a 30″ cinema display doesn’t always make for easy viewing on a 15″ MPB screen…or in an Adobe Connect Session, for that matter, where everyone’s got a different screen resolution
-’icon’ assets in Balsamiq can’t be resized by dragging resize handles – they can only be set to one of a few preset sizes (L, M, S, XS…). This really breaks when an icon is in a group – if you resize the group, the icon doesn’t resize with it.

Finally, I found this review of Balsamiq was also helpful. Coincidentally I reviewed iPlotz a while back here