I leave tomorrow (Sunday) for MAX in South Korea and Hong Kong. I’ll be giving some talks on ActionScript 3. If you’re going to be there, send me an email, and let’s hook up. I’ll be gone for a week, and probably jet lagged out of my mind for a day or two after I get home, so I’ll be slow answering email.
My presentation contains a lot of good ActionScript 2 (things new to Flash Player 
and Action Script 3 code examples. I’ll post everything online once I get back.
Even if you were there, you can relive some of the best moments through the MAX 2005 videos. It’s all very good stuff, but you definitely need to check out the Ze Frank segment at the beginning of day one.
Want some very cool Macromedia pins? Just find me at MAX, and ask. These were handed out at a company party at the Fillmore in San Francisco a couple weeks ago. One per customer, so pick your favorite product.
Although you’ve probably already seen the Flex 2.0 product family announcement, you can now see a video clip of Kevin Lynch actually delivering the official announcement at Web 2.0. Mike Chambers got Kevin’s entire presentation on tape. It’s only about 15 minutes long, but Kevin packs in a ton of good information, including building a very nice little application using Flex Builder 2 (Zorn) in only about 5 minutes. The clip is available as Flash video both on Mike’s blog and on Google Video. If you get seasick, brace yourself for about the first 30 seconds, but after that, it stabilizes.
I arrived back in San Francisco this afternoon from TODCON in
Las Vegas. It was really an excellent conference. I want to personally
thank
Ray West of Community
MX for organizing the event (and for the blackjack tips).
This was my second TODCON, and what I really like about this conference is the
feeling of community among the group. It’s a relatively small
conference, but pretty much everyone knows each other, or will get to know each
other by the end. In most cases, attendees are friends as well as colleagues. That
doesn’t mean TODCON is a social event, though. Although there are obviously plenty
of opportunities for socializing, during the day, sessions are focused and informative,
and small enough to be very interactive.
I don’t want to start listing names of people I met and new friends I made for
fear of leaving someone out, but you guys know
who you are. I enjoyed the sessions and the time with the Macromedia community,
and I hope to see you all again next year, if not sooner.
Another CFUN is behind us, and I can honestly say, this year was even better than last. CFUN is one of my favorite conferences because it has an abundance of the two things all good conferences need:
I don’t want to start dropping names for fear I will leave many out, but I hung out and exchanged ideas with a huge number of great developers (and just plain great people) over the weekend. I love to see so many (well over 500!) developers get together from so many different places getting along so well both personally and professionally. Thank you Michael Smith (and others from TeraTech) for making it all possible.
I did a session entitled Flash for CFers which went well, and was a lot of fun. The only problem was that I wasn’t able to get a wireless connection to show some very cool demo apps. And I ran out of time. It’s hard to even scratch the surface of a topic like Flash and ColdFusion in only 50 minutes, but I think I was able to get through enough of it to give ColdFusion developers a pretty thorough introduction to Rich Internet Applications. I’m going to post the presentation and the source code for the sample application I demoed at some point this week after I get caught up from being out of town. I’ll also post links to the RIA examples I was going to show but couldn’t because of the network issues.
The audience was great during my presentation. While I was trying to get a network connection, someone shouted “Are you sure the problem isn’t your OS?” I was doing the presentation on a Powerbook, and even as a big Mac fan, I thought the comment was funny and timely. Then Steven Erat suggested I demo the Flash Store sample app, if I had that installed and running locally, which fortunately I did (yes, Flex works great on Macs, including debugging). And, naturally, there was Critter in the back who helped to set the tone of the presentation right from the very beginning (if you were in the room, you know what I’m referring to), and then we all rocked out to “Fight the Power” and a hilarious Steve Ballmer remix (in the context of Flash and ColdFusion, of course). I have given a lot of presentations over the last couple of years at a lot of different conferences, and I always like it when I feel like everyone had fun as well as learned something valuable.
Ben Forta’s day-two keynote was incredible. He demoed some amazing features of Blackstone, and although the features themselves weren’t new to me, I thoroughly enjoyed watching the reaction of the audience. I lost count of the number of times the audience erupted in applause during his talk, and all around me, I heard constant murmurs of amazement and excitement. I think Blackstone is going to be an extraordinarily popular release. Anyone who has seen Ben’s presentation knows that the ColdFusion engineering team has really outdone themselves this time.
There was some interesting software floating around the conference, as well. There was a beta version of He3 in everyone’s bag. He3 is a dedicated ColdFusion editor by RichPalette built on the Eclipse platform. I haven’t tried it yet (I didn’t have my ThinkPad with me, and I want to try it on Windows first before OS X), but I heard some very good comments which have me intrigued. I will definitely install it early this week and set aside some time to evaluate it.
Doug Hughes of Alagad was handing out copies of the new Alagad Image Component. I’ve played with it in the past, and it’s very impressive. It is capable of performing over 60 image manipulation operations, and has an extremely intuitive and powerful API. As an added bonus, it is implemented entirely in CFScript, so you don’t even need to install any jar or class files on your server to use it. Very cool stuff. If you need to manipulate images on the server, you need this component.
It was good seeing everyone again this year. Let’s continue to keep in touch, and I look forward to doing it all again in 2005!
I’ll be heading up to Maryland for CFUN 2004 in a few hours to join many friends and colleagues for a weekend of ColdFusion, a little Flash, and maybe a tiny bit of socializing. CFUN is definitely one of the best ColdFusion conferences around, and I feel fortunate I am only about an hour south of the venue (though I would happily travel anywhere to participate).
I’m going to be doing a session on Sunday on Flash for ColdFusion developers which is basically going to be an introduction to Flash and RIAs, geared toward ColdFusion folks. The presentation will probably eventually make it to my weblog, so if you’re interested in learning some Flash fundamentals, keep an eye out.
If you’re going to CFUN, please come by and introduce yourself. I’ll even have some DRKs to give out to the first few folks who ask me for one. Hope to see you there!
For all my Ohioan readers, you might want to check out the upcoming Macromedia regional event. The Southeast Ohio Macromedia User Group (SEOMUG) is hosting a one-day technical conference on March 25th from 8:00AM to 4:00PM featuring 3 Macromedia speakers:
More information and registration is at http://www.seomug.org/.
If you don’t live in Ohio, what better reason pack up and take a trip to a state I’m sure you’ve always wanted to visit, but just needed a good enough excuse!
I’m not sure when I’ll get a chance to post this since I’m writing it on the plane on the way back from Flashforward 2004 in San Francisco, but I’ll try to get it live as soon after I land as possible. As always, I thoroughly enjoyed the conference, and in particular, hanging out with the Flash community. Here are some arbitrary thoughts and observations from last week:
