Peter Elst

Live … from Flash on the Beach!

I managed to drag myself out of bed just in time to catch a quick breakfast with Keith and Tink and head out to the Dome to see Mike Downey, Mike Chambers and Mark Anders present an excellent keynote on what Adobe has in store for us in the not too distant future with Creative Suite 3 and Apollo.

First session of the day was Tink’s, walking through Flex for the Flash developer, looking at custom events etc. — although I’ve been working with it for a while now it was a well worth refresher course for me.

Lunch ran a bit over, went for some tapas with Elmer, Carolina and the These Days and PIH crew. Did manage to catch the last half an hour of Brendan’s talk. Loved his presenting style and again a great high-level look at what AS3 has in store.

Next up Aral Balkan who as always managed to capture the audience and get his point across about XP, usability, Agile and user-centric development. Definitely like the approach he suggests and would love to implement these techniques in all my project development going forward. Its not all common-sense ;)

To wrap up the day I went to see Mark Anders’ session on Flex components, a great in depth look at how to handle components in Flex 2 and how measurement works by dissecting one of Ely Greenfield’s examples. When you saw the finished component it was obvious the effect was a bit of a hack but very interesting code to see this functionality in action though.

Missed the Flux party unfortunately, crashed in my hotel room probably not completely recovered from the night before…

Got into Brighton around 12, had some pizza with the guys from PIH and waited around with a bunch of FOTB speakers at the hotel waiting for the room to be ready.

Went for early registration and a little technical rehearsal at the venue and the evening started out at the hotel bar with drinks and some multiplayer Nintendo DS Lite fun — who says we’re geeks?

Later that evening we head out to the pre-conference / house warming party at Aral’s new shack. Met up with a bunch of new people and probably had the greatest time in months. Headed back to the hotel around 2am, trying to catch some sleep for an early start the next morning.

More to come…

Just got back from a great user group event with Mike Chambers and Downey — if you didn’t make it you really missed out, we got a great intro to Apollo and sneak peek at the next Flash release and it *rocks* big time!

Next up Flash on the Beach in Brighton, and the following week JavaPolis and presenting an introduction to Flex seminar for Adobe. Looks like a busy start to the month… but what a month.