Peter Elst

Its that time of the year again, one of the very best multimedia events of the season, Multi-Mania is happening on Friday May 23th at the Kortrijk Xpo, Belgium.

Where else do you get to see people including: Ralph Hauwert, Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, Marco Casario, Stephanie Sullivan, Rob Chiu, Hoss Gifford etc. not to forget several of the Adobe evangelist all stars completely free of charge?

With four different tracks plus a workshop track, free lunch (if you register before Monday, May 19th) an award show and a fantastic party to close the day this promises to be bigger and better than ever before. With an expected attendance of around 800 this is the perfect place to do some networking, meet students, colleagues and companies.

You really have to credit the crew for putting this together every year (and the sponsors for supporting the initiative), its astounding how far we’ve come with this event.

I think this is going to be the fourth year that I’m attending and will this time be speaking about “SQLite in Adobe AIR” (don’t worry if you saw my talk at one of the on AIR tour events, there’s lots of new stuff I’ll be covering).

More so than during previous editions we’ll be having sessions presented in English so if you fancy a weekend in Belgium, catch a kick-ass event and sample some of the best beers, you’re more than welcome to come down!

Some very interesting sessions from the looks of it, this is what I’m hoping to catch:

- The GAE SWF Project - Aral Balkan
- Having fun with Flash and AIR - Wim Vanhenden
- Design Challenges, Standards Solutions - Stephanie Sullivan
- Flex with AJAX - Marco Casario
- Flash 2D and 3D Effects - Ralph Hauwert
- The Pixel Whisperer - Mario Klingemann

And of course the award show with Hoss Gifford doing his no doubt very entertaining talk.

 
Register here

Just as I did last year I’m helping out a graduating multimedia student of the Arteveldehogeschool in Ghent, Jo Van Snick, who is doing his thesis on Adobe AIR.

If you’re a company based in Belgium or the Netherlands, regardless of your level of experience with the Adobe Integrated Runtime, I’d appreciate a few minutes of your time to participate in a little survey (questions in Dutch).

We already got some great feedback from various businesses but more information is still very welcome. Thanks!

http://www.cammeth.be/onderzoek/start/

 

I attended the MIX Essentials event in Louvain-la-Neuve this Thursday in an attempt to get some perspective on Microsoft’s roadmap for Rich Internet Applications (yes, you read that right — Internet) and Silverlight 2.

Note that I’m looking at this as a Flash Platform enthusiast, while I walked away excited about what Microsoft is doing don’t expect me to hold back on criticism where I see things lacking. It is in no way meant as a personal attack and welcome your thoughts.

Here’s breakdown of the sessions I attended, with my commentary and a couple of videos.

 
Opening Keynote - Luc van de Velde
Building RIAs with Silverlight 2 - Tim Heuer
Beauty & the Geek - Ian Griffiths & Paul Dawson
Data and Web Services in Silverlight 2 - Gill Cleeren
Steve Ballmer Keynote
Summary

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If you want to distribute AIR applications the install badge is definitely the best way to go. The one problem I had with it is that its a pain to prepare and embed on your blog.

To help remedy this I started working on this AIR Badge plugin last night, it allows you to simply use an [airbadge] tag and a couple of arguments in your blog post which will then be replaced by the AIR install badge.

 

[airbadge] application name, full URL to .air file, application version, image.jpg [/airbadge]

[airbadge]Contact Manager,
http://www.peterelst.com/downloads/sqlite/sqlite-contactmanager.air,
1,http://www.peterelst.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2008/04/contactmanager.jpg[/airbadge]

 
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If you missed my SQLite talk at one of the onAIR tour events earlier this month, Mike Chambers recorded it in Brussels and its now available to watch online.

Upcoming events where I’ll be covering Adobe AIR are Multi-Mania, Scotch on the Rocks and another In-the-Brain session on “The Evolution of the Flash Platform” with Skills Matter as part of the London Web Week.

Hope to see you there!

I just got back from joining the European on AIR tour in Amsterdam and Brussels and it rocked big time!

Two great events with hundreds of developers attending to learn all about the Adobe Integrated Runtime. For me it was an opportunity to deep dive in the SQLite database API and build a couple of interesting demo’s. Talked to so many people with fantastic ideas and eager to get started with AIR that I’m sure we’ll be seeing some amazing things happening in the coming months.

As promised here are the slides for my SQLite talk as well as the downloads for the various demo apps and flash.data.SQLConnection and flash.data.SQLStatement wrapper classes.

 
 SQLite in Adobe AIR slides

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