Peter Elst

In case you missed it — AIR 2 beta 2 is now available on labs.adobe.com and among a bunch of other things there are now some really cool additional printing features that give you a lot more control than what we used to have.

Be sure to check out the video interview Ryan Stewart did with Rick Rocheleau, one of the engineers on the core technologies group who made this possible.

There’s another new conference coming this year and thats always exciting, but Flash and the City promises to be different. Not only is this the first major Flash conference in NYC in quite a while, its going to be an amazing opportunity to network and meet interesting people.

Why so? Well rather than just sit inside and geek out listening to the various sessions, there’s something called the “City track” that gets you exploring the “Big Apple” with speakers and fellow attendees. I think this concept could be a real winner, some of the activities you can join in with are:

• South Street Sea Port tour
• Dim Sum Breakfast
• Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty
• Brooklyn Tour On A Double Decker Tour Bus

 
Even if you don’t want to miss any of the speakers and stay in to see all the sessions, there’s a 3 hour cruise complete with dinner (and open bar) on Saturday evening included in your ticket.

There’s also the Statue of Liberty awards on Sunday evening with a number of categories including “Most significant Open Source Project of the year”, “Most influential Flash person of the year” etc. Make sure you get your nominations in before March 31st.

May 13th, the day before the conference there are four different workshops you can attend — Mobile and Devices, Beginning ActionScript, Flex 4 and AIR 2.0. That last one is definitely one you’ll want to attend, AIR 2.0 is some truly mind-blowing technology and you’ll learn all about it and get some hands on experience.

I’m excited to be taking the lead for that AIR 2.0 workshop and getting some fantastic speakers on board to help cover all the new features. Don’t worry if you’re new to Adobe AIR, we’ll start out with a basic introduction first and get you going.

So what are you waiting for? Get your tickets now! The way this conference is shaping up, Flash and the City is going to be an iconic event.

 
www.flashandthecity.com

 

My second talk at the Adobe DevSummit Chennai was a 15 minute lightning talk on using SQLite in Adobe AIR. This is probably the fastest I’ve ever covered the topic but should still give you a good idea of what local database functionality is available when developing AIR applications.

Earlier this week I headed to the Adobe DevSummit event in Chennai and was pleasantly surprised of how vibrant the community here is. No less than 600 people turned up and the rooms were absolutely packed.

We had some great talks and hands-on sessions by the Indian Adobe evangelists and various people from the community (including Mrinal Wadhwa, Saurabh Narula, Yash Mody,…) presented in depth sessions on various technologies. I did two sessions on Adobe AIR, one of which covers various examples of AIR APIs and you can see some video excerpts of below.

I was very happy to be invited to speak again at this second edition of The ActionScript Conference in Singapore. This year they even made it a two day event at an amazing venue overlooking Marina Bay. I have some video recorded that I’ll upload soon.

Shunjie and the rest of the team do an amazing job getting this all set up and they’re a great bunch to hang out with.

Some personal highlights of the conference were the talks by Alvin Zhang and Lionel Low. Alvin showed some great multi-touch demo’s on a touch table he built himself using the Diffused Surface Illumination technique (involves among other things a projector, PlayStation 3 camera and a diffusor). Lionel talked about “Warpspeed Flash” and highlighted various ideas to work smarter rather than harder. Its really great to hear from these local guys and topics that you don’t typically see at other conferences.

Was also particularly pleased to finally meet Himanshu Mody of Tekno Point and see my former colleague Arvind Singh again.

My session was called “Getting Creative with Adobe AIR”, it was originally a little more targeted at designers but decided to go with some more interesting API examples since the audience this year seemed to be more of a developer crowd.

I was pleasantly surprised about the questions I got and people coming up to talk to me about their projects. I’ve uploaded my slides and example code for those interested.

I have a few more days in Singapore before flying back to London for Flash on the Beach, going to make the most of it. Thanks again for all the guys working so hard to make this conference happen, hope to be back for the next few editions!

I came across this great video by Paul Robertson, Senior ActionScript Developer/Writer at Adobe, about local database optimization with Adobe AIR. There’s some really useful information in his presentation so definitely worth watching!
 

Earlier today at the Flash at the Lake conference here in Zurich, Switzerland I presented my “Introduction to SQLite in Adobe AIR” session. I’ve done this one a couple of times before but have updated it to include more information on:

• Database encryption
• Synchronization strategies
• Using Data Access Objects
• SQLite wrapper classes

You can find my slides below, and the demo files are available for download here. Enjoy!
 

Sometimes I really wish I worked over in San Francisco — now and again Adobe does these great meet ups, like recently happened with FlashCamp. They’ve put the video of the presentations online including a keynote by CTO Kevin Lynch and the following topics:

• Introduction to Flash Catalyst

• What’s New in Flex 4
• Skinning Components and Apps in Flex 4
• New Productivity Features in Flash Builder 4
• New Data Features in Flash Builder 4
• Update on Adobe AIR
• Using Effects and Animation in Flex 4
• Advanced CSS in Flex 4

 
These are some really good in depth presentations that I can highly recommend you check out!
 

Lee Brimelow has a little teaser up of an interview he did with Dave August, senior developer at OOOii (a company previously known as BlackBox Digital) who worked on the graphics and animations you can see in the latest Star Trek movie.

They actually used Flash Platform products like AIR and their own ActionScript 3.0 framework to accomplish this which must have been a great project to work on.

For a moment it looked as though I was going to miss out on this years FFK in Cologne — the largest German speaking conference covering web products and technologies organized by Marc Thiele and Sascha Wolter of Flashforum.de. This is already their 9th edition and not surprisingly it has completely sold out!

At the last minute I managed to secure a spot (thanks to Marc) in the “Discover the third dimension” workshop on Away3D that Jens Brynildsen is teaching on Monday. I’ve already experimented with Papervision3D quite a bit but was eager to look into what Away3D has to offer so this is the perfect opportunity.

I’ll be sure to blog about to workshop and perhaps share some experiments after I’ve familiarized myself with the code.
 
Ganz toll! ;)