Peter Elst

Yesterday, myself and two colleagues from Project Cocoon made it out to Chennai for Flex@Beach. I did not really know what to expect from the event but was happily surprised about the turnout and excitement around Flex and Flash Platform technology in general.

There was a lot of focus on frameworks and architecture as well as some technology demo’s and a bit of talk on methodologies. I think you couldn’t do a much better session lineup than this for a developer crowd.

Parsley Introduction - Chandra Deepan
Mate Introduction – Devaraj
AS3Signals – Peter Elst
FLAR demo application – Senthil Kumar
AIR 2.0 Features and Demo – Ganesh Gandhi
Flex 4 Spark Framework - Alaguvel
Flash Catalyst Workflow – Michaël Chaize
Scrum Agile Methodology – Sakthivel
Robotlegs Introduction – Devaraj
WebORB .NET & Flex Integration
Away3D Introduction – Iyswarya

I particularly liked the short Away3D session by Iyswarya that closed the day and hope she can do a more in depth one next time. Since doing the Away3D workshop in Frankfurt last year I’ve been very interested in using it more for production work and think I will pick it up again very soon.

Compared to the other talks my AS3Signals session was quite lightweight but it seemed to be well received and its nice to see lots of people excited about the idea of using it in their projects.

As promised here are my slides for the presentation:

 
The closing remarks by Philippe Moreau from Adam’s Studio India were also representative of a lot of the things I heard from people there. The interest in Flex and Flash Platform technology is picking up at a fast pace in Chennai and they would really like to see more involvement from Adobe in the area.

Ideas such as having an authorized training center and virtual teams for collaborating on projects got brought up and really resonated with people. I think we’re seeing the beginnings of a grass roots movement here, the mood was almost revolutionary. In the coming weeks we at Project Cocoon will also evaluate and see how we can help out to make the ecosystem grow.

 

Today one of Adobe’s community programs previously known as “Adobe Community Experts” got rebranded to “Adobe Community Professionals“. This was long needed to avoid naming conflicts with other people using the ACE acronym such as the “Adobe Certified Experts“.

I’m also glad to report I’ve been renewed for another term in this program. If you count the years at Macromedia this is now my 8th term, first as a Team Macromedia volunteer, then Adobe Community Expert and now Adobe Community Professional.

Still every year its an anxious wait to see if you’ve made the cut — thanks to Adobe and the community team in particular for their vote of confidence!

 


 

With just a few days left in 2009, I wanted to post some moments this year that stuck with me:

• Discussion about Fx prefix versus namespaces in Flex 4
• Flex Builder to get renamed to Flash Builder
• Fantastic first edition of Flash at the Lake in Zurich, Switzerland
• Carlos Ulloa speaks at TEDGlobal
• Summer of Flash podcast (now RIA Radio) gets started
• Joa Ebert’s jaw dropping presentation at Flash on the Beach
• Ralph Hauwert leaves the Papervision3D team
• Liz Frederik joins Adobe as part of the community program team
• Adobe acquires Omniture for $1.8 billion USD
• Omniture CEO boasting about getting Adobe to pay “a whole lot of money” at the MAX keynote
• AIR 2, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst public beta releases
• Adobe announces native iPhone application export from Flash CS5
• Flash CS5 public beta canceled

 
The annual tradition of complaining about Adobe MAX not paying speaker expenses of non-Adobe employees can now be put to rest, flight and hotel accommodation were covered and it turned out to be a fantastic event. Looking forward to heading to Los Angeles again next year for more Adobe goodness (and no doubt another trip to Universal Studios Hollywood).

Its been a difficult year for many, another 600 layoffs at Adobe this November – we’ve sadly lost the wonderful Stacy Sison of the community programs, evangelist extraordinaire Rufus Deuchler and several others.

For me personally I spent half a year teaching first year Devine students at the Technical University College of West-Flanders, was invited to speak at 5 conferences, presented 3 Flex/ActionScript workshops, did technical review on 2 books, attended a TED conference and have set up Project Cocoon Multimedia in Pondicherry, India with two good friends and fellow freelancers.

This next year I’m planning to spend both in India and back home in Belgium. I’ll be focusing on training and consultancy and building out our activities with Project Cocoon. You’ll no doubt still see me around at various conferences but plan on cutting down on my speaking engagements.

 
Wishing you all a fantastic 2010!

 

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 just wrapped up a fascinating 6 months as a lecturer to first year “Digital Design and Media” students at the Technical University College of West-Flanders.

If there’s something I’ve recognized from my time there is that passion and commitment are determining factors for being successful in what you do. There certainly was no lack of that in my former colleagues and several students you’ll no doubt soon hear about as up and coming talent. I wish them all the best and am always available to support them moving forward!

 
Over the last few years I’ve had numerous opportunities come my way, largely thanks to my involvement in the Flash community. This has allowed me to travel all over the world, author books and generally make a good living doing what I love.

Those of you that know me well, will no doubt know about my other passion, India.

After the upcoming conference season I’ll be taking a step back and work on what we’ve tentatively called “Project Cocoon”. For this I’ll be joining forces with good friends and talented designers/developers/artists Nathalie Wormser and Ramakrishna Minnard in Pondicherry, South India where we’ll be setting up shop.

Within this collaborative project we each have our own focus but a common goal, creating engaging user experiences through pushing beyond both our own limitations as the limits of the technology we use. As part of the project we plan to support and actively participate in various social and charitable initiatives.

Project Cocoon will be in its incubation period for a couple of months after which it will likely become my regular workplace in India for a good deal of the year.

Feel free to get in touch if you have any projects you’d like us to get involved with.

 
I’m equally excited about attending TEDIndia in Mysore, November 4-7th where I’ll be representing the team. This will be a unique opportunity to network, get a perspective on the future of India from a wide variety of angles and most importantly — get inspired.

To quote Lakshmi Pratury, co-host of TEDIndia, in a recent column —

“At TEDIndia this November, we want to explore this world to come. India—the largest democracy in the world with a population that includes three quarters of a billion people under the age of 35, speaking either one of 16 official languages or one of its hundreds of dialects, worshipping a million gods—provides the perfect setting for an exploration of the future. And TED, the legendary conference of great minds, is the perfect vehicle for bringing us together [...]

TEDIndia represents the confluence of cultures within me—and the recognition by the TED community of the importance of India and the Asian continent. Seven of the 10 most populous countries in the world are part of Asia; and India, with all its obstacles and opportunities, is a microcosm of that Asian future.”

 

 
Its going to be an interesting journey and I’ll be sure to keep you posted!

After some discussions earlier this week, it became apparent not everyone is aware of Adobe’s public bug base where you can have your voice heard and vote up bugs important to you.

I thought it might be interesting to highlight the current top 5 highest voted open feature requests across the various projects.

• FB-19053 – Flex Builder on Linux (433 votes)
• FP-1060 – Flash Player support for FreeBSD (157 votes)
• FP-1499 – Global Runtime Exception Handling (143 votes)
• FP-273 – Acoustic Echo Cancellation support (141 votes)
• FP-37 – AMD64 support needed in Linux (136 votes)

These feature requests already have quite a bit of support behind them but you might want to browse the Adobe Bug Base yourself to vote up things important to you, or submit your own bugs and feature requests.

 
bugs.adobe.com

Addicted to Twitter or Facebook? The Social Media Addicts Association can help you.

SMAA is run by reformed social media addicts who all had the courage to stand up and admit to their problem. Will you stop poking people you haven’t seen since college, and join us?

With me closing in on 8000 tweets, reaching an average of 8.6 posts a day and finding it necessary to add Facebook and Twitter login features to this blog, this initiative couldn’t have come at a better time. Kudos to Nascom and Sony VAIO for this fun viral campaign.

www.stopwritingonmywall.com

This last week or two we’ve seen a lot of heated debate around the future of ActionScript and the Flash Player. Its nice to see this kind of excitement and passion for the technology — yet I can’t help but feel we’re experiencing a form of ‘continental drift’ here.

I’ve seen ActionScript grow up from its humble beginnings with just a handful of frame actions to supporting prototypes, object-oriented syntactical sugar to where we now have a full fledged object-oriented programming model.

 
That is a good thing, right?

Yes and no. While I wouldn’t have dreamed it some time back when I was advocating object-oriented code as the one-stop solution to all your problems, I’m starting to feel we’re losing out on a lot that made ActionScript so appealing.

This is something Aral Balkan has been saying for the last year or two and I initially considered blasphemous. Is a focus on how to do things ‘properly’ holding us back getting things done? I believe so.

Is there anything now – excluding improvements to Flash Player performance – that could not have been done with ActionScript 1.0? Very little, though admittedly it now takes a lot less effort.

 
Read the rest of this entry »

I was happy to see this video by Dave McAllister, Open Standards Evangelist at Adobe, talking about Adobe’s take on open initiatives and how that involves community.
 
There are some common misconceptions about Adobe being very concerned with keeping their core technologies closed and proprietary while, more so than many other leading technology companies, the opposite is true. Even more so in the last few years.
 

 
(via Serge Jespers)