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

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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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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Great news if you’re in or around Dublin, Ireland on April 11th!

There’s a fantastic tag team consisting of Ryan Stewart, Kev McCabe and Ted Patrick coming to entertain you with talks on Flex, ColdFusion and AIR at a free half day event called Scotch on AIR.

Agenda

12:00 - Lunch
13:00 - Flex - Ted Patrick
14:00 - Break
14:10 - ColdFusion - Kev McCabe
15:10 - Break
15:20 - AIR - Ryan Stewart
16:20 - Break
16:30 - RIA Open Debate (One & All)
17:30 - Raffle, Close & Thank You

Location

The Westmoreland Bar
27 Westmoreland Street
Dublin 2

Read more here and be sure to register!

Great news for the 360|Flex Europe conference in Milan, Italy that is just round the corner — thanks to their sponsors they’ve been able to make day 1 of the conference completely free of charge and open to the general public.

The new price of the conference is 240 Euro and refunds will be given to those that already registered at the original price. Its not too late to attend, you can register online or at the event to attend days two and three which will then give you the USB stick with all session notes from the presenters and a chance to win some great giveaways.
 
http://www.360flex.com/360Flex_Europe/2008/03/360flex-day-one-free.html

The MAX 2008 conference dates have been announced and it seems like an Indian edition is again overlooked. It all looked very promising when Ted Patrick blogged Bangalore as a possible location for next year but turns out those plans were abandoned for whatever reason.

I think this is a mistake on Adobe’s part and am happy Vivek Kumar opened it up for debate on his blog. India and its developer community are a huge potential market for Adobe. Just look at the growth of the Flex community and what this trend indicates.

http://raghuonflex.wordpress.com/2007/09/03/flex-india-is-going-great-guns/

Why do I care? I’ve just returned from my 8th trip to India, have visited some of the most rural parts of South India and been to modern IT hubs like Gurgaon, Haryana. What I noticed is two things: Microsoft has a huge footprint throughout the country and to computer science graduates its looked at as the de facto direction to take for success as an IT professional. Those working with Adobe technology are often stuck in dead-end jobs in large corporations, mostly doing outsourced work for the US market, where creativity is seen as an obstacle rather than an asset.

Its not just about a conference like MAX, in many ways India is not taken seriously and what bugs me most is that a lot of developers seem to have become pragmatic and defeatist about this fact. It takes a company to dare take the initiative and invest in change. Adobe has an opportunity and needs to step up to the plate, failing that it takes little for Microsoft to start actively pushing out their technology to developers and tip the balance of the current ‘outsourcing ecosystem’.

I want Indian developers, not just the lucky few who can afford to freelance, to have the same opportunities I got when I got started — get inspired, get involved and build up a strong community. Adobe can help make this happen.

A population of over one billion, a potential IT market of some hundred thousands, don’t miss out and act now.

 
Read the discussion here

 

I just got back from two fantastic weeks in South India, caught up with my emails and have started looking at my agenda for the coming months.

Really excited to see so many events lined up. I’ll be starting to teach the “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″ course, joining the Adobe evangelists for two stops on the first leg of the European on AIR tour and *heaven forbid* will even be attending a Microsoft event to hear about Silverlight 2.0 and see Steve Ballmer deliver his keynote.

- March 31-1st — “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″ course - Lokeren, Belgium
- April 4th — on AIR tour Amsterdam, the Netherlands
- April 7th — on AIR tour Brussels, Belgium
- April 7-9th — 360Flex - Milan, Italy
- April 17-18th - “Core Object Oriented ActionScript 3.0 in Practice” - London, UK
- April 24th — MIX Essentials - Louvain-la-Neuve, Belgium
- May 8th — Flashconference.de - Stuttgart, Germany
- May 12-18th — Adobe Community Summit - San Jose, CA - USA
- May 23th — 2M08 - Kortrijk, Belgium
- May 26-27th – “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″ course - Lokeren, Belgium
- June 4-6th — Scotch on the Rocks - Edinburgh, UK

As you can see I unfortunately will not be making it to 360Flex after all (apologies for those of you who wanted to see me present there), I’m sure Tom and John will be making the first European edition a great success and hope to speak at the next one.

If you’re attending one of the events, leave a comment and be sure to come by and say hello!

After hanging out for dinner with a bunch of talented friends and colleagues (thanks Boulevart!) I called it an early night which unfortunately meant I missed out on the Phlash5 performance.

Playing with Pixels

Day two started out for me with Koen De Weggheleire’s talk. The party the night before didn’t seem to have caused too many casualties cause the room was packed and everyone seemed conscious enough to grasp the basic matrix math required to start experimenting with bitmap data in Flash.

I think Koen did a fantastic job explaining the topic and balancing the theory of color matrices, convolution and displacement filters and showing creative uses of these features. Definitely a talk you’ll want to catch at a future conference if you haven’t explored that area of ActionScript yet.
 
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For me FITC Amsterdam started on Sunday, attending the Papervision3D workshop presented by most of the core team. It was really nice to get an overview of what is available in the Papervision 2.0 “Great White” release.

Although it probably wasn’t the most in depth technical run through of the framework the information we got was really fantastic and I’m sure the attendees got everything they needed to start doing some Papervision3D projects.

For me Carlos‘ and Ralph’s contribution were the most practical and inspirational parts of the day and convinced me that I need to invest more time to experiment with Flash and 3D engines.
 

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I just finished my presentation at FITC Amsterdam, absolutely loved talking about Adobe AIR despite having some unfortunate beamer problems for the first 15 or so minutes of my talk — had some time to improvise and do Q&A with the audience.

The crowd seemed to be very ‘into’ AIR and interested to hear about the different API’s. Trying to cover everything in a one hour session is insane so I narrowed the scope down to the following:

■ Network monitoring
■ Windowing API
■ HTML support
■ FileSystem access
■ SQLite database
■ Drag ‘n drop support
■ Clipboard access
■ Update API

You can find my session notes below:

The source files referenced in my slides are available for download here: https://share.adobe.com/adc/adc.do?docid=53625a8c-e19a-11dc-88fd-81891157ba2a

Next up is Nico Lierman, talking about some more advanced data visualization with Flex and AIR. Looking forward to it!