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.

 

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’m almost at the end of my first month in India and have met some fantastic people both in Bangalore and here in Pondicherry.

Next week Adobe is holding a DevSummit in Chennai and the week after in Hyderabad. I’m very excited to be invited over to talk about one of my favorite Flash Platform technologies: Adobe AIR. My sessions include a deep dive on various AIR API’s called “RIA meets Desktop” and a 15 minute lightning talk about using SQLite local databases with AIR.

I hope to see you there!

Today was day 1 of the main TEDIndia event. I’ve been at the wonderful Infosys Mysore campus since Monday and have met some truly extraordinary people.

I couldn’t help but write a quick summary of todays sessions and what inspired me most.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Usha Uthup, legendary Indian pop singer, opened with a beautiful rendition of “Raghupati Raghava Raja Ram” — generally believed to have been Mahatma Gandhi’s favorite song, there were quite a few other direct and indirect references to the “Father of the Nation” later in the day.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

The first speaker was the incomparable Hans Rosling, showing some very interesting graphs on Asia’s past and future in terms of life expectancy and per capita income. He showed this against a historical context and predicted that it is possible for India – providing certain conditions are met – to reach the same average income as the United Kingdom by the year 2048 (July 27th, in the late afternoon to be precise).

First standing ovation of the day.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Next up was Devdutt Pattanaik, talking about mythology and cultural perceptions. He started with the story of the race around the world between Ganesha and Karttikeya — abstracting this down to subjective truth and personal context. He went on to discuss Alexander the Great and the gymnosophist, linear versus cyclical belief systems. I was most interested how he would be able to tie these ideas into the business world and he did manage to make some compelling arguments there.

Another well deserved standing ovation.

To round off the first session Usha Uthup again came on again to sing a medley from all around the world and got the crowd to stand up, clap, sing dance along. I don’t think anyone expected that to spontaneously happen and is – as I am told – generally referred to as a “TED moment”.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Jumping forward a bit the next speaker I would like to highlight is Dr. R.A. Mashelkar. Coming from an underprivileged background as a child, he grew up to become an eminent scientist. The mantra throughout his talk was: “Getting more, from less, for more” and the idea of “Gandhian Engineering”. He makes a good point that when targeting people that can barely get by, its not enough to think about cost cutting, it needs to be about ultra-low cost solutions. He showed various examples, including a very impressive prosthetic leg that could very easily be fitted, allowed to run, jump, climb tries and cost well under 100 USD what would otherwise be 20.000 USD.

This talk to me reinforced the idea that “constraints are the best breeding ground for innovation”.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Moving on to the last session of the day, one person you’ll no doubt here a lot more from in the future is Pranav Mistry. The work he did on Sixth Sense technology, essentially bringing together the physical and digital world, was also featured at a previous TED by Patty Maes (a Belgian native) but he showed a number of interesting new applications. It was great to hear about some of his earlier experiments and more of the vision behind the project.

What I am most excited about here is that, in talking to Chris Anderson, after his talk he said he would like to open source the software and encourage different people to make their own implementations. While I could still see some teething problems with the technology I have no doubt a lot of us will be using this in some form or another within the next 3-5 years.

Credit: TED / James Duncan Davidson

Another fantastic talk that really resonated with me was one by Sadhguru Jaggi Vasudev, an India mystic like no other. He shared his life story and explained what he called the “field of perception” which we put up in our mind, something that can be expanded to encompass the wider world around us. As such he says that the idea of empathy is built into our very systems. Sadhguru certainly is a profound and profoundly entertaining speaker including references to stolen sandals at temples, “divine versus dosa” and the hilarious punch line “hey woman, its your dream”. Turns out he is a pretty good singer as well. Be sure to watch for that when the recording goes up on TED.com.

The last session of the day got closed by an impressive musical duo, Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan bringing a unique mixture of classical piano and carnatic singing. Its hard to imagine that combination of East and West would work well together but it makes for a unique sound. I’ve certainly become a big fan of their music.

 
I hope some of you have been able to follow along on the free livestream, they’ll be doing the same for the last session of the conference on Saturday at 11am Indian Standard Time.

This has certainly been a memorable first day and can’t wait for the rest of the conference!

The last two months have been hectic to say the least attending and speaking at conferences in Singapore, Brighton and Los Angeles and most recently giving some workshops in London.

I’m looking forward to settling down in India to start a new chapter and get Project Cocoon off the ground. Before that though, one more conference, and one I’ve always wanted to attend: TED.

TED is coming to India this November and I am extremely excited. This should be an opportunity to meet some inspiring people and get renewed energy to work on a couple of personal projects I’ve been postponing for far too long. I thought it would be fun to share some of the people I’m most looking forward to hearing speak and perform.

Usha Uthup
Devdutt Pattanaik
Hans Rosling
Anil Srinivasan and Sikkil Gurucharan
Shekhar Kapur
Shashi Tharoor
His Holiness the 17th Karmapa

I’ll be heading out to India end of the month and will be back for a few weeks over the holidays end of December. After TEDIndia I have a few days off in Bangalore, if anyone would like to meet up feel free to get in touch — following that I’ll be flying to Chennai and on to Pondicherry to meet up with the rest of the team.

Definitely one of the biggest announcements at todays Adobe MAX keynote was the ability to compile Flash applications to native iPhone ARM binaries. Just to be clear, this doesn’t mean Flash Player runs on the iPhone or SWF files get interpreted at runtime.

I’m happy to see Adobe push things forward for mobile and not having Apple restrict innovation. One of the interesting consequences of being able to export to native iPhone code from Flash CS5 is that developers are no longer required to develop on a Mac, opening up a whole new developer ecosystem.

There are more signs Adobe is putting additional pressure on Apple, whether this will be successful or not is another issue. At least it makes it perfectly clear that Adobe is committed to supporting the iPhone as a platform, whatever it takes.

An example of this is the page iPhone users get to see when they try to install Flash Player.

Lots more interesting information coming out, especially around Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0 — I’ll blog more about that as I find out.

I’ve been lucky enough to attend all four editions of Flash on the Beach since it started in 2006, three of them as a speaker and hope to get invited to do many more. Looking back I can honestly say this year was the best one yet — it had something for everyone and think John got the mix between creative and technical sessions just right.

My personal highlights of the conference were Joa Ebert’s mind-blowing display of Flash Player optimization and Craig Swann’s inspirational session that went on to cover some unexpected topics. I’d say those two were definitely the buzz of the conference and rightly so.

Flashmagazine has excellent write ups of all three days of the conference. Here are a couple of interesting things that get announced:

• Flash CS5 will have code hinting for custom classes and integration with Flash Builder as a code editor
• AIR 2.0 will allow you to bundle native code and execute it, has a new FileMonitor, VolumeMonitor and StorageVolume API for accessing USB connected drives
• Joa Ebert wrote a C# and Java to SWF compiler
• Ralph Hauwert is leaving the Papervision3D team

I’m yet to hear anyone say he was disappointed attending Flash on the Beach in these four years. I can’t wait for the fifth edition — go John go! best. conference. ever.

This year I did a completely different session at Flash on the Beach, talking about what it takes to go freelance as a Flash developer — what are the challenges and opportunities that await you.

It seemed to go down really well and was very happy with the feedback I got. For those of you that asked, here are the slides of my talk and feel free to leave a comment or drop me an email if you have any further questions.

The conference so far has been excellent, I’ll be sure to blog a roundup of the various sessions as soon as I get home. The highlight so far for me was definitely Joa Ebert showing off his code optimizer tool (70 fps to 500 fps), Java and C# to SWF compiler. Everyone here is still buzzing about that!