Peter Elst

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’ve been reading through O’Reilly’s “ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Techniques” by William Sanders and Chandima Cumaranatunge for the last few weeks and have to say its an incredibly useful resource.

The interesting thing is that this book approaches design patterns in the more traditional sense, not dumbing down on the object-oriented terminology. In that sense it is very approachable to those coming from a Java or C background and are looking for ActionScript 3.0 implementations of specific patterns.

On the other hand I can’t help but feel some patterns are shoehorned to fit in an ActionScript 3.0 context. True, ActionScript is a lot more like Java these days but there are still things that can’t directly be translated (or shouldn’t necessarily be).

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“One conference to rule them all”

I just got back from Flash on the Beach ‘07 in Brighton - the lack of blog posts probably indicates how busy it has been between sessions, meeting up with friends and the various parties.

Its hard to pinpoint what exactly makes this conference so special but if I think John and the team hit the nail on the head with the mix of creative, technical and inspirational sessions and the fantastic speaker lineup. What I generally would like to see more at conferences is more advanced technical talks on AS3, Flex and AIR although the technical sessions were really good I’d say most were aimed at an intermediate audience.

Looking back my favorite session of the conference was without a doubt Jared Tarbell’s - “Algorithms to Fill Space“. His mix of math and creativity and presentation style blew my mind. Jared is also genuinely one of the nicest and down to earth people I know, hope to catch up with him again at conferences in the near future.

I’ve recorded Monday’s Adobe keynote in full (some hilarious bits in there with Richard Galvan, Ted Patrick and Andrew Shorten) and about half of Mario Klingemann’s new talk, will edit those down and get them up by this weekend.

Flash on the Beach ‘08 is planned for the end of September, I’m counting down the weeks!

Having been to both the Chicago and Barcelona editions of Adobe MAX, I thought it might be worth in doing a little comparison of the two in terms of location, sessions, party etc.

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In case you didn’t pick this up with all the announcements Adobe made this last week — Adobe Media Player is now available on labs.adobe.com as a prerelease product along with beta 2 of the AIR runtime.

Adobe already has some content providers lined up such as CBS, PBS, Yahoo! and services like blip.tv help you with creating feeds that target Adobe Media Player (one of the reasons why I used them for uploading the MAX conference sneak peek video’s).

Its really cool to finally see Adobe with a product that plays back FLV files on the desktop, something we had to rely on third party apps for in the past. Although AMP is still pretty rough around the edges, the feature set looks very promising.

Here’s a little walkthrough of how to subscribe to a feed not listed in the catalog.

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Its safe to say that the general theme of Creative Suite 3 is “integration” and what a fantastic job they’ve done with it.

In a way I see the March 27th announcement as the actual closure of the acquisition. Adobe and Macromedia tools now place nice together.

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I just got a Chumby alpha prototype and am really *really* excited — big up to Michael Coleman for giving me a chance to play around with it at this early stage!

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I just got back from seeing Ben Forta’s sneak peek session on Scorpio in Brussels — and I can honestly say it rocks! Believe we were the first over in Europe to publicly see the demo’s and there’s some very very exciting stuff in there. I won’t spoil the fun by revealing everything we saw because Ben still has an upcoming user group tour in the US. Suffice to say there are really cool things happening with PDF, image manipulation and some other areas which you might not have expected ColdFusion to get into.

There is apparently going to be a public beta at some point and you can get signed up to be considered for the private beta via the Scorpio page on labs.adobe.com.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Scorpio

This whole web 2.0 phenomena sure brings out some cool services — with all the beta’s you can sign up for these days I’ve become pretty selective which ones I subscribe to, just to make sure I do get a couple of hours of work done.

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[update] If you own a Wii and read my blog, feel free to add me as a friend - here is my ID: 2344 1118 2775 4961

It took me a while to get hold of one (narrowly missed getting my hands on a Wii on its launch day) but after placing a couple of calls today managed to get hold of my brand new toy.

What can you say — the Nintendo Wii rocks! Took me under half an hour to set up and do a system update over the wireless network. Wii Sports that comes with the console is very addictive but you sure feel the workout

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