Peter Elst

Adobe MAX Europe is just a few days away and despite me regularly complaining about some of the conference’s miscomings (you know I still love you guys) I’m really very excited about what we’ll be seeing there!

I deliberately didn’t read too much coverage of the US edition but did tweak my session schedule earlier today to cover some important themes I noticed this year: Flash Player extensibility and mobile.
 

Monday, December 1, 2008
09:30am - 11:00am MAX 2008 Opening General Session
11:30am - 01:00pm Creating Effects with Pixel Bender
02:00pm - 03:00pm Adobe Roadmap: Rich Internet Applications
03:15pm - 04:15pm Using C++ Libraries in Flash Player and Adobe AIR
04:30pm - 05:30pm Community and Flash Player
05:30pm - 09:30pm Welcome Reception in Community Pavilion

Tuesday, December 2, 2008
09:00am - 10:00am Developer Best Practices with Flex
10:30am - 12:00pm General Session
01:30pm - 02:30pm Flash Lite Programming for Nokia Devices
02:45pm - 03:45pm Flex and Open Source
04:00pm - 05:00pm Monetizing Applications with Adobe AIR
05:30pm - 07:00pm Sneak Peeks
08:00pm - 11:30pm Customer Appreciation Event

Wednesday, December 3, 2008
09:00am - 10:00am Using the Text Component Library for Flash Player
10:15am - 11:15am Learn About the Nokia Mobile Browser, Flash, and Flash Lite
11:30am - 12:30pm Why Open Source, and What Makes the Cut?
01:30pm - 02:30pm Looking Ahead to the Next Version of Flex Builder
02:45pm - 03:45pm Maintaining security with Adobe AIR
04:00pm - 05:00pm Flex and PHP: Working with Flex Builder and Zend Studio for Eclipse

 
Pablo Parrado and myself will be covering the event live from Milan for actionscripthero.org so make sure you stay tuned for that!
 

Events

Thomas “the Flash Lite wiz” Joos and the guys at Boulevart created a great little game for MAX Milan. Be sure to check it out and you might even win some really cool prizes!

More information here: http://labs.boulevart.be/index.php/max-milan-shooter/
 

Flash Lite

Thanks to all who voted, my faith in the US is restored after 8 years of failed politics — congratulations President Obama!

I watched the election results come in on Twitter and arrived just in time at an internet cafe here in South India to see John McCain give his concession speech and Barack Obama take the stage to celebrate his victory. Truly a moment for the history books.

I’ll be heading back home in two weeks and will resume ‘regular blogging activity’. Until then, may the force be with you.

 

General

Hej Danmark, vi ses snart!

When planning my schedule for 2009 got some good news from Skills Matter, my training partner in the UK, we’ll be taking the “Core ActionScript: Object-Oriented ActionScript in Practice” course to Århus, Denmark.

If you’re not already familiar with this particular course, its a two-day introduction to Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 with a strong focus on Flex. You’ll learn about concepts like classes, inheritance, encapsulation and polymorphism but more importantly learn how to implement it in real-world projects.

Hope to see you there!

 
More information here: http://skillsmatter.com/go/ajax-ria
 

Training

“Overcoming poverty is not a gesture of charity. It is an act of justice. It is the protection of a fundamental human right, the right to dignity and a decent life”

- Nelson Mandela

 
Today is Blog Action Day — thousands of bloggers will unite to discuss a single issue - poverty. We aim to raise awareness, initiate action and to shake the web!

Read more…

General

I was happy to hear the Kuneri SWFPack beta has been released to the public today, a web-based tool that allows you to very easily package up Flash Lite content to a SIS (NFL, CAB and DRM support is planned).

All basic Flash Lite packaging features are free of charge, they do plan on adding some extra commerical options later on. SWFPack allows you to generate signed or unsigned SIS files, you just upload a SWF or ZIP file (for projects that include multiple files and folders) and press Done.

I’ll definitely be giving this tool at try really soon, packaging has always been one of the major obstacles holding me back from doing more Flash Lite authoring.

www.swfpack.com
 

Flash Lite

I just found this great video on the future of programming languages by Anders Hejlsberg, who was the lead architect of the C# programming language. Its definitely an interesting presentation to watch to get a perspective on where things are heading. (via Sean “the Flex Guy” Moore)

 

Video

I don’t generally blog politics and this is going to be the one and only time I’ll bring up this years US Presidential election.

While the campaign so far has arguably resulted in some of the best political satire out there, the world is facing some serious challenges and whether we like it or not, the US plays and will continue to play a substantial role in getting this resolved.

Some people are frustrated to see how in Europe and other parts of the world the public consensus seems to lean heavily towards one candidate. That may well be true, and that bias could be explained in part by overcompensation because of our need for change and inability to make a difference through voting.

Those of you in the US can make that difference, I’m not going to ask you to vote for one candidate over the other but please do your research and most importantly vote. We are counting on you to turn the page on the last eight years.
 

General

When you go to conferences as much as I do and meet up with old friends and acquaintances, the number one question is: “So, Peter what have you been up to?”. I realized that, unless you follow me on twitter and actually read the dozens of messages I post there every week, fairly few people have a clue what I’ve been doing these last few months.

Well here goes, apart from the Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 courses I teach in Belgium and the UK, I spend a good bit of time tech reviewing several books. Two great titles that are coming out soon are AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of ED) and the Adobe AIR Cookbook (O’Reilly).

I’m also co-authoring a couple of books, one that has already been announced is AdvancED AIR Applications (Friends of ED).

Turns out I’ve so far attended 10 events and conferences this year, presented a total 12 sessions and have enjoyed every minute! That said I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep things going at that rate.

While I’d love to be in the position to speak at all conferences that would like to have me over, unless my basic travel and accommodation expenses can be covered (which thankfully and increasing number of conferences are able to do), I’m going to have to become very selective in what I take on. I’d prefer to spend my personal travel budget on community events that genuinely have limited resources or are just starting out. That’s not a dig at Adobe MAX by the way, there are different reasons why I won’t be speaking there this year.

The ActionScript Conference in Singapore is going to be my last conference speaking engagement of the year and have not confirmed anything for 2009 as of yet.

We’ll see how things go, after Singapore I’m heading to India for a couple of weeks and will get back to business again by the end of November.
 

AIR, Events, Flex, General, Publications, Training, Twitter

Thanks to Zohar Babin for pointing me to some further information about the FlaCC project on the LLVM.org website. Scott Petersen gave a talk on August 1st at the Apple Campus for the “2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting“.

The title of his session was “Flash C Compiler: Compiling C code to the Adobe Flash Virtual Machine” with the following session description:

FlaCC is a research project that compiles C code to ActionScript using llvm-gcc with a custom flash code generator. This enables almost arbitrary C and C++ code to be executed safely and efficiently within a Flash container on web pages. This talk describes the implementation of the system and shows several compelling examples that use it to run other language and CPU interpreters within Flash as well as run existing large programs within C. The demos are also extremely impressive

Read more…

AIR, Flash, Flex