Flash On The Beach - Day 1

Despite a hugely successful shindig at Aral's there was a good turn-out for the morning key-note by Mike Downey and the Adobe crew. Good job too as it was a very interesting and informative keynote with some looks over the past year and a couple of sneak peaks at Flash 9 and the upcoming Apollo runtime.

The first session I went to was Craig Swan's of Crash media, previously I had caught the last 10 minutes of his talk at OFFF in Barcelona so this was a good chance to fill in the blanks. He demonstrated some very inspirational projects and experiments pushing the boundaries of user interaction with devices plumbed into Flash through various inputs. I took away alot of ideas and thoughts about alternative uses and implemenations of Flash with non-keyboard input devices.

Next was Mike Chambers presenting on Apollo, a desktop runtime designed for leveraging rich internet applications development with desktop integration. This is hugely interesting to me, I'll write another post on the details. Needless to say a hugely intriguing presentation.

After Mike I went to catch Aral's "Memo to the CEO" where he explains some very good rationale behind the shocking project success rate (50-70% failure!) in the IT industry. He went on to promote ideas of a more Agile, user centric approach to project development that does away with large functional specifications, drawn out project timelines, big-bang impelmentations. Enthusiastically presented and some excellent ideals on approach.

The final session of the day was Adobe's Mark Anders who presented the ins and outs of component design in Flex2. I had been thinking there hadn't been much activity on the component front in the Flex community so thought this would be a useful and interesting presentation and it was. I think a lot of people left with plans of attack and ideas for their next Flex2 component.

Overall a quality first day, unfortunately I'm currently missing the morning session because of a client meeting but will be back for the afternoon.