MAX 2007 Recap and Assets
I was very happy this year to be so heavily involved in MAX sessions. The attendance at the conference and those sessions was amazing. With a few exceptions, I heard a lot of positive remarks about presenters and their content. I’m already looking forward to next year in San Francisco, CA. In the meantime, here’s a recap of the sessions, and their related content.
Hands-On AIR
This was my first time instructing an all-day hands-on session, and I was really pleased to see how many people had registered. This topic wasn’t even originally on the schedule, and was added at my request. To have it be a success was really important to me, and while the class presented its share of technical difficulties, I’d have to say that it went over great.
During this session we left virtually no aspect of most of the APIs in AIR Beta 1 untouched - and we explored them all on brand new AIR Beta 2 bits! I saved our work incrementally and have attached the source for clipboard, drag-and-drop, file IO, native window (custom chrome), script-bridging, and service monitor. Hopefully these code reviews will prove useful as a reminder to those that attended the class. Thanks for attending!
Ignite MAX: Defining Rich
I got my first taste of an “ignite” event while in Seattle, WA on the AIR Bus Tour. It was hosted by Ryan Stewart and looked amazingly fun. When I saw the opportunity again at MAX I couldn’t help but get involved. I asked Ted Patrick to get added to the agenda and found myself on stage at the Ignite MAX reception event.
I chose to use a presentation I had recently assembled for my keynote at the Rich Web Experience. The topic of the presentation was “Defining Rich” which is more about why we want “rich” in the first place, more than it is about what makes a “rich” user interface. I shortened it to twenty slides and setup for the fifteen-seconds per slide presentation. What can I say except that it was as fun as it looked!
Using AIR APIs
I gave this presentation twice during the week. Its actually kind of funny, because on the Bus Tour, it’s really Danny Dura’s presentation. I put my own take on it for MAX with a set of examples for both HTML and Flash work-flows. I covered the AIR APIs from both sides up front, and then alternate between technologies for the remainder of the presentation. It seemed to work out pretty well (even when I was ten minutes late the second time and short on time).
The HTML assets I used actually make up a much larger, HTML-only, version of the presentation. It originated for my session at The Ajax Experience in San Francisco, CA. I created the Flex version of the assets as components at the last minute while hanging out on the AIR bus in the AIR Park at MAX. They’re a little less refined, but definitely still useful for those getting started.
AIR Boot Camp
Mike Chambers invited me to present the HTML side of AIR at his boot camp session on Wednesday morning. Among the many aspects I really enjoy about presenting AIR is being able to start from scratch and end up with a functional desktop application. I took this approach for my portion of this session and ended up with yet even more assets. From nothing, to a desktop application that’s network aware and can write a file to the local disk in just an hour (while explaining every step nonetheless).
A special thanks to all those that attended my various talks!