mattguest.com

360|Flex - Day 1

Terrific day at 360|Flex today. I attended some good sessions, had a few fun conversations about flex and development in general, and then had some really good beers. Seriously, the organizers have impressive taste in beer.

The keynote was pretty cool, though no earth shattering new news. Justin Everett-Church was showing off Flash player 10, and even though I’ve played with the beta I didn’t realize just how great the hardware accelerated graphics are going to be. I had originally heard that only the 3d and video would be accelerated, but apparently I was misinformed as according to Justin all display objects will be created on the graphics card, which is very good.

Shining through for me though was a reaffirmation of how incredible Flex 4 (Gumbo) is going to be. There’s a whole new paradigm for working with states, which have always been great in concept but, for me at least, incredibly frustrating to use in practice. The new mxml shape and drawing tools are looking really good, and the true separation of component and skin is incredible. We’ve all been talking about skinning as a way to separate functionality from design for some time now, but seeing what can be done in flex 4 is the first time I’ve felt like it’s truly been achieved, which brings me to Thermo. Being billed as a designer tool, Thermo is going to make everyone’s life easier, whether you hand it over to a designer or not.

So, while the keynote didn’t have too much new stuff for us, I got to see some demos I hadn’t before and definitely got re-jazzed about where Flex is headed.

The sessions I attended were pretty good:

Flex and Accessibility
I did not realize how much control you have over this. If you truly want to make your app accessible, then the tools are there.. even if they’re not fully documented.

Encrypting Flex
Some good techniques were covered here for encrypting and decrypting modules or external swfs on the fly.

Introduction to Swiz
I had been curious about this after listening to an interview with Chris Scott on the Flex Show. It looks great. If we weren’t already so invested in PureMVC on the project I’m working on I think I’d switch us over.

Advanced Actionscript APIs
This was a fun one, Jacob Wright is a good presenter and the material was interesting. He covered Metadata tags, The Proxy class and Namespaces, all of which I’ve used in the past, but I picked up a few new tricks in his session today.

One thing I’ve noticed here at the conference is a general feel of prosperity and optimism surrounding Flex. I suppose this is to be expected at a Flex conference, but I talked to a lot of people today and I think it’s really cool that many, when asked what they like best about flex development, replied somewhere in their answer that they couldn’t think of when they’d had this much fun as a developer.. I couldn’t agree more.