Category: Conferences

Flash on the Beach – Miami

One of the most popular Flash conferences, Flash on the Beach, usually held in Brighton, UK is coming to Miami! If you have not heard of this conference before, be sure to do a quick search, and you will find raving reviews. There are only a few conferences that I recommend to people, and this is one of them. FOTB consistently puts on an amazing event, and now we yanks on the other side of the pond get one all to ourselves!

FOTB Miami will be held April 6th through the 8th, 2009, which should leave you plenty of time to get home and file your taxes. Tickets are currently $299, but there are only 199 tickets at that price, so be sure and sign up soon. Once those are gone, the price will go up. Considering how many amazing speakers will be there, this is an absolute bargain.

I will definitely be in Miami to enjoy the event, and take in some of that Florida sun after a cold winter. I hope to see you there as well!

Another TwitterCamp Update

Just a quick update that a new version of TwitterCamp is available (see http://www.danieldura.com/twittercamp.) This is a pretty major release, as it adds support for the new Twitter search API, and removes the requirement for you to authenticate, or for people who want to post to the application to follow you. All they have to do is follow the search terms that you input into the application.

Also, I added a configuration panel for more easily updating the skin. Now you do not need to recompile the application to re-skin TwitterCamp. Just launch the configuration panel which appears on launch, or can be accessed through the context menu.

Please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions for features. Of course, now I need to spend a little time focusing on the upcoming Moderator update.

Have you registered for MAX?

I was just recently in a meeting, where we were discussing some of the activities going on around MAX 2008 and some of the information we will be sharing about that time. All I can say is WOW! This will be my seventh or eighth MAX. I honestly can’t even remember how many I have been to at this point, especially if you include the international events. But this is the one I am the most excited for, and I already know all the secrets! 😉

We have a great session line-up with great speakers, many of whom are engineers at Adobe. And not to mention, we are holding it in the infamous Moscone Center in downtown San Francisco, which is just a few blocks from our San Francisco offices (the old Macromedia building). If you really kiss up, I might even give you a tour 😉 On top of that, the price right now is very reasonable.

So, stop thinking about it and sign up now. I hope this doesn’t come off as a sales pitch, but I know you won’t be disappointed by this event. I think we are going to sell out pretty quick this year if last year was any indication. Not to mention, I think the demand for tickets is going to be even higher because of the location. So hurry up! Sign up here.

My Latest Obsession – Live Streaming

There is no doubt that micro-content is the new way to communicate with the world. After more than five years of blogging, I find myself spending much more time on sites like Twitter, Pownce, YouTube, and a myriad of other sites. My latest obsession is live streaming of video content. The first leg of the onAIR Tour Europe has given me a chance to really experiment with this medium using Qik.com’s service. While there are many kinks to work out, I have to say that this is one of the most enjoyable and painless mediums.

Today we are in Amsterdam at the Beurs van Berlage, an old Dutch stock exchange which is experiencing a second life as an event venue. I must admit, this is one of the coolest venues to date. I have taken a number of videos of this event which you can view on http://www.qik.com/danieldura/. I just posted a quick interview with Ted Patrick, where he is demoing a new project which will help HTML developers test and deploy AIR applications (embedded below.)

If you want to watch videos that we are streaming live from the tour, you can follow my secondary Twitter account http://www.twitter.com/dduraqik. Be warned, the live streams are sometimes a bit choppy, depending on the connection. But if you wait a few minutes, once the video is complete it is a much more pleasant experience. Hopefully the bandwidth issues should be solved soon.

Heading to Europe for the onAIR Train Tour

As you may have heard, we are soon to head out on the first leg of the onAIR Tour in Europe. This time we will be sporting backpacks and making our way from city to city the European way, via trains (instead of our much beloved bus.) We have high expectations for this tour, we are already seeing amazing registration numbers. So if you have not registered, you will want to do it soon so you aren’t left out.

Register at the onAIR Tour website.

AIR and Flex Presentations and Code Samples

I have been pretty slack in posting this. Over the past few months I have been busy presenting on AIR and Flex at numerous events such as the onAIR Bus Tour and Adobe MAX. I have just finished cleaning up and compiling all of the examples and the presentations that I have been showing.

There are two presentations, compiled as PDFs. Most of my AIR presentations are a variation of the one below. I have also included a Flex Builder presentation that I gave here in Europe at the Beyond Boundaries events we held in Amsterdam and Brussels. Along with the presentations is an archive of Flex Builder project archives that contain most of the code I have showed.

Enough talking, here are the files:

At MIX06 in Las Vegas

I am actually sitting in a an enlightening session right now at MIX about Atlas and IE7. About an hour ago we finished the session with Bill Gates and Tim O’Reilly. It was my first time seeing Bill Gates live, which was fun.

If you are here at the conference, feel free to come up an introduce yourself. I hope to have a more comprehensive post later about the sessions I am attending.

Arrived in Sydney for WebDU

This morning Mike and I arrived here in Sydney for WebDU. Unfortunately WebDU and Flashforward were right on top of one another, so I wasn’t able to make it to Seattle. This will be the first Flashforward I have missed in quite a while. Here in Sydney I will be speaking on ActionScript 3 and the new VM.

If you are here in Sydney, please come up and introduce yourself and stop by my session. I will also try to post any photos I take to my Flickr stream.

ActionScript 3 Sample Code and Presentations

A few months ago I was privileged to be able to attend the amazing Spark Europe conference. It was a great experience and a very well presented and attended event. While Mike Chambers and I were over in Europe, we decided to visit a few of the user groups while we were there. Christian Cantrell was also doing a tour of Asia at the same time, so we decided to work together to assemble some great ActionScript 3 samples (which you can download here. ) The links for the Breezos for the presentations can be found at the bottom of this post.

Inside the archive you will find examples demonstrating the following functionality (as quoted from Christian’s blog):

  • Regular Expressions.
  • E4X. The new and very simple way to create, parse, and
    query XML in ActionScript 3.
  • ExternalInterface API. Allows your Flash content to
    communicate with its container (usually the HTML page via JavaScript)
    without any additional libraries.
  • File upload. Shows how to upload a file using Flex and save
    it on the server using ColdFusion. (File upload is actually already
    available in Flash 8.0, but this is a Flex 2 example).
  • Data types. Lists all the ActionScript 3.0 data types and
    their default values.
  • Operators. Demonstrates some of the ActionScript 3.0
    operators.
  • Packages. Demonstrates how packages work in ActionScript
    3.0.
  • Rest arguments. ActionScript 3.0 supports a concept of
    “rest arguments” which you allows you to make some argument required,
    and also handle an arbitrary number of additional arguments.
  • Proxy. The flash.util.Proxy object is a more powerful
    version of __resolve.
  • Reflection. Shows how to introspect ActionScript 3.0
    classes.
  • Timer. Shows how to execute code at a specified interval.
  • The new display list API.

    • These samples will run in the Flex Builder 2 Alpha, which can be downloaded from Adobe Labs.