A Portland, OR. Adobe Flex User Group
MAX '08 Review
Lots of cool stuff! Lots on Flash Catalyst (formally "thermo"), Gumbo, and more. I'm jumping on the plane home right now, so I'll give a more complete update later. Overall, great show.
continued...
Right, sorry, it's taking a bit to get back into the swing of things.
First, let me give a little background on the company I work for, Universal Mind. We're a distributed company with employees spread out all over the world. Each year, UM sends ALL of it's employees (contractors and full timers) to MAX. It's a great time to meet everyone while picking up cool info at MAX itself.
So, the first day (I arrived on Saturday before the conference) I was there UM set up a full day of activities (not specifically related to MAX) that included Paintball, biking, geocaching through the Redwoods, and kayaking. Pretty cool for the 70+ UM employees. During each of the activities, we were split up into smaller groups so we could better get to know each other. As it turns out, I spent the afternoon geocaching with Nahuel and Laura the creators of the Mate framework (turns out they're UMers). So, now I'm looking to change my Cairngorm ways :)
The big news at MAX this year is Gumbo (Flex 4 & Flex Builder 4), and Flash Catalyst (formerly known as "Thermo"). I haven't had a chance to actually play with either yet, but I did get the preview CD :) so I'll be installing that in a few minutes. I do know from what I saw:
Flex Builder 4 adds some new refactoring, understands asdoc style comments in code hinting and allows that code hinting metadata to be packaged up in the swc itself so custom designed components can look like native components in the ide. Something I'm really excited about is Project Alchemy (unfortunately, my plane left before this session on the last day). Project Alchemy provides the ability to automagically translate C & C++ code into AS code and run it via Flex. They showed a main stage example of zork running in Flex :)
Flash Catalyst looks like a really good prototyping tool that facilitates the communication between designer and developer (and back again). It allows designers to bring in their screen design .psd files cut them up into components, add the transition effects that they would otherwise have to describe to the developer with sticky notes, save the project and hand it off to the developer. The developer gets the project, opens it up inside of flex builder and continues doing the more traditional back-end implementation of the code. This will be great for "design challenged" developers like myself.
Non-Adobe related, but still cool non-the-less: During the conference, but outside of the conference session rooms, in the more open areas, they were holding "Unconference" sessions. These are community driven sessions put on by individuals or groups who have something of interest to share. I actually found these to be much more interesting than most of the Adobe sessions. Of course, after realizing my relationship with the Mate folks, I sat in on a session about that. It's certainly cleaner (for me) to understand, so like I said, I'm going to dive into that a bit deeper.
The last thing I'm going to talk about (for now) is the Intuit Partner Platform, that was shown at Max. It's billed as "The fastest way to build apps, and the easiest way to sell them", and is a "platform as a service" model, which is free for developers. It's pretty easy to get started with, in fact, we took SpatialKey, modified the code base slightly and entered the simplified version in Intuit's workplace application contest, which we won :) Anyway, this could be a really great way for flex developers to make money, and I suggest everyone reading this to check it out.
Any specific questions about the show, let me know.
continued...
Right, sorry, it's taking a bit to get back into the swing of things.
First, let me give a little background on the company I work for, Universal Mind. We're a distributed company with employees spread out all over the world. Each year, UM sends ALL of it's employees (contractors and full timers) to MAX. It's a great time to meet everyone while picking up cool info at MAX itself.
So, the first day (I arrived on Saturday before the conference) I was there UM set up a full day of activities (not specifically related to MAX) that included Paintball, biking, geocaching through the Redwoods, and kayaking. Pretty cool for the 70+ UM employees. During each of the activities, we were split up into smaller groups so we could better get to know each other. As it turns out, I spent the afternoon geocaching with Nahuel and Laura the creators of the Mate framework (turns out they're UMers). So, now I'm looking to change my Cairngorm ways :)
The big news at MAX this year is Gumbo (Flex 4 & Flex Builder 4), and Flash Catalyst (formerly known as "Thermo"). I haven't had a chance to actually play with either yet, but I did get the preview CD :) so I'll be installing that in a few minutes. I do know from what I saw:
Flex Builder 4 adds some new refactoring, understands asdoc style comments in code hinting and allows that code hinting metadata to be packaged up in the swc itself so custom designed components can look like native components in the ide. Something I'm really excited about is Project Alchemy (unfortunately, my plane left before this session on the last day). Project Alchemy provides the ability to automagically translate C & C++ code into AS code and run it via Flex. They showed a main stage example of zork running in Flex :)
Flash Catalyst looks like a really good prototyping tool that facilitates the communication between designer and developer (and back again). It allows designers to bring in their screen design .psd files cut them up into components, add the transition effects that they would otherwise have to describe to the developer with sticky notes, save the project and hand it off to the developer. The developer gets the project, opens it up inside of flex builder and continues doing the more traditional back-end implementation of the code. This will be great for "design challenged" developers like myself.
Non-Adobe related, but still cool non-the-less: During the conference, but outside of the conference session rooms, in the more open areas, they were holding "Unconference" sessions. These are community driven sessions put on by individuals or groups who have something of interest to share. I actually found these to be much more interesting than most of the Adobe sessions. Of course, after realizing my relationship with the Mate folks, I sat in on a session about that. It's certainly cleaner (for me) to understand, so like I said, I'm going to dive into that a bit deeper.
The last thing I'm going to talk about (for now) is the Intuit Partner Platform, that was shown at Max. It's billed as "The fastest way to build apps, and the easiest way to sell them", and is a "platform as a service" model, which is free for developers. It's pretty easy to get started with, in fact, we took SpatialKey, modified the code base slightly and entered the simplified version in Intuit's workplace application contest, which we won :) Anyway, this could be a really great way for flex developers to make money, and I suggest everyone reading this to check it out.
Any specific questions about the show, let me know.
Add a Comment
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Comment by Matt Garland on November 23, 2008 at 1:49pm -
Reggie--can you generate ASDocs from within FB now? I'm a sloppy typer--I'd love just to push a button instead of getting on the command line, or creating an ANT file. I like pushing buttons.
Remember when I predicted in my pres. that Mate would conquer? I didn't know you'd be one of next victims!
About Thermo--does the component codebase look substantially different...or is Thermo basically just really, really good skinning, with essentially the same components?
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Comment by Matt Garland on November 21, 2008 at 3:52pm
- Reggie--don't forget us, give us the good news.
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