360Flex Day 1

So it's Monday morning, I'm eating breakfast by myself, yay.

We walk over to 360Flex (which is at ebay's HQ, awesome) and Adobe is 5 minutes into their keynote. This was the hilight of the morning for me. They previewed some awesome new stuff in Flash Player 10, Flex 4 and most importantly......Thermo.

On the topic of Thermo, when the F is this thing going to come out. People are telling me to wait til MAX, cause it will probably be there, at least in beta form, or maybe it will be released with all of CS4 later this year. All I can say is it bridges the gap between designer and developer like never before.

Let me break it down......Your designer makes a mock up of their Layout in Photoshop or Fireworks. In Thermo you hit "Create new layout from PSD file". It then turns your PSD mockup into full MXML!!!! The designer could then tweak things in Thermo if they like, scroll bars, buttons, etc. Or you as the developer can take over. There is some overlap, between designer & developer, but it is good overlap.

The ability to just go into the code and replace dummy text, is beautiful, just beautiful.

After that we sat through the worst presentation of the day. I don't mean to be harsh, they lady was an awesome programmer, but I believe she was a little nervous as her room had twice as many people as anyone else. If it's your first time speaking and there are 300 geeks staring at you, wow, that would make me nervous too. I can't say I didn't learn anything, it was about Item Renderers and Item Editors, but, she needs to work on her public speaking skills a little more. She seemed happy to be done, and I feel really bad for her, but public speaking is definitely not for everyone, I couldn't do it.

Next was Lunch, gross ass pasta (with peas!!!) and brick like breadsticks. Looking forward to Adobe's dinner on Tuesday.

After lunch I was able to see the coolest thing ever. OpenFlux / Plexiglass. It takes a list and turns it into cool 3D effects, like a Carousel, Cover Flow, Time Machine, Roller Coaster, etc. It even has cameras that allow you to move around your flex layout, so cool.

Next was Swiz framework. It's probably really cool, but it was hurting my head, I think it's way over my expertise at this time.

Finally was creating an MMO from scratch in 59 minutes. This was NOT what I thought it was going to be. The guy flew through everything, and I suppose it was more for ppl interested in game development. I went to watch what was going on, but quickly got lost. I'm a WoW geek, so the beginning interested me, then I was lost.

So far, I have only taken away OpenFlux/PlexiGlass and the wonders of things to come at Adobe. I hope Tueday will be better.