On Monday I attended “Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From The Ground Up Tour“.
First half of the 9 hours marathon to present ActionScript 3 was a true beginners course to Object Oriented Programming. With AS3, Adobe finally manages to provide dissent environment, IDE and run-time. It will appeal to lots of developers (Java developers will be quite exited about it, its very similar syntax), but it will be putting off lots of designers (as many I know who were there are not very happy what they saw), as they don’t get it, and some of them probably never will. Good news for them is that THE time-line is not going away and they can still make some money with the manual-non-scripting approach. The market will decide who is going to stay in the game.
Second half of the presentation was actually much more interesting for me, because Colin Moock show how all things link together using Eclipse Flex IDE and a browser to develop small web application. So, you can develop smooth rich media app outside Flash, but the bad news is, you still have to pay for the IDE and the compiler. Hmmm, I don’t like that. Seems like they missed the whole point of attracting new army of developers to develop new applications for potential rich media content delivery.
Whole examples and tutorials presented are in Moock’s book Essential Actionscript 3.0.
The presentation was great and he is calm and brilliant presenter.
Presentation slides can be found here.
Code examples used in the presentation can be found here.
Flex 3 Builder Pro or Flex Eclipse Plugin (you can get 60 days trail) or Free Flex 2 SDK can be found here.
For me, I’m still for developing in the holy web standards trinity XHTML, CSS and JavaScript, but I can see great potential in using Flex as addition to this for some solutions.
… “we have only 300 employees” – says Dave Morin, a Senior Platform Manager of Facebook. Huh? Small? Ask UK/European companies what small means. Obviosly there are big differences between the US and the rest of the world about ‘size’. It was great to hear presentation of the currently most busiest social networking web app in the world. Well done to the FOWA organizers.
For the FOWA’s second day my top 3 presentations were:
“Let your company have a voice and culture” – are probably the words said by Dick Costolo echoing in my head today. For the end, I enjoyed Leisa Reichelt’s presentation on “Ambient Intimacy”. She said really nice thoughts about human nature and user behavior on the web.
… were the first words echoing in my head after the first day at the FOWA conference. The presentation by Robin Christopherson, (AbilityNet) – “The Art of Attractive Yet Useable Sites”, about accessibility and the current state of what’s out there was brilliant. Just to see how one of the biggest online business (amazon.co.uk, Yahoo) maintain and develop nearly impossible to access websites and online services is terrifying.
In my design and development practise I try to develop as much as possible accessible web applications using web standards, but sometimes the business requirements are impossible to met while taking care of everything. It is easier for websites and smaller projects, but for web applications is much harder.
My top 3 presentations were:
Daniel Burka (digg / Pownce) “How User Feedback can Influences Design”, Lane Becker & Thor Muller (Satisfaction) – “Customer Service is the New Marketing” and Dion Almaer, (Ajaxian.com) – “How to take your app offline”.
Of course here were other brilliant speeches, and they were all excellent, ending with the live recording of the Diggnation video podcast as top entertaining highlight of the day.
All conference will be available in audio format, so watch the conference web-site for those.
You can see photos here.
Off to day 2 now…
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