These road shows are great opportunities to meet Adobeans who don’t usually make the User Group Circuit and really get a feel for the community. Adobe chips in some money for beer and food, so these meetings are usually a bit bigger and more of a “Thing” than your average user group meeting. You’ll have a chance to talk one-on-one with Adobe engineers and evangelists. Something that doesn’t happen often outside of conferences.

They’re always fun. Always a great learning experience. Get the latest details on the open sourcing of Adobe into the Apache foundation, and probably some good tidbits on the next Flash builder… just a guess :)

We’re happy to be providing two tickets to 360|Flex 2012 to be raffled off during the meeting as well, so if you’re still on the fence (really we can’t fathom that, but you never know) about attending the most awesome event in the Flex/AIR/ActionScript space, you’ll have two chances to win a free ticket.

Make sure you RSVP so that the organizers know how much food and beer to get. And if you don’t want to take your chances on winning a free ticket, register now for 360|Flex 2012 before it sells out. It did last year.

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You can get two sizes (138×138, or 728×90) just right click and save the linked file.

We appreciate everyone who puts a banner on their site to show their support of the conference. Every site is a huge help in our grassroots marketing efforts!

Thanks! See you April! Register now before we sell out.

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And when it’s over it’s over. We don’t extend early bird, we don’t have early early bird, followed by early bird, followed by slightly late bird. We have the Faithful ticket, and the regular price ticket. That’s it.

We don’t extend the Faithful ticket because it’s not fair to those who bought it early. When conference extend early bird pricing it’s a ploy. They need more sales, and are trying to lure you in. Usually it’s because their conference costs too much, and they sell mostly early bird tickets :)

If you buy a Faithful ticket, you’re using your wallet to show us your love, to make sure we know we have the communities support early on, it’s a big help in getting the conference planned, etc. After that the regular (and still way affordable) ticket price kicks in.

We also don’t extend the Faithful ticket price because the regular price isn’t so bad as to need it. We don’t charge $1000 or $1500. it’s $599 if you buy your ticket right before the conference (assuming we don’t sell out, which I think we will again).  The Faithful ticket was created to help out our indie dev friends who are super budget conscious. They don’t have expense accounts and even though their company might be paying for the ticket, their company is them. We realize many of our attendees come to 360|Flex on their own dime and the Faithful ticket was a way to help them out.

While making a profit is important to us, our community being able to afford to attend the conference is a big deal.

So all that was said to really emphasize the point that if you want to save some money on your ticket to 360|Flex 2012, buy your ticket today. Tomorrow at 10am the price goes up to the regular price, and that’s that. No amount of crying will bring back the Faithful price.

Register now!

See you in Denver.

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A Pro License to Envision ADPT Pro Eclipse Plugin. ($49 value)

“Speed up transition from planning phase to implementation generating Actionscript, Java, JavaScript, PHP and Pseudocode. Widen your collaboration with options to import diagrams from other Envision APDT products. Easily organize your common diagram snippet, export and share them with your team. Discuss ideas and break down the gap between technical guys and not technical guys with the simple an intuituve pseudocode output. Speed up the overall design process.”

We’ll send an email at the end of the year to everyone who has registered so far with the discount code for your free license.

Giorgio ROCKS!

Better register fast!

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We just posted the session details PDF. Take a peak. We’ll be updating it regularly as we add more content, but at least you can see what kind or truly awesome stuff we’ve got lined up. Go on, go download it. While you’re here, make sure to check the schedule too. We’ll tweet when we make changes, but just in general, take a look. It’s a hot line up.

Oh yeah you should register soon. Remember last time, we sold out. Our goal is to do it again, but more than a week before the conference. Let’s do this.

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This time around, I enlisted the help of a few folks whom I trust a great deal; Ben Clinkinbeard, Jeffry Houser and Sim Bateman. We balanced providing what you’d expect from us (awesome cutting edge concepts around Flex and AIR), with some new stuff to make sure the community knows what the Adobe stack is all about, what options are out there for doing HTML stuff, and mobile stuff, etc.. It was a tough balancing act for sure. I think we did a pretty good job of creating a rock star line up. Highlighting what’s awesome kick ass with Flex and AIR, while also talking about mobile options, HTML a little, and more.

You’ll notice two things on the schedule that are kind of new.

1. Paid sunday training. There’s still free training on Sunday don’t worry. However we also want to try something new. Offering 2 full day hands on training classes, in addition to two free Sunday classes. Each paid class is 8 hours of hands-on learning. Space is limited in each one, so if you’re interested in getting some awesome hands-on training for a 360|Flex style price (hint: 1 class is $100 the other is $145 but you get an arduino kit) then you should register for those as well. You have to be a 360|Flex attendee to take  part in the training. There’s registration links on the schedule.
2. An empty column. That column is for sponsored sessions and late additions. Once we start filling in that column, we’ll move the content so it’s not all in one room, but we intentionally left space for late additions to the line up. Normally I pack the schedule, then have to juggle sessions, etc. Getting a little smarter :) We’ll be adding a bunch of content between now and April, so stay tuned.

So with that said, take a peak at the schedule.

See you in April. Register now!

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I also won’t lie and say it was a surprise or that I hadn’t already started thinking about possible futures for 360|Flex.

I’ll also point out that none of us were Flex developers 10 years ago, most of us came from somewhere else, and likely would move on eventually, guess Adobe chose the when for us, which is never fun or ideal, but it is what it is.  As an Adobe community we’re at least used to things changing and messing up our plans, usually directly at Adobe’s hands :)

So what does this mean for 360|Flex?

Well it means that our hopes of having a kick ass 10 year anniversary 360|Flex conference are probably not gonna happen :) I play to be doing conferences in another 5 years, but 360|Flex as a brand, well we’ll have to see.

But it DOES NOT mean 360|Flex 2012 won’t happen.

It DOES NOT mean 360|Flex 2012 won’t kick ass.

It DOES mean there’ll be some awesome new content around the Adobe Stack at 360|Flex 2012, which if you’ve been to any of the last 2-3 360|Flex’s that’s nothing new. Sim has presented some JS stuff before, and we’ve mixed in a few non Flex sessions from time to time to help present other options for developers. We’ll continue doing that.

It DOES NOT mean we’ll be having any Microsoft sessions, or sponsorship. That’s not what 360|Flex or myself are about. There’s plenty of events that will take anyone’s money for placement and speaking opportunities. We’re not one of those events.

It DOES mean that 360|Flex will (as all good programmers do) start looking at other aspects of delivering awesome experiences. We’re not running away from Flex, not in the least, but Adobe has a stack that’s interesting, and the community is likely to do really awesome things with Flex. Now that it’s in our hands.

Think about the timing of 360|Flex 2012… 5 months after this announcement, after the last official Adobe release of Flex. What do you think the Open Source team will have to share by April? I suspect quite a bit. If you’re at all curious/worried/interested in the post Adobe Flex roadmap, I think 360|Flex 2012 will be the place to be. Not just to hear what the future has in store for you, but to be a part of that future, which is in my opinion, the most important reason to attend.

We’ve always supported past abortive attempts at helping Adobe and the Opening of Flex. We think that was and is a positive direction… It’s great that maybe now, finally Flex will be in the hands of those who most want it to succeed. Some of the best (by survey response) sessions at 360|Flex have been ones pushing the envelope, showing what’s possible when you get creative and think outside the box, also those that talk about open options. Remember the Spoon general session?

All of this is to say that, 360|Flex is going to grow and evolve the same way Flex and the overall Adobe Stack are going to. I can’t wait for April to get here and see not just what the community has in store for Flex, but what Adobe has in store for the community with tools like Muse and Edge, and PhoneGap.

As a teaser, here’s a look at some of the session titles that we’re looking at having.

• It is in the details (CSS3 magic)

• Choosing the Right Mobile Development Platform
• Geolocation 201
• Introduction to Robotlegs
• Maven by example
• Advanced Mobile Q&A
• Lets write some unit tests.
• How not to suck as a Flex Developer
• And of course way more. But that’s some of that stuff we’re looking at.

Tickets were already moving fast, and that hasn’t stopped, I’d register now before we sell out. Yeah I still think we’re gonna sell out. If you’re doing Flex today, you’ll still get a ton out of 360|Flex, and likely you’ll be doing it in April too.

Register Now.

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I Don’t Care. 

I love Adobe and their tech and tools, but I’ve never been a supporter for the sake of supporting. Nor have i ever held back constructive criticism.

Think about this…

Have and love your iPad? Then you aren’t missing Flash mobile anyway. Same goes for iPod Touch, and iPhone. Many get a long just fine. I’d even argue android phones do just fine even with it, and no one uses it.

Have a Xoom or Galaxy Tab? How many flash sites/apps do or did you use that were flash? Me. Almost none. Who’s building apps for mobile flash player only? I can’t even think of the last flash app i used on my Xoom.

Do I think Flash is dead? Absolutely not. I’m as bullish as ever on Flex and AIR. Will the crappy banner ad makers leave and go HTML5? Sure and the anti-Flash crowd will turn their ire in that direction. Will people stop building Enterprise Flex apps? Not likely. At least not likely anytime soon. To the CEO who worries about when his Fortune 100 uses Tablets, well let’s be honest that’ll be in 6 years, and your developers will package that awesome, smoothly designed Flex app into a native AIR app for whatever tablet you choose. There’s no risk in investing in Flex/AIR, there never was, there still isn’t. I’d challenge anyone to present a realistic use case to the contrary.

Community

Are your skills as a Flash/Flex developer useless? no. I’d say you’re pretty damn well positioned. Nook? Air for android. Kindle Fire? same. Galaxy/Xoom. same thing. See where this is going. Oh yeah iPad? iPhone? yup you’re still good.

Does Adobe need to improve the cross compilation for iOS, yes. Will they, I suspect so. i hope so.

PhoneGap anyone? Think that’s not more important now? Options are important and the community has many of varying sizes and shapes.

There’s so much future ahead for Flex’ers and AIR’ers(?) that i hate seeing the community go into collective conniption fits. The Flash community is an awesome group of people with really awesome skills, making really awesome things. Losing a platform no one really targeted is not going to hurt anyone. My biggest hope is those engineers now move to building better tools and such for Adobe to help make AIR and Flex, etc more awesome. I know that’s a lot of awesome, but really, it fits.

Ok time to get back to creating an awesome line up for 360|Flex 2012. I think you’ll see that the future is bright for Flex/AIR and mobile when I publish it the schedule. I’m already having a hard time picking the best of the best submissions.

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So here’s the deal. We all know that at the end of a session there’s questions. Sometimes there’s 2 and they’re answered before the session ends. Sometimes there’s 15 or the speaker goes until time is up. Our speakers don’t hide in green rooms, and would rather sit with you over a beer anyhow, but to help make getting questions answered we’re doing what we call speaker labs.

How do they work?

The old way was a separate room off to the side of the conference where speakers were scheduled to basically hang out and answer questions, etc. For those that found the room it was great. Many got one-on-one help from industry experts, and loved it. But like I said, it was hard to find.

This time we’re making it easier. Basically in one room each time slot there will be a lab, the speakers from the previous time slot will all have a table. As soon as their session is over they’ll go to the LAB room for extended Q&A and discussion.

This means attendees can choose, attend the next session or get a question answered or more direct help. That’s a downside for sure. But we think it balances out in that we do try to get 100% of the sessions recorded, and posted so you might miss a session live, but could go back and watch the recording.

The other downside is that it reduces the total number of sessions we can offer. I hemmed and hawed on this aspect, since I think part of what makes 360|Flex so awesome is that we pack so much information into the conference. BUT I think (and you can correct me on this) what really makes 360|Flex awesome isn’t only volume of sessions, but depth of knowledge and I think while trading off a few sessions to have labs, we’re opening the door for a lot more knowledge transfer and education.

I think this will add a new aspect to 360|Flex for both attendees and speakers and really add to the value of the conference.

I think it ends up being a win win from that stand point. So we’re going to give it a try. I’m working on the schedule now, the Call For Papers closes in about 2 weeks, but I’m starting to look at sessions and plan things.

Can’t wait to reveal the line up. I think you’ll like it! You have bought your ticket right?

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I was talking to Sim the other day and we were talking about the Sunday training and my philosophy that it shouldn’t add to the price of the conference because we want to keep it affordable for those without expense accounts or companies that will pay their way. But then I got to thinking. There’s no reason to not offer both.

There’s plenty of room for Flex 101, intro to AIR for android, etc. but what if we offered something more in-depth, with more prepared materials, etc. Basically regular training you’d get elsewhere. For a small fee. You could still attend the free hands-on sessions, but could also opt in to pay for the paid training.

I’m thinking two paid training sessions, plus 3-4 of our standard hands-n sessions that are included in the registration price.
This type of hybrid pre-conference option opens some interesting doors for the conference. Obviously we’d get a little bump in income which helps keep us going (we’d of course split with the instructor of those courses or something) but it also keeps true to our initial thinking that pre-conference training shouldn’t be an added expense.

What do you think? Would you be interested in paying say $100-$200 for an 8 hour training course on something that you were interested in or needed to learn?

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