360flex – this IS NOT the end of the world as we know it.

November 9, 2011 By

I’m in the middle of sifting through more than 100 submissions for 360|Flex 2012, but wanted to take a minute or three to put my thoughts down on paper… err screen about the announcement that Adobe is killing off the Flash Mobile player.

 

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.

 

Filed Under: 360flex, Announcements, Business, Community, Reasons to Attend, Sessions Tagged With: , , , , , , , , ,

360|Flex 2012 – Trying something new – Speaker Labs

November 2, 2011 By

We tried this at another event and it was popular, but it wasn’t well executed :) As we like to do, we’re improving on the next iteration.

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?

Filed Under: 360flex, Announcements, Business, Community, Hands-On, Reasons to Attend, Sessions Tagged With: , , , , , , ,

360Flex 2012 – Paid Pre Conference training?

November 1, 2011 By

When Tom and I started the conference one of the things we hated was how other events charge for pre-conference training. Just adding to the price of conferences.

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?

 

Filed Under: 360flex, Announcements, Business, Hands-On, Reasons to Attend, Sessions, Training Tagged With: , , , , , ,

360Flex – We’re Bringing Training Back

October 21, 2011 By

Now that I’ve got that song stuck in your head…

 

Some of you will remember this, many won’t. We once offered a two day hands on training course at the Ebay Campus. We had 4 instructors, and the entire weekend was hands on with frameworks.

Well we’re getting back into training. NOT just frameworks. That’s where you come in. If there was a 2 day hands on, meals included training in Denver sometime around January would you come? What would you like that training to be? Should be focus on more 101 intro level stuff, or see if we can’t raise the training bar and really go nuts? Maybe we do something mobile with Adobe’s shiny new Phonegap platform?

Your ticket to this training would also apply in part to a ticket to 360|Flex, because we’re cool like that.

What would you like to see offered?

Filed Under: 360flex, Announcements, Business, Community, Hands-On, Reasons to Attend, Training Tagged With: , , , , , , , ,

360Flex 2011 – Thank You

April 21, 2011 By

The last day, and the day after 360|Flex are bittersweet. Everyone is signing the welcome banner on wednesday, stopping by to say goodbye as they leave to catch flights, congratulating us on making a profit (w00t!!), etc. It’s great to be able to say goodbye to everyone. The day after is lots of packing up, seeing the stragglers around the lobby, driving home.

It also means it’s gonna be a year until we do it again. It was sad when it was only 6 months, now it’s a year and so… well THANK YOU FLEX COMMUNITY.

The awesome vibe and spirit of 360|Flex 2011 will keep us energized for the rest of the year.

I wanted to take a minute to post this and make sure there was no doubt in anyone’s mind why we do this. If you left Denver last week, ready to do cool shit, conquer the world, and in general be awesome, then we did our job, and so did the speakers and sponsors.

If you didn’t let me know why! We’ll do better!

I know for some it’s hard to think of a conference as a “mom and pop operation” they’re usually huge and faceless, and it’s easy to think of them in terms of a big business. Funny story, I was sitting at the reg table (my spot is the one by the printer, my stickered out laptop and many tablets are always there. If I’m not walking around helping out, I’m there reading tweets to make sure the temp in Salon A is ok, or the internet in Salon C works, etc) and NJ from Adobe was talking to an attendee. The funny part of this is that I’ve met NJ exactly twice. Once a long long time ago at MAX when he was demo’ing a Surface Table built with AS, and then again in Denver last week, he didn’t remember the first time, and I probably didn’t even really introduce myself. I’ve met the Attendee at least 2x also, last time in DC for 360|Flex East and again last week in Denver. The attendee was complaining to NJ “Who ever runs this conference should….” I wasn’t really paying attention to their conversation, but that got my attention so I looked up. NJ looked to me, then the attendee, then to me, then back and pointed at me and said “That guy. He runs it”

The point of that story, is that there is no “who ever” it’s John and Nicole Wilker. One of us is always at the front desk. We welcome every attendee Sunday and Monday, and we say goodbye all day Wednesday. I give a short morning keynote about the conference and life in general. There’s not hired hands doing the grunt work, there’s no group “back home at

the office”. There’s no private office where the staff hides out. Our office last week was a dining room full of boxes where we stored things.

 

360|Flex is awesome because of the community. Not me, not Tom when he was on board, not Nicole. We’re stewards, nothing more. This year’s 360|Flex rekindled why I started doing these events. It made me remember that the community is so incredible and sharing, and no matter how much they make as an indie dev or corporate dev, they need and want a place to come together, that they can afford to get to. To sit with a beer and plate of snacks and talk about code, how excited they are for Spoon, which is better; robotlegs or swiz. Take a short field trip to Denver one day, etc.

 

Tom and I started 360|Flex because it was the event we wanted to attend, I continue it because it’s the event folks like, and I love being able to see them come in and leave with all sorts of new knowledge and skills. Nicole and I never set out to be conference organizers, but we love providing a place for the community to show up in person, and grow and get stronger.

 

So long blog post short… Thank you to every single attendee, speaker, and sponsor who helped make 360|Flex 2011 so awesome. You placed your trust in us to deliver a good event, and I hope we lived up to that trust and will see you next year! (Or at MAX, keep an eye out for 360|MAX)

If you missed 360|Flex 2011, try not to next year :) But don’t worry you can watch the session recordings.

Filed Under: 360flex, Announcements, Business, Community, Reasons to Attend, Sessions, Sponsors, The Speakers, why Tagged With: , , , , , ,
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