Adobe Flex User Group Tour – Denver

January 19, 2012 By

We’re happy to be a part of the Adobe User Group Roadshow this year. If you’re not sure what we’re talking about, Adobe announced the dates and locations (US only so far) of their international User Group Road Show. We’re stoked that Denver is on the list and that the RMAUG and RIA 5280 are co-hosting, you can RSVP here. This will be a great pre-curser to 360|Flex (also in Denver) in April.

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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360Flex 2012 – Angry Birds

January 5, 2012 By

Wanna save $150 bucks on your ticket to 360|Flex 2012? Get it before this friday at 10am. We don’t call it early bird, we call it the Faithful ticket, but it’s pretty much the same thing as far as the price goes.

 

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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360Flex 2012 – Register before January and get Envision ADPT Pro

December 5, 2011 By

Our friend and long time speaker Giorgio Natili has offered an awesome bonus for those attendees who register before the end of the year.

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!

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

360Flex 2012 Schedule

November 18, 2011 By

This was one of the hardest schedules to put together. They’re always hard, with more than 100 submissions and less than 40 spots to fill, it’s a tough process. Add to that the recent changes around Flex and Flash, and the job of making sure 360|Flex 2012 is relevant got much harder.

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!

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

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: , , , , , , , , ,
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