Today was the first day of flash and the city and it was quite inspirational! It started up with some minor issues like standing in line for forty minutes just to get the badges, then off for a quick breakfast! The Helen Mills theater might not be the best place for conferences but it is a nice place and that kind of makes up for it. The biggest issue is the sound of the speakers mixed up with the sound of people at the bar.

Lunch time at Flash and the City

When the sessions started I was impressed by the number of adobe people present. They did a quick keynote over 20 slides each and with a maximum of 20 seconds on each slide. Really a great format when adopted properly, but a few of the speakers just speeded up their speeches instead!

This day I mostly followed the technical track and got some inspiration about Cairngorm and Parsley (which might be to dependent on meta-data tags and data binding that slows down applications and makes it hard to get an insight in existing code). Then there was some lazy programming with a great professor that talked about ugly solutions and how that some times are the best and that you shouldn’t strive to make the BestButtonEva class for each project you make but to instead have focus on the current problem. An other session was about how to structure your project and routines. It’s kind of funny since I’m actually writing such a blog post right now. But it is on hold, among with the project where I’m evaluating structure. Here I also got an Ant-book as a freebie =) Then there was Brass Monkey which is really cool stuff! Control you games (or other applications) via your smartphone. It was presented as your a Wii-remote look-a-like. You have your application and then connect your smartphone to it via wifi. Then it uses a mix of TCP and UDP protocols to give a smart protocol of real time response and data. The demos were pretty cool and it finished with a race boot battle between an android phone control and a iOS phone control http://twitpic.com/59oqyk.

The main part I’ll be taking with me from today was that a lot of my ideas collaborate with others ideas which is great! Then I also got a great deal of inspiration on making a better messaging system in flash and improve unit testing and automation of projects. I’m also flooded with framework ideas but I don’t know if those ideas ever will be a framework. But now I got the luxurious problem of picking what to do first.

Hopefully tomorrow will be as inspirational as today! Really looking forward to see Keith Peters speech!

 
Read more: Flash and the City – The second day