Adobe MAX 2007: First Day + Our session

I had some troubles with my internet connection yesterday evening at my hotel room, so with some delay here it is. The first day at MAX :-)

1. The Google Analytics Reporting suite, our own session:

Nicolas and I had a good time doing our presentation. We started with some Sandra Kim tunes, before diving into the hardcore world of code. We enjoyed it and the reactions on the application are very good and encouraging. Keep an eye out on the analytics website

For more pictures on our presentation check out: about.boulevart.be

2. Peter Elst on Best practices in Actionscript 3:
http://www.peterelst.com
As always Peter's sessions are pixel perfect. Most of the stuff het talked about I am already familiar with, but I went to support Peter. But remember, and we all know this, when going live ALWAYS DELETE your trace statements. Peter did a simple test with an array filled with 10000 elements. With trace statement 11 seconds to do a loop, without the trace statement 41 milliseconds.


3. The keynote:
Kevin Lynch, Ben Forta, Mike Downey, Justin Everett Church and the rest of the Adobe crew presented us with all the latest of Adobe: AIR, Flash player 10 codename Astro, Hydra, Flexbuilder 3,...

4.Xavier Beumala & Carlos Rovira: Flex in Flash
http://www.madeinflex.com
Xavier and Carlos talked about combining flash and flex. It seems that with the release of flexbuilder 3, the flex team has put a lot of effort into simplifying the skinning of components. The flex component kit is now standard in Flexbuilder 3.
Still to me it seems the workflow of skinning components or using flash to build them for Flex is not yet optimal. There are still to many parameters and rules to cope with to call it a fluid workflow. Important was the usage of Flex components in Flash . It's quite simple actually. You have to put an onEnterFrame event listener on the loader object once the flex swf is loaded and wait for the second frame. Then the flew swf is all yours and you can start listening to events dispatched from the Flex component.

5. Mario Klingemann on The Blind Sketckmaker.
htpp://www.quasimondo.com
Mario posed himself the question: "Can computers generate art?". He developed a few tools in AIR to help him find the answer. Basically he feeds his software images and with the usage of the image filters he retracts data from the picture in order to categorize it. The he let's the compouter generate images from a blank canvas and hold them against his database to check wether the picture the computer generated is art or not.
It was a very inspiring session to me and will make get more into the filters for sure. The point is the idea and not the technology and Mario is ahead of the class.



And yes, we had some great cava afterwards :-)