Friday, August 17, 2007

360Flex Seattle

I just returned from the 360Flex Conference in Seattle. It was fun and I learned a few things. A couple of the main themes in the sessions were teaching developers how to be designers and how'd they do that? I would have to say my two favorite sessions were Programmatic Visualization by Andrew Trice where he had great examples of using the drawing API inside Flex and Flex and Ruby by Simeon Bateman where he demonstrated how to set up a Ruby on Rails dataset and access it using RemoteObject in Flex. You can find more information from these two great presenters on their blogs: Andrew Trice and Simeon Bateman - The simFluence.

I plan to use the Flex drawing API in my new reporting / mapping application where I need to develop a measuring tool for my map. I also plan to learn Ruby on Rails as soon as I can because it seems like a great, easy tool to set up datasets for use inside Flex.

The one topic I really would have liked to see a session about was how to develop an application in AIR for use offline. Maybe using some SQLLite examples, XML examples, etc. This is a topic I'm extremely interested in and there doesn't seem to be many examples out there yet, so I was hoping there would be a presentation at the conference on this.

Finally I also was able to fit in a few fun things while I was visiting Seattle. It was my first stay in Seattle even though I'm a native Northwesterner. I wish I would have traveled there before because it is a really fun city to visit. I highly recommend seeing a Mariners game in Safeco field. It is a beautiful field and there's nothing better than a baseball game (except maybe a Packers game in Lambeau field). We went to the Monday night game where they beat the Minnesota Twins in the bottom of the 9th with a homerun. Awesome!!!

I also did a few touristy trips, such as visiting Pikes Place Market. Seattle is celebrating the markets 100th birthday with Centennial days. I took a couple hours to visit Seattle Center where I saw the Space Needle and visited the Experience Music Project (EMP) and the Science Fiction Museum. I loved the Northwest section of the EMP where there were music items from the grunge era in the 1990's. The song writings by Kurt Cobain for a Nirvana song were very cool! If you're a sci-fi fan like I am you'll enjoy the Science Fiction Museum with all of it's cool movie costumes and props including the wicked witches hat from the Wizard of Oz, Arnold Schwarzenegger's leather jacket from Terminator, Darth Vader's costume from the Star Wars movies and all the Star Trek props and costumes you could imagine. It was all a lot of fun!

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