The first 2 sessions are over. First up was Mike Downey, a big-wig from Adobe, with the keynote speech. He gave an overview of what has happened around Flash this year before going into the new stuff which is coming out soon. And that new stuff looks very exciting - the Adobe Device Centre for developing Flash apps for portable devices, Flex 2 (which has been around for a few months but is now taking off), Apollo for taking Flash to the desktop and, of course, the Flash 9 IDE.
The Flash 9 IDE in particular looks very cool.
For the 2nd session I caught "Introductions to Flex 2.0 for Flash Developers" by Tink, a London based Flash and Flex developer/guru.
As it was an introductory session, I found the first half pretty basic as he had a lot of ground to cover. But when he got to the more complicated stuff in the 2nd half of the presentation, it was much more interesting.
Flex is starting to sort itself out for me in my head and I'm thinking of more and more ways we can use it at work. There's 2 more sessions at the conference about Flex components, so that should hopefully give me some more info and help settle the final pieces in my mental puzzle.
There does seem to be a few obstacles (though not insurmountable by any means of the imagination). These are that old AS2 components are basically useless in Flex - which means a lot of re-factoring of legacy code (and that's a lot of components) and that Flex apps require the Flash Player 9 - which has a current market penetration which isn't suitable for most of our clients. This is changing fast though so I doubt it'll be an issue in 3-6 months time. The first issue will sort itself out given time - once Flash 9 IDE is realised, we'll be developing everything in AS3 anyway.
I'll be typing up my notes later and posting them when they're done. Which means probably not many beers for me tonight!
Up later today: sessions on Apollo, Agile development and more Flex.
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