SWF It Good

So today Daniel Dura, an Adobe Evangelist, came by Travelocity to talk about Flash, Flex and AIR. It was interesting to here him speak and his hair was redder then pictures led on. But I won't hold that against him.

History and Examples

If you have ever seen anyone from Adobe speak, you know they have to go over the History of the Flash Player, AVM, JIT and all that. Luckily he didn't have to talk about the history of the web as some Adobe eseminars do.

Once he got past that some people asked questions about some of Adobe's technologies. I'm not quoting Daniel, but he compared Flash to Silverlight and AIR to WPF. One thing I didn't know is that the debugger and even the compiler are open source. Though I will never want to rewrite the compiler. Nice Adobe

Oh and they showed this killer travel app that they cooked up.

Examples

I don't know what the rest of the audience's background is but I though it was good he went over using AS3 in FlexBuilder. Some examples were using E4X, Arrays and DisplayObjects. Afterwards he created a simple Flex rss reader for his blog. Then converted to an AIR app which is quite simple if you didn't know.

What was not easy was him showing us how to compile it only using the command line. Thankfully after that he showed how to do that in FlexBuilder (cake).

Next was an HTML example, I forgot what the example was. Though he remined me that you can call flash packages in JavaScript. The way it works is their is the flash engine and the JavaScript engine. The JavaScript engine says, "Hey, I can't find this DropShadowFilter thing...Oh, I'll look in the Flash engine. There it is." That is really exciting to me. See my post on calling Flash class in Javascript.

After that he talked about the other AIR specific packages.

• Drag and Drop
• Service Monitor
• SqlLite

(An aside) One thing I saw that was awesome cause I love the in operator and for each but I didn't know you could do this

Good Job Daniel. You reawakened my want to use AIR.

Oh see his Air Code