Andrew Shorten

Just a quick reminder about the London Poker Tournament that is happening this Thursday in London - if you want to come along then you need to register ASAP as we’re getting close to capacity.

You’ll find the registration form, event information, location and details on the prizes at http://www.pokercoder.com/.

Note that this is a *physical* event (i.e. with real food/beer and the chance to meet with fellow developers in the flesh) and NOT an online tournament. Hope to see you there.

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Just a heads-up that Colin Moock’s ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up Tour will be coming to Europe in early 2008. If you haven’t heard about the tour already, then essentially Colin will be providing a full day of intensive ActionScript 3.0 training for free, in association with Adobe.

Colin will be coming to Amsterdam, London and Munich as part of the European leg of the tour. I can confirm at this stage that the Amsterdam event will be on February 27th; I’ll post the dates for London and Munich as soon as they are available.

Registration isn’t open just yet, so just keep your calendar clear if you’re interested in attending! The US events filled up extremely quickly, so I would encourage you to keep an eye on the official tour website for further details on dates.

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The guys at the Flash Brighton user group have been working on putting together a free one day event that will cover Flex, AIR and ActionScript 3 - on the lines of a Flex/AIR/RIA Camp, but entitled Flash Brighton’s Big Day Out!

This event will take place on Saturday 24th November at the Royal Albion Hotel on Brighton’s seafront. The details are still going up on the official website, so you’ll need to keep watching for full details on speakers and sessions, but registration for the event is now open.

Adobe is helping out with the food/drinks, and I’ll be there to do the keynote session in the morning, but this is an event run by the community for the community, so please come along or tell any friends/colleagues who would like to get up to speed on recent Adobe developments about it.

Spaces at the event will be limited so make sure you register. I hope to see you there

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I’ve known about this for a while now, but details about the forthcoming Adobe-sponsored Poker Tournament are now available at http://www.pokercoder.com/. It’s your chance to learn and/or play poker, mix with fellow poker-playing Adobe designers and developers and possibly win tickets to Flash on the Beach and a host of Adobe software prizes!

The first ever London Poker Tournament will take place at the Grosvenor Victoria Casino on November 1st 2007. The event is completely free, but spaces are limited so you do need to register in advance! Hats off to Sean McSharry who did the research on the correlation between poker players & coders and who is also organising the event - he has more details on the evening here.

Come and join us for a beer, a game of Poker and for what should be a fun night - btw, I’ll be on the beginners table so you don’t have to be an expert poker player to come along

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The first ever MAX event in Europe has come to a close, with pretty much everyone I spoke to giving great feedback as to the success of the event in Barcelona. Blogging throughout the conference proved difficult (there was just so much going on) so instead I thought I’d summarise what MAX Europe was for me now that it’s all over.

So, for me, MAX was… spending a day with 20 or so representatives from interactive agencies from across Europe, watching a great MAX keynote, being interviewed for the BBC’s Digital Planet programme on the World Service (and podcast) talking about AIR, eating too many McDonalds (I found them to provide a good pre-speaking burst of energy, but maybe not so good for the diet), debating with some of the UK journalists about ‘what exactly is a runtime’ over drinks, delivering sessions on Designer/Developer workflow and building AIR applications using Dreamweaver & Spry (those who know me will be surprised by the topic selection allocation, but I now have new-found respect for Spry - check it out on Labs!), giving press and analyst interviews on AIR, Flex and RIA, walking way too far to get to a restaurant (thanks to Robin Charney who believed the concierge that it was a 10 minute walk and refused to get a taxi, an hour later we were still walking), meeting with people that I have only ever seen on Twitter, Facebook and email, listening to the buzz around Thermo, watching the Sneak Peeks (and being very impressed with some cool image stretching demos), catching up with Ben Forta, Mike Downey, Mark Anders, Serge Jespers, Waldo Smeets, Enrique Duvos and other Adobeans, mingling with people in the Community Pavilion, getting stressed by last minute changes to the Birds of a Feather sessions and room locations (it was all OK in the end), helping Andy Hood from AKQA out of a laptop issue in his session, being impressed with the conference wi-fi network (it worked), being stopped from taking two MAX mugs home (my Adobe badge didn’t wash with the security guard and it’s one per person) and attending the MAX Royale official party. Boy, am I glad that I came back to Adobe… MAX was a busy but fantastic three days.

From an organisation perspective I think things ran really smoothly (it felt like there had been a MAX in Europe for years) - I’ve heard there were a couple of presenters who had technical setup issues and I hope we can improve on that in years to come, but for my sessions everything worked OK.

It really was great to see 1200 designers and developers from across Europe at this event and to really feel the momentum that is building around Flex and AIR here. If you attended MAX and have got some feedback on what went well and what you’d like to see us do different next time please leave a comment or contact me direct.

I look forward to seeing you at next year’s MAX Europe in…. (to be announced ).

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If you’re heading out to MAX Europe next week and you’ve got a Flash Lite 1.1 or later enabled mobile phone then download this application (right click… save as) to get information about sessions right on your handset!

Download MAX Europe phone application (right click… save as) and then copy to your phone.

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We’ve now got a list of Birds of a Feather sessions which will take place on Monday night at MAX Europe.

We’ve probably got room for one more BOF session - so if you’d like to kick-start a discussion around a topic go to the Max Europe BOF list and post your suggestion today.

The sessions that have been proposed and accepted are as follows:

BOF - Ask the Flex team
Meet up with Matt Chotin and other members of the Flex team to ask them anything about Flex! Join this session for a discussion on Flex, current and future, and to give your feedback to the team.

BOF - Meet the XD team
The XD Team at Adobe has a simple goal: To design and develop elegant, sophisticated tools and applications that allow you to make and build better stuff. Come meet the team, see our influences, and hear what inspires us. Then tell us what inspires you.

BOF - Building real-life AIR applications using AJAX
Join this BOF to talk about AJAX frameworks, developing for AIR with HTML/JavaScript, developer tools and the approaches/considerations for building desktop apps.

BOF - Explore the creative mobile frontier with Nokia
Join Nokia executives to discuss how developers and content creators can get engaged in the mobile revolution by taking advantage of Flash Lite 3. FL3 will allow mobile users to view vibrant multi-media content, opening many new opportunities for developers

Nokia will also discuss MOSH, which is a user defined channel for the distribution of applications and other content for mobile devices. Mosh provides a seamless sharing experience, enabling content creators with any phone to create, upload, share and eventually monetize content.

BOF - Building Custom Flex 3.0 Components
Discussing Custom Components in Flex. ILOG Elixir team will provide feedback on building advanced graphical components for the Flex 3 platform.

BOF - Online Collaborative Media: The Web is more than Sharing
“Together” in a web space…
* How far can we collaborate in the web?
* How to encourage users to contribute and create together?

Let’s converse about minimizing the gap between online and offline.
Bring heavy desktop tasks such as image processing, video editing and
3d, while using Flex/Flash and AIR, producing a more collaborative
enviroments for users to create online.

BOF - ColdFusion in Europe
Join Ben Forta and Tim Buntel and other Adobe staff for the ColdFusion BOF. The topic is deliberately vague and open-ended because we’d like a completely open free-form discussion about ColdFusion in Europe - and we want to discuss it all, the good, the bad, and even the ugly.

BOF - Rights Management
Need to maintain the confidentiality of sensitive information in your content and messsges? Need to audit who has done what with your content? Learn about Adobe’s LiveCycle Rights Management ES and how you can share sensitive content that is critical to collaboration throughout your business processes, control content access and usage rights through dynamic and persistent policies forconfidentiality, privacy, and accountability, protect sensitive information by proactively plugging potential leaks, integrate with applications for easy one-click content protection, and integrate with back-end systems for comprehensive rights management that is centralized, automated, and cost-effective.

BOF - Flash Lite: Mobile Opportunities
Whats possible with Flash Lite? What sort of apps are people developing? How easy or dificult is it to develop a Flash Lite app? Lets discuss the new and exciting opportunities in the mobile space.

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A couple of people have stumbled across the problem of not being able to install AIR applications that were written for beta 1 once they’ve installed beta 2 of the runtime.

Rather than uninstalling beta 1 of AIR before installing beta 2, leave beta 1 installed and beta 2 will be installed alongside the previous version of the runtime. This enables applications written for both beta 1 and beta 2 to be installed and run.

You can download both the beta 1 and beta 2 runtimes from Adobe Labs. If you’ve already installed beta 2 and need to run applications not yet updated for the new runtime, then uninstall beta 2, re-install beta 1 first and then install beta 2.

Check the AIR release notes for further information, especially if you want to run beta 1 and beta 2 side-by-side on Windows (there can be issues due to account security privileges).

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Yesterday at Future of Web Apps in London we presented 10 web applications built using Adobe technology that we believe best represents the capabilities of Flash Player, Flex and AIR, whilst highlighting to a wider web designer/developer audience the type of applications that we think will become the standard for Future Web Applications.

Here’s what we showed:

• Sliderocket (browser-based presentations)
• Scrapblog (blog and scrapbook combined)
• Picnic (online photo editing/manipulation)
• MTV Video Remixer (online video editing/manipulation)
• Buzzword (document editing)

• Fine Tune (desktop music player)
• eBay Desktop (eBay on your desktop)
• Adobe Media Player (desktop video playback)
• Pownce (messaging client)
• AIR Google Analytics (desktop analytics)

Would these all be on your top ten or do you think we missed some? Let me know via the comments…

We’re also giving away free copies of the AIR for JavaScript developers pocket guide - this has proved very popular with the crowd here, with over 600 copies given away in the first day

If you’re at FOWA today then please stop off at the Adobe stand, pick up a free book (and a beer) and come talk to us about Flex and AIR.

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The winner of the grand prize, comprising flights to Barcelona, hotel accommodation and a full conference pass to MAX Europe is… Matthew Muller.

Congratulations to all our winners from last week!

If you didn’t win then this is your final day to use the discount code to register for MAX Europe. Register using code ‘ECM297′ and you’ll get entry for 500 euros (plus 16% tax). Don’t miss out - register today!

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