Andrew Shorten @ Adobe

Adobe’s education team have published a set of online resources that are designed to be used by teachers and students as part of HCI, Interaction Design and Computer Programming courses undertaken at Colleges and Universities.

The materials are centered around a project which requires designers and developers to work together to design, prototype, build and deploy a RIA – rather than focusing on just how to program in Flex, the course can be used to stimulate discussions on user-centered design, interaction design principles, designer/developer worklow as well as testing, bug management and deployment.

You get access to the course projects and a range of online workshop modules at http://www.adobe.com/education/instruction/teach/ria.html. The materials are available to anyone, so they may be of interest even if you’re not in education but are looking for additional Flex learning resources.

Also a reminder that students and lecturers can get a free copy of Flex Builder Professional by registering with Adobe. I’ve been advised that the registration process is down for couple of days, but keep an eye on http://www.flexregistration.com/ in early June the site should be accepting new requests.

The 3rd Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is now open for registration at www.pokercoder.com – whether you are good or bad at Poker or have never played before it’s a great opportunity to get involved in the Adobe developer community and meetup with fellow Flex and Flash developers.

The event is completely FREE and will take place on Tuesday 27th May at 7pm at the Loose Cannon Poker club  in Cannon Street.  Adobe are providing the beer and prizes as usual – prizes include a single CS3 product or Flex Builder for each person on the final table and a copy of a premium CS3 suite plus a pass to Max Europe for the overall winner.

This event is open only to those who use Adobe products professionally. Don’t worry if you’ve never played before as there are always lots of newbies and the dealers at your table will be giving  you all 20 minutes of training if you need it.

Go register at www.pokercoder.com and if you have any further questions, contact the event organiser (email sean at pokercoder.com). Hope to see you there next week.

If you’re based in Poland then I hope you’ve already heard about the forthcoming Flex Camp which is taking place on Sunday 1st June in Krakow. If not, then now is the time to register!

The event organisers have put together a packed agenda which is focused around building a Flex application from scratch throughout the day; this will be a great learning opportunity if you’re new to Flex or if you’ve been building applications, but haven’t yet had the time to explore topics such as skinning, AIR deployment and integration with BlazeDS. Going through the process of building an application will also provide an opportunity for discussion around best practices and I’m sure there will be something new for everyone attending.

I’ll be giving the keynote at the beginning of the day (in English, then everything else will be in Polish) and I’m sure we’ll have some give-aways for those attending also

More information is available on the event website. Hope to see you there.