Andrew Shorten

With MAX 2008 in San Francisco over, focus now shifts to the companion event happening in Milan at the beginning of December.

Just as there are new, Europe-only, sessions at MAX in Milan, there are also a set of Europe-only MAX awards up for grabs at the conference. Voting for the awards is now open, so if you get five minutes, take a look at the Finalist Gallery and vote for your favourites. Winners will be announced before the Sneak Peak session at MAX in Milan.

If you’re in London on Wednesday then there is an added incentive to come along to the Flex London User Group meeting - we’re giving away a free pass to MAX in Milan.

If you haven’t been to one of the “Flex in the Pub” sessions before, they provide a great opportunity to connect with other Flex developers, discuss projects, get help with code problems or just have a drink (or two!). 

This month the theme for the evening is MAX Europe, providing a chance to meet up with some of the speakers going from the UK, pick up exclusive badges and T-Shirts for those going to Milan and arrange flights, hotels and room sharing with other developers. To be in with a chance of winning the free MAX pass, register for the meet-up and then turn up on Wednesday night. See you there…

The winners of the ScaleNine ‘Skin to Win’ contest were announced today by Juan Sanchez over on the ScaleNine blog, with the winning entry submitted by ‘Undefined‘, a web development company based in Spain.  

Congratulations to the team from Undefined, along with the runner up and spot prize winners - the quality of all the entries was really high and I know that it was tough for the judges to come to a final decision on the winners.

One of the original aims for running the contest was to increase the number of complete Flex themes available, so it is great that all 27 entries submitted to the contest will be available for you to download, use and adapt for your own projects. Keep an eye on the ScaleNine.com site over the next week as they are uploaded to the gallery.

Last week at Future of Web Apps we were on the lookout for some cool ideas as to how you might use Adobe AIR - to provide a little incentive we teamed up with Carsonified (the event organisers) to offer £5k to the winner of a ‘dragons den’ style contest to help them build the application.  

We had some really great entries for the contest, as well as a couple of strange ones, but we whittled them down to three finalists who then pitched their idea in front of approximately 1200 conference attendees. We spoke to each of the finalists before they went on stage… if you’re interested you can watch how the guys behind Relocally, BoxedUp and UpShotApp described their proposed applications.

The overall winner of the contest was UpShotApp, an existing web-based application that allows you to upload pictures and track what friends, colleagues and clients think about them. They want to use Adobe AIR to provide a desktop uploader, with tight integration (via Switchboard) to Adobe’s Creative Suite applications, so that you can upload and track comments on pictures right from your desktop.

There’s a nice sketch on Flickr which captures the essence of day 2 at FOWA, including the AIR Dragons Den session. Elsewhere at FOWA, we were giving away badges with the mnemonics for Adobe products, handing out ‘AIR for JavaScript developers’ and ‘Getting Started with Flex 3′ books, answering questions about Flex and AIR on the Adobe stand, as well as running a couple of sessions in the ‘University’ track.

A lot of the content from Future of Web Apps has been published online, so if you couldn’t attend you can catch up on what you missed here.

Just a reminder that if you are thinking of submitting a theme for the ScaleNine ‘Skin to Win’ contest then today is the last day to package up your entry and submit it here.

Top prize is a MacBook Air, copy of CS4 Master Suite and Flex Builder 3, together with a ticket to MAX (US or Europe). We’ve had a good number of entries already so I’m looking forward to working with the other judges over the next week to select a winner!