Andrew Shorten

As announced back in November, the on AIR tour is coming to Europe this year - we’ve now posted the details of all the dates and locations for on the tour website.

If you didn’t follow the US tour last year, then essentially in each location we’ll be running a one day conference on Adobe AIR, with technical sessions, showcases and discussions. All the events are free and are open to anyone interested in learning more about AIR - you do need to register in advance though.

Mike Chambers has all the details here, but in summary the dates/locations are as follows:

First leg, March 31st - April 11:

• Madrid, March 31st
• Paris, April 2nd
• Amsterdam, April 4th
• Brussels, April 7th
• London, April 9th
• Dublin, April 11th

Second leg, June 2nd - June 13th:

• Stockholm, June 2nd
• Berlin, June 4th
• Warsaw, June 6th
• Prague, June 9th
• Munich, June 11th
• Milan, June 13th

I’ll be at the Brussel/London/Dublin and Prague/Munich/Milan events and look forward to seeing you there! Check out the agenda (the events are a full day with something for everyone), register and then spread the news

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We’re all set with the dates for the European Flex 3 pre-release tour which is taking place in January 2008. Serge Jespers, James Ward, Enrique Duvos and I will be traveling across Europe talking about Flex 3, AIR and BlazeDS - if you’d like to get up-to-date on the forthcoming launch of these technologies then please join us at one of the events.

There will also be presentations organised by the local usergroup leaders which will highlight some of the Flex applications being built in each country.

Dates for each of the events that Enrique and I will be at are listed below - please check the local user group website for location, times and registration information:

• Monday 14th - Moscow, Russia
• Tuesday 15th - Warsaw, Poland
• Wednesday 16th - Prague, Czech Republic
• Thursday 17th - Sofia, Bulgaria
• Friday 18th - Hamburg, Germany
• Monday 21st - Istanbul, Turkey
• Tuesday 22nd - Zurich, Switzerland
• Wednesday 23rd - Barcelona, Spain

If you can make it along to one of the dates above then we look forward to meeting you there! If you’ve been building a Flex application and would like to show it at the event then get in touch.

Serge and James will be visiting the following locations:

• Tuesday 22nd - Paris
• Wednesday 23rd - Milan
• Thursday 24th - London
• Friday 25th - Amsterdam
• Saturday 26th - Brussels

Check Serge’s blog for updated information on these events and locations.

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Further to my previous entry I can now confirm the dates for all three European events at which Colin Moock will present his ‘ActionScript 3.0: From the Ground Up Tour’.

The dates are:

• Munich, 20th February 2008
• Amsterdam, 27th February 2008
• London, 3rd March 2008

Registration for each event will open approximately 6 weeks before the event date, so reserve the dates in your diary and bookmark the official website.

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I announced in the Flash on the Beach keynote this morning that the onAIR tour will be coming to Europe next year. We’re still working to confirm the dates/locations, but we will be visiting 12 cities over 4 weeks in April/May 2008.

We won’t be bringing the bus over to Europe; instead we will be letting the train take the strain as we travel to each of the cities.

Most of the crew from the original onAIR bus tour will be coming over to Europe, and will be joined by the European evangelists and no doubt some special guests too - keep an eye on the onAIR website for further details.

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Take one MAX Europe party, a number of Adobe Evangelists, several community experts, some alcohol and a video camera crew and this is what you get.

Filmed by Nicolas Lierman, you get (in order of interview) Aral Balkan, Ben Forta, yours truly, Stephanie Sullivan, Mark Anders, Sean Christmann, Justin Everett-Church, Serge Jespers and Carlos Ulloa talking about their MAX Europe experiences, along with Mike Jones who is just enjoying himself.

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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 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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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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