Update: Wow, this ended up being long. If you don’t want to read it all, you can click the name of the city below or even better, check out the photos and videos from the tour. Keep track of the tour on Facebook and check out my personal videos as well for an “after events” view of the tour.
Cities: Madrid, Paris, Amsterdam, Brussels, London, Dublin.
Before I forget it all I wanted to do a recap of the tour. It was definitely one of the coolest developer-related things I’ve done and it will be tough to capture it all so I’ll focus on the highlights. We all had our own personal way of capturing the trip. Kevin actually did a highly in-depth technical blog post for every stop on the tour. Lee wrote up a great report. Mike did the best job of keeping track of the blog posts from the event. I had two favorite parts. On the personal side it was great to hang out with the European evangelists; Enrique, Serge, and Andrew. I still have no idea when Serge is joking, but I think that makes him even more hilarious. Professionally, I was really impressed with the amount and quality of AIR applications that I saw on the tour. People are doing very cool stuff with AIR.
Stop 1: Madrid
Madrid was a great event and I think it *might* have drawn the people from furthest away because we had a big contingent from Portugal there. In fact Joao Fernandes recorded all of the sessions at the event. Madrid was also special because Enrique gave the keynote in Spanish and it was our only foreign language keynote of the trip. I got to chat with a company that’s still in stealth mode from Portugal doing some very cool stuff that I’m excited to talk about. I didn’t have any speaking slots in Madrid so I didn’t get quite as many questions but I got to meet a fellow mountaineer and saw some great pictures of his from Morocco. Thanks Ricardo.
Stop 2: Paris
The best applications of the trip were in Paris. After a long, powerless train ride from Madrid we had one of the more fun events I thought. We were all worried about the language and making a bunch of French-speakers sit through an entire day in English but we had a great turnout and a great response. I got to meet the creator of mooFlair, a neat video-viewing application and also a multi-touch table that used AIR as the UI from Inituilab. We also got to see a presentation on the iLog Elixer components which was really good. There’s a ton of stuff you can do with those things. He showed a demo page that I can’t find the link to now, but there is some good stuff on the developer center. We also ended Paris with a blogger dinner in which we got to meet a lot of the French RIA bloggers. Very quality evening.
Stop 3: Amsterdam
In Amsterdam I got to take a look at an application codenamed Elvis by DutchSoftware. It’s targeted at the publishing field and allows them to keep track and manage all of their assets including text, photos, and multimedia assets. I think it’s an interesting application that might help bridge Adobe’s “old” customers to the new technology. The team is also great and they asked a lot of good questions which Ted was able to help out with.
Stop 4: Brussels
I think we were all kind of run down after the first week but the response we got in Brussels was great. Dion joined up with us, Serge, our native Belgian, gave the keynote, Nicolas from the Analytics application also joined up, I got to give Kevin’s second Ajax session about Flash and JavaScript integration. That’s one of my favorite parts of AIR so it was a fun session to give. I got a lot of questions about it afterwards so I think it’s a topic that resonates with people. I didn’t have anyone come show me an AIR application in Brussels but I did connect some people with the user group in town. It sounds like they lost their database and a few members weren’t getting emails.
Stop 5: London
In terms of applications, London was very cool because we got to chat with the guys from howard/baines about AlertThingy, their FriendFeed application built on top of AIR. They released it shortly after the tour and it was really interesting to talk to them about their experiences because they started from scratch and went in only knowing Ajax. We had a great keynote from Andrew and the largest turnout of any event. I also got a lot of more advanced questions in London. I didn’t see as many applications as I wanted to, but I think there are a number of things cooking. It’s an interesting community.
Stop 5.5: Dublin
Ted and I made one extra stop at the Scotch on AIR event in Dublin. We had to postpone the on AIR event in Dublin but about 30 people came from all over Ireland to hear about Flex, ColdFusion, and AIR. It was really cool to see the turnout and we had the event in the basement of a bar so it still had that on AIR feeling. If you’re in the UK and looking for a conference to cover those technologies, Scotch on the Rocks is shaping up to be great.