If you want to hear about Catalyst from the horse’s mouth and you’re in the bay area then you should swing by the Bay Area Application Developers Adobe User Group. Peter Flynn, an engineer on the Catalyst team, is going to talk about Catalyst and he’ll be joined by the venerable Deepa Subramaniam talking about Gumbo. Plus she’s giving away a copy of her book, so there are free goodies!
TweetUpdate: Hey all, I had to postpone this by a bit, so I apologize. I’ll have more info on when I’m doing the first one soon.
I’m looking for ways to reduce my travel a bit while still having a positive impact on the community and getting the word about what Adobe is doing out to folks. As I was talking about this with Doug, he suggested the idea of doing an online meeting every couple of weeks, which I thought was a great idea. So I’m announcing the “Semi-Monthly Expedition”, which will be a recurring online session that happens every couple of weeks. I’m tentatively planning to do the second and third Wednesdays of every month, but we’ll see how it goes and if it makes sense to keep it consistent.
So what is it? Basically I’m going to hold an online meeting using Connect on a specific topic. The presentation itself will only be about 30 minutes long but I’ll hang out for the rest of the 30 minutes to answer questions. I want to keep it short because I’ll also be recording the session for anyone who wants the info but can’t attend for whatever reason. Topics will cover basically anything at Adobe.
The first session is going to be a Flash Catalyst Sneak in which I’ll spend 30 minutes talking about some of the changes since the MAX preview build as a sneak to what you can expect in the public beta. Here are the details:
What: The Semi-Monthly Expedition: Flash Catalyst Sneak
When:Wednesday, March 11th, at 9:00 AM PST
Where: http://my.adobe.acrobat.com/riamountaineer/
Hopefully it will be a good, fun way to share some info and let people ask questions directly. I’ll also be posting all of the code, presentation slides and demos for people so they can take and use or explore at will. Some of the things I want to cover in other sessions:
A bunch of ideas and hopefully I can get to them. We’ll see how the first one goes.
TweetI just uploaded the Flash Catalyst slides from my presentation last night to the San Flashcisco user group. You should be able to download them from that link. It was a very, very fun event, and I got a lot of questions – some easy, some a lot harder. I hope I answered all of them to some level of satisfaction and everyone had fun. I’m still embarrassed I can’t always remember how to make a motion tween in Flash. I need to spend more time with Lee.
I didn’t actually get to many of these slides because I dove into the demo and answered questions, so if you were there, they probably won’t look very familiar. Hopefully they provide some extra info/context to the demo.
Thanks to everyone who came out!
TweetIn this tutorial we’re going to go through the steps to create a microsite for my fake mountaineering guide service. It will take you through most of the things you can do with the Flash Catalyst MAX Release. To start, you’ll need to have Flash Catalyst installed, Photoshop CS4 installed, and you’ll need to download the PSD file here. This tutorial is also available, with some minor changes, as a screencast (thanks to the screencast godfather, Lee Brimelow).
TweetI’m going to be down in San Francisco on the 15th to present Flash Catalyst to the San Flashcisco user group. If you’re interested in checking out Flash Catalyst and asking questions, stop by. I’ll also have MAX DVDs for those of you that weren’t able to make MAX but still want to jump in. If you’re interested, please RSVP. Chris Tower from current.com will also be there, so it’s going to be a great meeting.
When: 6:00 PM, January 15th
Where: SFSU Downtown Campus,
835 Market Street,
6th Floor, Room: 627
San Francisco,
CA 94103-1901
See you there!
TweetI did two main things over the break: learned C# and played with Flash Catalyst. For the first, I highly suggest Head First C# – great, great book. With the MAX announcements I got excited about the Flex and C# worlds coming together so I’m looking to pump out some data services examples with the new .NET stuff. But I also wanted to make the most out of Flash Catalyst and since it’s an early build, I noticed that as the content I created got more complex, Flash Catalyst slowed down. So I asked Cory West, the engineering manager for some performance tips when using Flash Catalyst. A couple of these are pretty obvious, but if you’re running into issues, it’s good to keep these in mind:
I’ve also got an in-depth walkthrough/tutorial that I’ll be posting here in text form and screencast form that should help cover most of the features in the MAX release.
TweetJulie just posted a video of NJ and I doing the Flash Catalyst demo from the MAX Keynote. If you didn’t see the keynote or want to get a better idea of what Flash Catalyst will do for you, it provides a great demo of the features and a closeup of how everything works. I think it turned out really well, and yes, I know I need to shave.
I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff from MAX Milan to post this week, so stay tuned.
TweetI’ve been on vacation the past week but I’m sitting in the Cancun airport waiting for my flight to Milan (through 2 other cities) and getting excited about MAX Milan. I’m going to be doing the Flash Catalyst keynote with one of the Catalyst engineers, Ty Voliter, and I’ve got a surprise for Flash Catalyst fans (you’ll have to come find me). We’ll also be giving out brand spanking new DVDs with Flash Catalyst and “Gumbo” for anyone that wants them, so it should be a good event. After the success of the MAX North America liveblog, a few of our other European evangelists are going to be covering the keynotes in Europe. Serge and Andrew will, of course, be occupied because they’re the keynote rockstars in Milan.
I’m getting in Saturday afternoon, so if you’re there and want to meet up for some jet-lagged drinks or dinner, drop me an email or give me a ring (+12672509422).
TweetLee Brimelow left a comment over on Keith Peter’s blog about Flex Builder. That spawned a pretty well read post over on calm in the chaos (great name). As someone that has been doing Flex development since the 1.5 days, here’s what I’ll tell you.
One, Flex is a great brand. I love the Flex brand. It’s not going away and in fact we want the community to embrace that brand. Things like the Flex Show and 360 Flex should show that we really support the community using the Flex brand. But anyone that has done Flex development over the past 5 years knows that there’s been some confusion over the kinds of apps that you’re building. Flex apps? Flash apps? They use the Flex Framework but they still run on the Flash Player. Even though you may not have used Flash Professional to build them.
So here’s the deal. The Flash Platform is going to be all encompassing. It doesn’t matter if you’re using Flex exclusively or Flash Professional exclusively – we’re all building Flash applications. Everything we create ultimately compiles down to the SWF format. That’s the Flash Platform. And Adobe has a ton of tools that target the Flash platform. We’ve got Flash Professional, we’ve got Flash Catalyst, we’ve got Flex Builder, we’ve got ancillary projects like Alchemy. Imagine all of those tools working seamlessly together. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone had one single brand of tools to use to target the platform? Wouldn’t that help clear up some of the confusion in the community? And the think about the strength of that brand for developers as we move into the mobile space. Ultimately I think this helps bring together everyone that’s building anything on the Flash Platform.
TweetI was lucky enough to be a part of the MAX Day 2 keynote where we showed off Flash Catalyst so I’ve been surfing around collecting the feedback. Here’s the good stuff I’ve found so far.
Thanks to everyone who’s posting info about Flash Catalyst. I’m hoping to do some screencast and tutorials in the next couple of weeks so that those of you who are playing with the MAX build can get started quickly.
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