360Flex (San Jose, March 5-7)

High

First Blog Entry Ever!

It seems like a few years ago I just dropped my head into Flash and never took the time to look up or around to see what other people were doing with it.

This week I went to Flex360 (San Jose, March 5-7) and was like "Shia, what happened?"

Now there's Adobe Labs, FlexCoders, Yahoo!, Flex, AS3, Tom Ortega, Roger Gonzalez and Grant Skinner and a huge (super supportive) community built tightly around the technology. I admit, Im blown away by it all.

Where there were two companies ...
It seems like ten years ago now... but when I heard that Macromedia became Adobe I was honestly freaking out. Don't get me wrong, I love all of my built-by-Adobe-it-only-takes-five-minutes-to-initialize-desktop-applications, but like everything else I was fearful that Adobe would bloat my precious little runtime (remember Reader?)

Wednesday at 360Flex Emmy Huang and Justin Everett-Church from Adobe had an open wishlist session during lunch . The topic of player feature creep/bloat briefly reared its head and without going as far as to say they forwardly shared our concern, they did seem quite interested to know where we developers thought that bloat threshold might be. Interestingly enough, someone said "2Mb" (download is currently 1.967.)

Anyway. Kudos to The Man. Thus far I am truly impressed with the takeover, Adobe's involvement with the community, and finally last and not least, free beer / h'orderves ...

To give a little back, I compiled this little list of blogs from the 360Flex schedule. A little directory of gurus and heroes that make these conferences possible.

Please ping me if I got any of this wrong...

360 Flex Presenters Blogs:

Anatole Tartakovsky http://flexblog.faratasystems.com/?author=2
Ben Forta http://www.forta.com/
Ben Lucyk http://esria.com/
Ben Stucki http://blog.benstucki.net/
Chafic Kazoun http://www.rewindlife.com/
Christian Cantrell http://weblogs.macromedia.com/cantrell/
Christophe Coenraets http://coenraets.org/
Clint Modien http://clintm.esria.com/
Danny Patterson: http://dannypatterson.com/Resources/Blog
David Zuckerman http://davidzuckerman.com/adobe/
Deepa Subramaniam (Adobe)
Ely Greenfield http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/
Grant Skinner http://www.gskinner.com/blog/
Harris Reynolds http://blog.harrisreynolds.net/
Jason Williams (Adobe)
Jesse Warden http://www.jessewarden.com/
Joe Berkovitz http://joeberkovitz.com/
John Wilker http://www.johnwilker.com/j/
Kevin Hoyt http://weblogs.macromedia.com/khoyt/
Kevin Schmidt http://www.flexinabox.com/
Mansour Raad http://webddj.sys-con.com/read/288053.htm
Mike Chambers http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh/
Mike Morearty http://www.morearty.com/blog/
Renaun Erickson http://renaun.com/blog/
Roger Gonzalez http://blogs.adobe.com/rgonzalez/flex/
Ted Patrick http://www.onflex.org/ted/
Tom Ortega http://lordbron.wordpress.com/