Last friday I attended the Adobe's On AIR Tour in Amsterdam.

The sessions were interesting for actionscript developers, as well as javascript developers. For both type of developers where some specific sessions.

At Adobe Max last year I followed an AIR training, so I already knew the possibilities of the AIR API. Since the 1.0 release I haven't had the chance to see what's new. One of the things that where missing in the previous beta releases was the possibility to start an AIR program on system startup. It wasn't sure back then if this would be possible in the 1.0 release. Between the lines, Lee Brimelow spoke about this possibility!

During the day some prices where given away randomly. Some O'reilly books, Flex 3 software, T-Shirts, posters and finally 2 Adobe CS3 Master Collections. Guess what who won the CS3 Mac version! Indeed, I won it!! I'm really happy with it, although I'm not a mac user... So when you are reading this and you are a Mac user having a windows license, please contact me, so we can exchange our software:-) I would be really happy having the whole CS3 Master collection installed on my laptop!

Tags: AIR, Events by Paul Tondeur
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Today I attended Collin Moock's AS3 From the ground up tour. This was organized at the same location of FITC which ended yesterday.

I heard some stories about the though material to get through during this 9 hour training day. Good preparation and a good night of sleep where required to follow his presentation. However it was a long day sitting at very uncomfortable wooden chairs, it was really good to follow. Collin mentioned some very useful tips and information that where new to me.

The audience was mixed from really beginners to pro's. I can understand the real beginners needed the preparation before attending, but for the professionals only the last few hours where really interesting. I think this training would be perfect for people who're now working from the timeline only and are thinking about starting with classes. They could learn a lot from Collin's clear explained and well organized information.

I've a lot of respect for Collin's knowledge. Like a walking reference guide he knew without looking at any documentation all answers to very specific questions which came from the audience. He's very talented and the right person to be on tour right now!

Tags: Events by Paul Tondeur
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Yesterday was the last and second day of FITC Amsterdam. Based on the program titles and descriptions I expected the first day being the most interested for me. But that's not true at all.

The second session of the day was called "The circle" by Jared Tarbell. It should teach in a creative session about getting a better understanding of why the circle is considered as the most perfect geometric object. I'd expected this to be a designer session, but in fact it could be inspiration for a designer, but to get all his examples done you really should be a genius mathematician and coder like Jared Tarbell is. Hopefully he'll post his examples online very soon to see and try to understand how he made those fantastic examples!

The other session that surprised me was Ralph Hauwert's session about 2D and 3D effects. I'd expected this would be a papervision talk, but it was more than that. Ralph shared in a enthusiastic and motivating way his thoughts about dealing with the limitations we have with actionscript. I'll soon post some video's I made during this session.

I didn't joined Koen De Weggheleire's session about playing with bitmaps, because I already saw this session at Adobe Max last year, but I heard some positive feedback about his session. Off course I didn't expected something else since he's a good presenter with a great topic to talk about.

Tags: Events, General by Paul Tondeur
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I just woke up after FITC's first conference day which was a great day full off inspirational sessions!

Some sessions really amazed me, cause I didn't knew about all the details for example about Kaboom!!! by Seb Lee-Delisle. I just knew it existed but I've never used it before. For those who've never heard about kaboom!!!, it's a really great particle system. Within just a few lines of code you're able to create some great effects! You should check it out yourself.

Another session which was quite inspiring was Samuel Agesilas Pastel's one about Saffron, an UML tool build in AIR. I've never heard about this application before, but it sounds verry usefull to me! Let's check this out as soon the first release will come out!

Offcourse the sessions about Paperworld3d, Papervision3d, Actionscript4 and Red5 where good as well, but the above surprised me, not knowing they existed or what was possible in such an easy way.

I'm planning to post some video's I made during the conference early next week, this week I won't have the possibility in my schedule...

Tags: Events, General by Paul Tondeur
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