January 27th, 2008
My AIR Flair and some link drops
Finally, after months of working with Flex, researching, prototyping and developing some real world projects on this wonderful RIA development framework, I am doing an internal presentation on Flex and AIR to our developers and designers.
I had already done a more hyped up presentation on Flash and Flex capabilities that was well received. It was mostly a recount of the great works of Picnik, before they partnered with Flickr, PaperVision3d, Dote Design image gallery, Flip , FotoFlexer, MixBook, Graphita, Visual Complexity catalog, 10×10 by J.J. Harris, FineTune, TuneGlue, Musicovery, ToneMine, BurstLabs, Mindomo, blinkx Video Search, Oskope, experiments by Mr. Doob, Andre Michelle, Lee Felarca, the quietly scheming Ely Greenfield and the great works of Keith Peters who I should thank for getting me hooked on all things Flash.
This presentation is different. I have J2EE, .Net and Ruby developers, IAs and visual designers in anticipation to see what Flex and Air bring to the table and how they are different from AJAX, XUL, OpenLaszlo, and Silverlight.
No prob. I am all giddy and excited about this presentation and mixing together all the goodies with the code and links from some good online sources to share the joy.
This is going to be a hands-on presentation for developers and designers. For designers, there will be some mods and remixes of Flex skins from Fle[ks]ray and ScaleNine. All the Flex effects are included for swapping the slides. I also added PaperVision3d effects from Tink, and Distortion Cube effects for the hack of it. Got to please those Ubuntu and Mac users somehow.
For developers, I got basic Flickr example, Yahoo weather and maps sample, simple mp3 player, mini browser with links to online Flex resources, Ely’s Display Shelf for the recommended books, and of course AIR Window Sampler. More than I could possible fit into a one hour hands-on presentation, but if you have other suggestions, please let me know.
I decided to keep text slides to the minimum and avoid slides with bits of code pulled out of context. Some working code with a walk-through in Flex Builder should give a better feel of what Flex and AIR is all about to get developers started.
I’ve done a similar type of presentation in the past for SVG. Setting up basic slideshow in Flex was much easier, and with the skins and effects added there is no comparison.
I’ll share with you the feedback I get from this presentation and hopefully the code too. In the meantime, here is the screenshot of my splash screen (Click on the image to see it full size).
How hot is that?
It’s a semi-transparent AIR Window with the city background image from Flekristal Flex UI skin. You can see that the window behind this presentation is Flex Builder that has my presentation project files open. I plan to switch back and forth between presentation and Flex Builder to show the code behind.
Oh, and I am going to start out with this energizing beat called “Bamboo Banga” by M.I.A. for the folks that want to get some mu shu out of it.
