Widgets on the beach

Ivan Pope is bringing us the first widgets conference in Europe: Widgety Goodness.
He has managed to put together an great group of speakers that will be presenting different sessions related to something we love: Widgets.

The event is on Thursday December 6th in the sunny and trendy city of Brighton and if I managed to convince my new managers (I'm changing jobs next month), I'll be there for sure.

Follow this link for more info.

salut!

Adobe Live: Apollo - the future...

This time, 10 minutes about Adobe Apollo, very nice presentation from Daniel Dura, Apollo & Flash Evangelist from Adobe.
Click the play button to play the video


Even though the option to create Apollo files from Dreamweaver didn't work in the presentation, this option looks really promising as its nice, easy & simple.

salut!

Adobe Live: Mobile Experience Design

From the London Adobe Live Developer Event I filmed about 5 minutes of Andrew Borovskys presentation. I didn't have much battery left nor space on my miniDV tape but anyway, I ended up with a 1GB .avi file that couldn't upload to Google Video!
As you can see, my Adobe Premiere Pro skills are very rusty...
Hopefully this weekend I'll have time to practice a bit more and will have another video from the Adobe Live event ready to post here.



Salut!

London Adobe Live: Developer Event

PICT0015, originally uploaded by Ernesto Quezada.

Daniel Dura, from Adobe, opens the Adobe Live Developer event in London, two days ago.

I heard they were expecting 1700 people for this event but not even half of them turned up, Mike Jones said it might have been due to the nice weather we had that day (not usual in London...) and because most of the people were working at that time... Some people forgot about it (hi Mike!), some people turned up later (how's going Tink?), some people left early (hey Dan Todd!)...

I think we have heard already many things that were said during that event, either in the London Flash Platform User Group meetings or from any blog in the MXNA (for example), or in any other presentation; although is always good to go to these sort of events to refresh your mind and FEED your IMAGINATION! as their slogan goes.

After almost 10 hours and many different presentations, we were given all the beers and food they had ready for these 1700 people; imagine being there with all these cool guys (Richard, Carlos, Elmer, etc) of course I got drunk and went home with some pictures, 30 minutes of video and a big smile :)

salut!

LFPUG February 07 meeting

lfpug0207-01, originally uploaded by Ernesto Quezada.

Alias Cummins presenting at the London Flash Platform Users Group meeting last night.

We had two great presentations yesterday night; the first one, Alias showed us some cool stuff he has done experimenting with filters, bitmaps, and some other classes. He explained us how all this special filters and stuff comes from the same root: Perlin noise. In the end he showed us some code that looks simple but complex at the same time, using Maths and other crazy stuff.

The second presentation was in hands of Dan Thomas on Apollo. After explaining us some things about the legendary Apollo soon to be released (hopefuly), there was a debate about how good is Apollo and why should anyone choose it instead of for example JAVA? I think Emmanuel raised a good point when saying we are following too much Adobes press that even we are doing much more marketing than them. Very true!
Anyway, for desktop applications, I preffer to continue using MDM Zinc, a much more mature tool to develop desktop RIAs.

And the best part of the meeting, for me of course, I was AGAIN the lucky winner of a book!
This time is Richard Leggett's FLASH APPLICATIONS FOR MOBILE DEVICES that of course I started reading already.

Thanks Richard for the personalized autograph!

Salut!

Off to Flash on the Beach!

In few hours I will be heading to Victoria Station in Central London to get a train to Brighton, where Flash on the Beach will take place.
For those of you who don't know what Flash on the Beach is, quoted from their website:

Flash on the Beach conference is the first major Flash conference in the UK for over 6 years! Over 40 of the world's most talented Flash designers, developers and artists presenting on 3 tracks over 3 full days with mixer get togethers each morning and evening for essential networking opportunities.

For the next three days I will be attending different sessions related to new media and specially flash!
CamCorder ready, some miniDV tapes on my bag, off I go...

LFPUG November Meeting

6:30pm, Daniel Todd and me said goodbye to all our colleagues at work as both of us were heading to the London Flash Platform Users Group November edition and after a long weekend we both are heading to the Flash On The Beach conference so we won't be at the office for almost a week!
No Flash Developers in the office for almost a week? oh Jesus!
well, is for the good of the company that we are going to all these events as we can apply all our knowledge to the applications we make!
Anyway, we got to Play, the usual pub in Old Street, when the first conference had already started. A great presentation from Adam Robertson on Linux and Flash, where he showed us all the power of the open source technologies and how we can create flash applications, including flex-MXML, using only free open source tools.
After the presentation he gave us a copy of UBUNTU, the most human friendly Linux distribution so far.
A couple of beers later, Stefan Richter gave us a presentation on the new fullScreen features introduced on the new Flash Player 9. Showing us nice examples and good practices on how to use this feature, Stefan closed the November sesion and as usual, all the troop headed to the nearest pub to continue the chat mostly about the big event Flash On The Beach.
Was nice to see you guys and hopefully we will have a great time next week!
I can't wait! :)

salut

LFPUG October meeting

"Waste your time, but don't waste your money"
2 or 3 am?
Elmer Zinkhan was telling me that when I was jumping on the bus that took me home from the Angel shoping center where Tink, Carolina, Elmer, Mike and me had the last beers of the night...

This time, for the London Flash Platform Users Group meeting, me and my colleague Simon Lebatteux took a bus from Holborn station and in 10 minutes or so, we were at the Bear, a pub close to farringdon station where Tink and Rob Bateman were getting ready for their presentations.

One beer later (about 20 minutes or so...), Rob started his great presentation about "Optimizing Visual Interfaces for the Human Brain"where he explained us the way that the brain understand what the eyes see and the way the eyes tend to see the things, ignoring things that don't find interesting and focusing on what it's important...
We are still talking about this presentation at work with the colleagues as we really enjoyed it.

Two beers later and after some funny exercises from Rob, Tink started his presentation on "Flex 2 for flash developers", showing us how easy is to do some of the things that in flash actionscript 3 would takes us good couple of hours to do. In a line of MXML code is possible to do something that in AS3 takes 15 or more lines, so less code, less time and very robust applications can be done using flex.
MXML seems to be a very easy language to learn as at the end of the day is only XML (but on esteroids), altough Tink told us that we would still need to know AS3 to do the things...
Maybe one of these days I will start playing a bit with this Flex 2 and MXML

After the presentations, two pubs, some beers, rain and a very nice chat with the guys, I went back home with a big smile on my face (without smoking anything special!)

Cheers mates! and see you next month ;)

LFPUG September meeting

Stephen Downs did it again!
thanks Tink! it was a great meeting last night.
Was great to catch up with the flash geeks, all these cool people who come every month or so to these presentations.
This time, Daniel and me took a bus from work and in less than 15 minutes we were at the place just on time for Rich's fabulous presentation on Flash Lite 2.
Couple of beers later we had another good presentation, Johannes Nel gave us an introduction on binding data on flex.
More beers later and under the lovely London's rain I got home at around 2am.
When I left the pub after 1am, the guys were still there...
oh God! these meetings are dangerous!

btw, I'm just testing Google Video; a new camcorder is arriving soon so hopefully the next meeting video will be much better.

Salut!

LFPUG August meeting

What a great meeting we had last thursday!
I thought we would celebrate the Flash 10th anniversary but no-one even mentioned the subject (only me :P). Anyway, we met at Play, a club located in Old Street area, London, for the 3rd meeting of the London Flash Platform Users Group.
After a delay due to technical problems with the projector, Andrew Shorten from Adobe gave us a presentation called "Building Killer Desktop RIAs: Adobe’s Next Generation Technology". The presentation was really good and made me dream about the million of possibilities that are to come with the new APOLLO.
After the presentation, there was the biggest session of questions and answers I have ever seen in these sort of presentations!
Andrew even asked Tink (Users Group Director) if he should continue answering questions because of the time... the naughty answer from Tink: "we have the place until 2am..."
The second presentation was given by a London based digital agency called Glue-London who showed us many cool stuff they have done using video and flash, something I would call "online-interactive-videos".
After the presentations, I had the chance to talk with old friends and meet new people like Juan Delgado who I knew before from different Spanish speaking flash forums.
A bit drunk and very happy went back home at about 2am.
The only bad thing of the night was that my friend Simon, had his bike stolen just outside of the club.
As usual, I'm looking forward to going to the next meeting.

Salut

London Flash Platform User Group - July

I've been trying to write about this for the last couple of weeks but... you know... erm... I've no excuse.
Last months London Flash Platform User Groups meeting was just great as usual!
as usual? if is only the second meeting!
well, anyway, was great!
We got there on time and enjoyed both Dave and Tinks presentations.
I wrote about the previous meeting as I was a lucky winner of a book and I found unfare not to write anything this time just because I didn't get anything from the raffle!
The place this time was the AKQA headquaters, where my mates Richard and Emmanuel work.
After the presentations, pizza and beer at AKQA we went to the pub where I had the chance to catch up with old friends and meet new people.

That let me really looking forward to the next meeting!
Let's see what suprise has Tink for us this month.

salut