Flex360 Conference

Hello All,

I will try to use this blog to download the information taken in at Flex360 in Atlanta. There was a ton of information to absorb, a good bit of it way over my head in terms of the technical aspect, however, still extremely insightful. One of my favorite sessions was that of Doug McCune, in which he spoke to the open source aspect of the Flex community. Doug was kind enough to post his slides as well as examples on his blog at http://dougmccune.com/blog/2008/02/26/examples-from-my-360flex-session-using-open-source-community-projects/

There's a few cool examples in here...Clapton...how do we use them to create products of value??

The first one, is a physics form. Go ahead, try the example, type in a username and password and click Login. Not sure where this would come in useful, however it is using a physics engine in the background to develop the logic around what should fall where. Pretty funky...

The second piece is a Flex app that's been styled to fit the Vista look. Note the ability to cascade and tile the windows. In the conference Doug also used the alt+tab to show the funky vista look, don't think it works in the example posted though. I think this piece can be really useful when developing web apps for our clients familiar with Windows.

Third piece combines degrafa with a sweet little login box. Click the little red arrow at the top of the screen to pull down the login. Again, we'd want to make this more intuitive for the user, however it's a cool little app. The background utilized degrafa, which will be covered in another post

The Fourth is an air app that combines the ability to pull in the meta data of specific file formats with the ability to drag and drop a file (mp3 in this case) from the pc to the app and have it read in. The air app that I downloaded didn't have the coverflow piece (iTunes piece that Pauly built as well), however, it's still a great piece of work

As well, the slides for Doug's presentations can be viewed at http://dougmccune.com/360Flex_ATL/360Flex_DougMcCune_Using_Open_Source_Flex_Projects.pdf

I will definitely set aside some time to walk us all through this, perhaps after seeing a few examples, as well as resources to plenty of open source components, we can piece together some apps of value for our clients.

That's it for tonite.