Yesterday was the last day of the Flex 360 conference and it was a whirlwind. Along with checking out of the hotel and making sure to get to the airport on time I still had a conference to attend, including the final keynote. I don't have all my notes about what I did yesterday, so bear with me as I describe the highlights of the day. ...

The morning started out with the final keynote of the conference that included short talks on some community projects. One cool non-project community development was Flex Authority, which is a community driven zine that will be coming out in early summer. As for projects there were short demonstrations of OpenFlux and Degrafa that were great. The highlight was the last project which was a social musical notation program complete with keyboard( QWERTY not the 88s ) entry. A very cool program that I think is still not open to the public and unfortunately, no name was given.

Of the talks I went to yesterday, 2 stand out for very different reasons. One talk was about video in Flex and the other was about architecting AIR applications.

The presentation on video in flex stands out because, I realized I actually understand this concept quite a bit. The company I work for, Provis Media Group, is all about the powerful use of video on the web and I've been dealing with video and the flash player since day one. This doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. One glaring detail I learned is about the index on H.264 files that can keep HD videos from streaming progressively. The answer to that problem can be found here. The main thing I got out of this session, that can be applied to more than just video, is the usefulness of creating components based on the flex framework. It takes a little extra work up front but it can save a ton of time in the long run.

Architecting AIR applications stood out because it made me realize how much I hadn't thought of. The talk was led by a former .NET developer who went to web applications and now, thanks to AIR, is back to making desktop applications. Because of his background, he had a perspective about architecting an occasionally connected app that was different than the standard line. It was a great talk and I've got a lot of researching to do on new approaches. The main thing that got driven home was while tools like Cairngorm and Pure MVC have their uses, especially for web apps, their are some limitations when creating a desktop app. It's important to have many more tools and good OOP knowledge and practice under your belt so that you don't fall into the 'Golden Hammer' syndrome.

To finalize, Flex 360 was awesome and I hope to go to many more of these types of events. There is a Flex 360 event in Europe happening in April, I believe and I would love to go there, even though I know I wouldn't really get to see any of Europe. So if you are in Europe, check out 360 Flex Europe coming to Milan very soon.