Bill White’s Blog

After looking briefly at the API docs, I noticed that there are duplicates of several of the filter classes with the same name.  For example, there is a DropShadowFilter in the spark.filters package and there is another one by the same name in the flash.filters package.
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I just checked the Adobe.com website and they’ve posted the links for the officially released versions of Flex 4 and Flash Builder 4. For those of you who have not yet taken a look at the great new features in Flex 4, I would encourage you to check it out. It is simply awesome.

Here are some additional thoughts about 360|Flex so far.

In case you missed it, here is day 1.

Day 2:

• Most of the developers here seem to favor macs over pc’s. My guess is that Apple has at least 60% of the flex-nerd market.  Nice.
• The axiis framework is really something special.  Once they get the transitions in place, it will really be a must-have library for anyone doing data visualization.  The way they are handling layouts and data binding is pretty slick.
• Flex 4 is looking better and better but I’m not going to really get into it until they solidify the api a little more. Jeremy Saenz’s presentation today pointed out that the way skins are implemented in the current pre-release of Gumbo is still somewhat fluid and you can easily find yourself having to go back and re-work your examples.  This is to be expected in code that is still in the early stages of development but it is also what is keeping me from really getting my feet wet.  Once the beta is released, I’m all over it.
• The Universal Mind guys have really put a lot of thought into their UX efforts.  I was surprised to find out that Adobe’s UX team is not the only game in town.
• I was not aware that Joe Johnson and merhl.com are one in the same.  I’ve been reading his blog posts for years and yet I never knew who he was.  Actually, I still don’t know him, but I do know what he looks like now.

My co-worker, Joshua, and I have just completed our first full day of sessions at 360 Flex here in Indianapolis. So far it has been well worth it. Just some random thoughts and observations:

• The folks here are really cool and very friendly. They seem to be genuinely excited to be here.
• I’ve gotten to meet several of the guys who are working on projects that I’m either very interested in or already use. This includes folks like Juan Sanchez, Doug McCune and Ryan Campbell just to name a few. It is cool to finally put faces with names after following their blogs for such a long time.
• Indianapolis seems to be a pretty clean city and the downtown area is much more lively than I expected. There are lots of steakhouses and brew pubs.
• Renaun’s presentation on structured log testing is something I can definitely use on my projects at work. I just hope I can keep the disciplined attitude that it takes to keep my tests up-to-date.
• The enhancements coming down the pipe for Flex 4 are even more substantial than I realized. They will make writing Flex apps much more efficient. Too bad they are so vague about its availability.
• So far, Michael Labriola’s ‘Any Which Array but Loose’ has been my favorite session. He really seems to know his stuff and I learned a lot about what is really going on in the different types of arrays, vectors, bytearrays and arraycollections.
• I think Adobe initially thought that Flash Catalyst would be a great way to create Flex/Flash applications without all the messing coding. Now that it has been in development for quite some time, I think they’ve figured out that it is much better to position it as a tool for prototyping and wireframing applications and leaving the rest of the work up to the developers who want to get into the code.
• The first night here, Obama was in town. His motorcade was supposed to pass right by the hotel but I never saw it. Too bad. Would have been cool to see the limo and the whole procession first-hand.
• Every night there is a reception at the Rock Bottom Brewery. It is fun to socialize with everyone over a beer after a day of sessions. The waitresses are pretty good looking too, except for the one that is short, portly, and a dude.
• The presentation I’m most looking forward to is the one on OpenFlux. The outside-the-box thinking that goes into a project like this is really something else. The impact that OpenFlux and Degrafa have had on the evolution of Flex 4 is really impressive.
• This hotel is also a functioning train station. The rooms shake when a locomotive rolls through. They try to pass it off as part of the experience. My bet is that they just didn’t think it through.