Thank you, Adobe, for all the suh-weet swag and for the free copy of Flex Builder with Charting Components!

The features in the upcoming version of the Flex Builder are definitely upgrade-worthy, especially if you have any interest in AIR. There’s also better-exposed support for creating Flex Modules (there’s now UI for it instead of mostly just compiler flags/switches) which looks like it’ll be a big help.

AIR is a very cool technology which seems remarkably robust for a 1.0 release of a product. Essentially, it allows web developers to leverage their existing skillset and create desktop applications. Most of the demo AIR apps I saw were simply Flex apps that had been copied and pasted into an AIR project, with a single change of one tag… <Application> to <WindowedApplication>. That is just simply badass. Change one tag and your Flex app will run on Windows, Mac OSX, and Linux… and you don’t have to learn any icky Java. (Hey, even Bruce Eckel is a fan of Flex… I think that says something big.)

Overall, the presentations were interesting, though they were given by engineers who didn’t really seem to have much experience presenting. I was sitting in the second row and couldn’t hear several of the speakers due to a combination of loud, self-centered, obnoxious, drunken dickheads in the back and several speakers’ fear of the mic. Presenting is hard, so I can cut ‘em slack, but the disrespectful assholes in the back… grr. I mean, c’mon, Abode fed and liquored everybody up, gave us a ton of cool stuff (shirts, books, mugs, stickers, posters, mail-order Asian Brides…) and all they asked in return is for a couple of hours of our attention. And besides, it was really awesome to see some of the upcoming Builder 3.0 (Moxie) features demonstrated. I seem to absorb demos much more readily than reading text from a book. I guess I’m kinetic… who’d have guessed?

The most interesting product demo’ed, by far, was SlideRocket, which is pretty damn sweet presentation software built using Flex and the Papervision 3D library. I’m definitely going to use SlideRocket in the future. There’s also version of Adobe Premiere which works on the web and has been used by MTV and several other companies to create promotional tools that allow users to create their own music video from existing footage that they provide. An example shown was the MTV remix tool which allows one to make their own custom Nelly Furtado video. Pretty awesome, though it still demonstrates that even the most powerful tools in the world can’t spin shit content into gold. (Nothing could ever make Nelly Furtado listenable, ‘cept maybe a lobotomy… or a truckload of LSD. If she’s like a bird, she wants to fly, then I’m like Dick Cheney out hunting…)

Overall, FlexCamp was worth attending, and not just because of all the sweet treats they gave us. I note that there was a far larger percentage of women in attendance than at RailsConf, and that the audience seemed really diverse skill-wise. I don’t go to geekfests to meet women… my point is that a healthy community will likely have a more ‘natural’ mix of men and women. Women kinda stuck out at RailsConf because there were relatively few (though the ones I met were hella-cool.

Total tangent… I was sitting next to a lady at RailsConf who was working on an application called “Tissue Tracker.” I had to ask… was it a “cutesy” name for an issue tracking system… like T-Issue Tracker… she laughed and said “no, and we’re not tracking used Kleenex either… I work in the healthcare industry and we use this to track tissue samples.”

A few folks at FlexCamp asked questions about things that were eerily telepathic (I totally wanted to know the answer) and several folks asked questions that demonstrated a fundamental lack of understanding/experience with web development. (One person, in particular, wanted to directly access their database without using a middle tier…. no XML or PHP [or presumably “security” or that wackiness called “business logic”].)

The Rails community needs to be more like the Flex community in terms of acceptance and attraction of experiential diversity/focus. The Flex group ranged from server monkeys to UI designers and animators. How many animators are in the Rails community? (And how the hell would you use Rails to do animation? […but that’s not my point.]) Adobe is good a not only making awesome tools, but they’re good at explaining and demonstrating how to leverage their tools to accomplish stuff. And that’s the point.

Somebody really needs to start a PeepCode-style screencast or the like for Flex. That’d be the bomb.