It’s been a while since my last post but work has been very hectic of late. Now, with a little extra time I want to fill you in on 360Flex Indianapolis.The setting for this years only 360Flex conference was Inianapolis, IN. I had never been to Indianapolis, let alone Indiana, so I wasn’t sure what to expect. Although some people tried to describe the city in some not so appealing ways.
Upon arrival to the downtown area I was shocked. The downtown area is filled with local breweries, resturants, shopping, and entertainment galore. It seemed to be a very friendly walker/biker downtown. I would have to say that if you haven’t been to Indianapolis you should at least check it out once in your travels. Neat little city.
‘Ok, great, now how about the conference,’ you say. Well as always 360 Conferences are run very well. Tom Ortega and John Wilker have it down to a science. This year I was selected to present at the conference and I felt really honored to have the opportunity. Especially since the event is so well run and the speakers are really great.
My presentation, Javascript and Flex, was first thing on Monday morning following the key note. There was a nice turnout for the session and some good questions. I felt it went well as no one left early, always a good sign. The one tough part was that at the same time Mike Labriola was giving his presentation on FlexUnit 4. Mike is really one of the heavyweights and his presentations are outstanding and usually packed. So the crowd for me was kind of light, but it was a great group. I will be posting my slide presentation and code samples in a few days for all of you to download if you wish.
After my presentation was done I could finally relax and enjoy all of the other presentations. Two of the presentations I enjoyed were Mansour Raad’s ‘Not Another Mapping API’ and Juan Sanchez’s ‘Degrafa Framework’.
Mansour’s presentation was by far my favorite of the conference. Mansour is a very energetic speaker and extremely knowledgable in the GIS space. I was also a little partial to this presentation as Mansour works for ESRI and I am currently putting together a GIS infrastructure together for Railinc that uses ESRI software. I recommend that you visit Mansour’s blog for his presentation slides and some great GIS Flex tips. His presentation blew the doors off of the audience, who seemed to feel that web GIS was only Google and Yahoo. It was an eye opening presentation to the power of ESRI and their Flex API.
Juan’s presentation was a nice update on what is going on with the Degrafa framework. For those of you not familiar with Degrafa it is a framework for Flex that leverages the Flash drawing api, and makes your animation and drawing tasks far easier. Some of the highlights were: the new 1.0 release, using video’s as fills, and hooks to leverage the 3D capabilities of Flash Player 10. The video as a fill was very intriguing to me. Think of having any shape on the screen and it has a live running video as the fill. Draw a Pink Floyd triangle and play the Wizard of OZ as the fill while listening to Dark Side of the Moon, anyone? The video as a fill allowed for you to change the layout and rotate in a 3D field. Very cool.
I can’t thank John and Tom enough for the opportunity, and I look forward to the next 360Flex Conference. And if you couldn’t make it this time around make sure you can next time. It’s worth every penny.