However, when Lynda.com sold FlashForward to Beau Ambur and Metaliq a few months back, I was hoping things might be changing. Surely they wouldn't keep the cost of attendance so high, would they? I even had the thought that if the price got down to the $400 to $500 range, I would consider attending once again. So when I received an email today announcing FlashForward 2008 San Francisco festival nominations were open and providing a link to the pricing information, I was excited to see if changes had indeed been made.

Sadly, I was disappointed. Yes, the prices seem to have went down slightly. But the early bird price is still $899, and the cost goes all the way up to $1099 for at-the-door registration. I guess this year Flash on the Beach (for which I have already bought my 2008 pass) only wins by $464 instead of $664. That's progress, right?

http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=yGMLUk_2f4IRYXqoobzijRuQ_3d_3d

Tom and John, who run 360|Flex, are looking for some feedback on where they should be spending your attendance fees ($360), and this survey will help them answer their questions.

Having attended 360|Flex Seattle and posted my feelings on Tom and John's massive efforts, you may know that I feel strongly that this is one of the best values in conferences. A top-notch event for the mere price of $360. So, in keeping with their community-driven goals, please fill out the survey and let them know how you'd like your attendance fees spent at future conferences. If the survey is too limiting, leave a comment on their blogs, which are linked above.

Lastly, as part of the community, you can also see the live results to the survey here.

[Update: Peter Elst has posted his feelings on the subject. If nothing else, at least 360|Flex appears to be getting a good conversation started.]

Congrats to Dave Coletta and team! It is great to see Flex RIAs taking off and to know that all the resources available to Adobe will be put behind this amazing product.

Seriously though, there is some very cool stuff going on with AS3, Flex, and Flash these days. I can only imagine where this will go if Intel and Adobe do indeed get AIR running on mobile devices. It could have the potential to turn wireless carriers into data-only providers -- mobile broadband services.

I would highly suggest when the onAIR tour rolls through your town you check it out. I'll bet they may even have some more Ribbit info they could demo for you while it is in closed beta.

That said, this conference was the best value for a conference that I have attended to date. And, I'm not sure the value aspect of the conference could be improved upon. For example, the $360 attendance fee included breakfast, lunch and dinner/parties every day. The welcome kits included great polo shirts (as opposed to regular t-shirts) and beta invites for projects such as Buzzword. And the speakers and their sessions were generally great - I've written reviews/recaps of all the ones I attended here.

But, as is usually the case with conferences, you don't attend just to see the speakers - you attend for the community aspects. To meet like-minded people and to inspire and be inspired. So here's a list of some inspiring people and projects from the conference:

+ Buzzword Beta: For me, this is _the_ example of how Flex and AS3 can be used to build an application. Adobe contributed some money to this project to enable them to bring on additional developers and really make this a showcase for the Flex platform. And, showcase it is. I highly suggest trying to get your hands on a beta invite if you can. If you'd like one leave a comment on my blog and I'll add you as a collaborator on a document, which forces you to create an account and is a sort-of "back door" to a beta invite (Dave or anyone else from Virtual Ubiquity, let me know if this is going to cause a problem for you...). More on Buzzword can be found here.

+ Ribbit: VOIP (voice over IP) in Flex. The example I saw at the conference was where Charles Freedman used Ribbit to call a cell phone of someone in the audience. Being able to place and receive phone calls through Flex is truly cool stuff. Imagine the uses - tech support, fax capabilities... More info at Ribbit's developer site (now taking applications for the beta) and on Charles' blog. There is also a writeup at RIApedia and on Ryan Stewart's blog.

+ Charity Code Jam: As part of the conference there was also a charity code jam which benefited the local food bank, Northwest Harvest. Developers were encouraged to give whatever time they felt comfortable donating toward building an online portal for the charity. According to the project's website, over $158,225 worth of time was spent for the cause, writing a total of 5681 lines of code. That's a lot of work. All in all this appears to have been a very large success, even gathering some press from around the blogosphere. Hopefully other conferences will take this idea and help out a good cause by enabling the collective minds in attendance to work together for charity.

A few sessions I didn't mention in my daily wrap-up posts that are worth mention include:

+ Programmatic Visualizations - Andrew Trice
Andrew has a nice write-up along with his slides and links to some other resources on his blog.

+ Deep Linking Flex Applications - Simeon
Since I have been involved with the SWFAddress project, I have become much more aware of the options available for deep-linking, and how the included scheme with Flex isn't really all it is cracked up to be. Slides and commentary can be found on Simeon's blog.

+ Flex and PHP for Rich Internet Application Development - Charles Bihis
Seeing as how I use PHP for all of my server-side development, this probably should have been at the top of my list of sessions to attend. Now I'm sorry I missed out on it! Code samples, slides and notes on Charles' blog.

All in all 360|Flex was a wonderful conference. Here's hoping the guys from 360 Conferences keep delivering wonderful experiences and maybe even expand out into other interactive development subject matter for future conferences. Well done, guys!

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Keynote - John Wilker, Tom Ortega
The morning keynote was a showcase of different applications including Mixbook, Buzzword, TileUI, and Saffron. It was great to see what the community is doing with Flex and to get a preview of the beta invites everyone at 360|Flex received.

In addition to the showcase, John and Tom also launched their new project RIACommunity.com, and provided more information about how they make 360|Flex a reality - down to the budgets and specifics that I can't say I have seen shared by any other conference before. It truly showed that these guys are in it for the love of the community and not to make themselves rich.

- - -

"FlexBuilder Debugger" - Mike Morearty, Adobe
This was the second or third session I attended that was given by a developer from Adobe. It was great to see Adobe contributing to the conference because it doesn't get any more official than to come from an engineer who wrote the code!

Mike's session focused on tips and tricks, and advanced debugging in FlexBuilder. In addition, Mike previewed the changes/additions in the upcoming FlexBuilder 3 release such as:
+ Debugger tooltips
+ Right-click "Watch Expression"
+ Hierarchical variables view
+ Faster stepping
+ No-launch debugging / remote debugging

- - -

"Project Artemis: Accessing Devices & Processes in AIR" - Adam Flater
I think this session would have actually been better off titled "AIR & Java" because Project Artemis is based on linking AIR with Java on the end-user's computer. With the Java bridge in place AIR can link to Java and allow AIR to do anything on a user's computer that Java can do. For instance, this is how several people have gotten the Wiimote to work with AIR.

While the session allowed me to see what is possible with AIR and Java, it wasn't really for me since I don't develop in Java. Either way, Adam has given this talk at a few other conferences and had I been a Java developer, I am sure I would have been drooling with anticipation of this project's release.

- - -

"Custom Flex Component Development" - Doug McCune
Most Flash and Flex developers have heard of Doug for one of two reasons: his FlexLib components, or his latest experiment TileUI. Doug's session was easily one of the best of the conference and certainly one where I learned the most. Custom component development is the major way of extending Flex, so knowing how to create your own components is essential for any advanced Flex developer.

Oddly enough, Doug gave out a (since removed) link to a beta of his TileUI interface and the next day when I got home a friend IM'd me with the same link. I believe it also made an appearance on Digg. Word travels fast!

Doug has posted his slides on his blog, along with his thoughts on his session. I highly suggest reading both.

- - -

"Creating a Visual Experience - Theory & Strategy" and "Creating a Visual Experience - Part 2, Hands-on" - Juan Sanchez and Andy McIntosh
I have followed Juan's Scale Nine site for quite a while now as a great example of how great Flex could look if developers put in a little effort into skinning their applications. Juan has made it extremely simple to customize the look-and-feel of your Flex apps through CSS skins and has provided a showcase and free download of these skins on his website. That said, going into the session I was expecting to learn a lot from a knowledgeable source -- and that I did.

Juan handled most of the first session while Andy took on most of the second hands-on session. Juan first covered the different means of styling your apps (style tag, css, AS3 setStyle(), packaged SWFs, etc), and then went over how to implement each. I highly suggest you download the presentation (link below) and review the chart where Juan breaks down when and why to use styling (CSS) or skinning (replacing visual elements with graphics). The hands-on was also very helpful and while Juan initially wanted to show a more complicated example, I think keeping it simple turned out for the better as it allowed the core concepts to be shown more easily.

You can download the presentation and source files (before and after), as well as a list of resources on skinning on Andy's website: http://www.andymcintosh.com/360Flex/. Juan has also posted his thoughts on the session on his blog.

- - -

"ByteArray 202" - Ben Stucki
One thing a lot of developers (especially those coming over from Flash/AS2) don't realize about ActionScript 3 is its ability to read in raw binary data. Utilizing this as a tool in AS3 has allowed creations such as AlivePDF (an AS3 PDF maker) and FZip (AS3 ZIP file native read/create). In theory, with enough time and effort you could read or write any type of data using AS3, thus making it expandable for just about any purpose.

Man, did this session ever bring me back to my days of computer science classes in college. Ben started off giving an overview of binary data, bit and bytes, and then created a simple example where he accessed the ID3 data of an MP3 file (including embedded album artwork) from within AS3. Overall, a cool session that showed with a little effort you could have AS3 interact with just about any file type.

Ben has a blog where he posts about his continuing efforts.

- - -

"Buzzword: How'd They Build That?"- David Coletta
I'd have to say, this was one of the most entertaining sessions of the conference. Dave is a great public speaker (be sure to check out his public speaking tips, a reflection on his 360|Flex talk) and was incredibly open about how they built Buzzword. Honestly, I assumed this would be a 80 commercial on Buzzword, but in reality he really dug into the process and code used to create such a complete web application.

A few notes on what stood out for me:
+ The team developed their own testing framework where they can record actions and then reuse those tests on each build before releasing it. The framework actually outputs an AS3 class which when run outputs XML which can be compared to results from prior tests.
+ The application consists of over thirteen Flex projects. This is done for two reasons: build time in FlexBuilder is much shorter when broken down into discrete pieces, and user load times are less (or rather incremental) because the app is broken down into several SWF files that get loaded as needed instead of all at once.

Dave also had the best quote of the conference: “They’re not hacks. They are performance optimizations that are difficult to maintain.”

Dave has a write-up about thoughts on 360|Flex on his blog. He also has round-up posts on each day at the conference on his blog.

- - -

"WebOrb" - Mark Piller
I attended this session because I wanted to see what the difference was between WebOrb and other alternatives such as the free, open source AMFPHP. I mainly develop with PHP as my server-side language, so that was what was of most interest to me. Most of Mark's session focused on Java and their upcoming AIR version which both offer significant advantages over what AMFPHP offers - but in Java.

Overall, this session did end up feeling like a commercial for WebOrb, but it was well presented and if I actually used WebOrb I might of walked away with additional knowledge.

- - -

Keynote - Ted Patrick, John Wilker, Tom Ortega
Today's 360|Flex conference sessions started with Ted Patrick's Adobe Keynote which divulged quite a bit of information about upcoming releases from Adobe. Flex 3 will have a new beta out before the current one expires - most likely released at MAX in October, with a full final product release coming early in 2008. Ted was quick to point out that the new beta would be out before the current one expires. Some new features in the upcoming beta include graphic tags (think MXML for the drawing API), better text (embedding fonts, clarity/rendering), and skinning/style enhancements.

Next Ted spoke about AIR. There are a lot of updates to AIR planned, including API revisions, SQLLite, and signing/security improvements. Look for AIR to be officially released with FlexBuilder 3.

And, lets not forget the announcement of 360|Flex Milan and also the next US 360|Flex to be held on the east coast in a yet-to-be-named city.

- - -

"Flex Charting 101" - Rob Rusher
Rob's presentation did a good job of providing an introduction to charting in Flex. First, he covered the different types of charts (polar and cartesian) and then moved on to events and effects. Not having worked with charting in Flex very much, it was a good session to get my feet wet.

- - -

"Building Stunning Flex Apps with FlexBuilder 3 and CS3" - George Comninos
I'd have to say this was one of the most exciting sessions of the day. Coming from Flash development into Flex, one of the things I find most frustrating in how all Flex apps look alike and there is usually very little graphical expressiveness. George previewed some upcoming features in FlexBuilder 3, including the new graphical skins and integration with Flash, Fireworks, and Illustrator. Basically, there will be one very large image (bitmap or vector) that contains all the components in each of their states. You can then select each state and skin it as you wish. There will also be built in commands and integration with the CS3 application suite, right down to FlexBuilder recognizing nine-scale slices set in Flash. Oh, and lets not forget one of the best new features in FlexBuilder 3: visual CSS style editing.

- - -

"Understanding Flex-able Flash Video for Web" - Dave Hassoun
While Dave did a great job presenting his information, I think I chose poorly in going to this session. I have worked with video in Flash for a few years now, so I have had experience working with most of the techniques Dave spoke about. For those coming from Java or C backgrounds and have not worked with video much, this would have been a great session.

- - -

"Get Beyond Point and Grunt, or Better User Experience Through Alternative UIs" - Tony Hillerson
Tony gave a great presentation about incorporating input methods for advanced users. As Tony said "Alternatives = happy power users = richer experience = better experience." Tony went over a lot of basics of HCI (human-computer interaction) and then went in to Fitt's law (a formula for determining the time it takes to 'point' at something on screen). However, it was all to explain why these alternative user interfaces were worth your time to develop. Tony then went in to some examples of the alternative UIs: mouse gestures, radial menus, command line interfaces, keyboard shortcuts and context menus. Tony has even created a few great AS3 classes for mouse gestures and command line interfaces.

- - -

Update: There are also some other great wrap-ups on the day at these blogs: MyoT and Dave Coletta from BuzzWord.

Just a quick post to note that I'll be attending 360|Flex in Seattle in August, as well as Flash on the Beach in Brighton, UK in November.

I had previously posted how the cost of attending FlashForward in Boston was greater than flying to and attending Flash on the Beach in Brighton - so the decision to attend was not a difficult one.

If you are planning on attending either of these events, keep an eye out for me (at 6' 6", I'm easy to spot) and be sure to say hello!