Spoken @ Capital Flash Camp

First off, thanks to Sara Nieburg, Andy Powell, David Tucker, and Todd Cieplinski of Universal Mind for putting together a Flash Camp in the DC Metro area. We just don’t get enough community events in the aret.  It was also great to see some familiar faces from the Capital Flex User Group.  Admittedly, I haven’t been able to attend in months, but I was told there was beer last time.  Damn, need to start going again.

I know the attendance was not what some people might have hoped, but I think it wasn’t bad considering that Capital Flash Camp was announced just a little over a month ago.  The DC area’s Flex community is not as large as other places (Flash Camp SF was the same day and heavily attended, but it’s a big hub for the community) so it’s worthwhile whenever we get together.

As an aside, the Naval Heritage Center is a great place to check out if you’re doing the tourist thing in DC.

So presentations…

Terry Ryan, Keynote: Terry is a platform evangelist from Adobe and gave an overview of all the features available in Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst, and CF Builder and discussed workflows between the three.  Even with all of the new presos on Flex 4, there was still plenty to learn (I had no idea about the two-way binding in Flex 4).

Jeff Tapper, Flex 4 for Flex 3 Developers: As always, Jeff gave a great preso between his straightforward-yet-humorous delivery and his ability to explain the why’s behind the how’s and what’s.

Christian Saylor, The Art of Storytelling: Really enjoyed how Christian (Anti-Chris) relating storytelling to designing applications and more importantly his take on how and why some applications and products take hold of us and change our ways, while others don’t.

Carl Smith, It’s a Matter of Trust: Carl’s presentation was a hilarious overview about the different ways that trust affects how we interact with the world in general and with technology in particular.  I had the pleasure of chatting with Carl, owner of nGen Works, and he’s got a brilliant perspective on what makes for good applications.  Ask him about usability if you get a chance to talk to him.

Adnaan Ahmad, Introduction to Flash Catalyst: It was good to actually get a demo of Flash Catalyst and I wish Adnaan had gotten more time to go more in depth with it.  Nice job though.

Dave Watts, Using Flash Builder 4’s Data-Centric Development with ColdFusion 9: I’m not a CF person and so a bit of the preso was lost on me, but it seems that there are a bunch of niceties for connecting to various data sources and wiring them up to your Flex apps.

Chris Scott, Swiz Framework – Brutally simple micro-architecture for Rich Internet Application development with Adobe Flex: I personally got a ton out of Chris’s talk since I’m using Swiz for this first time at the current gig. The Swiz team hasn’t quite caught up with their documentation, so it was good to have Chris talk about various features and how to apply them.

For anyone interested, here is my preso and the code from my examples. Not much is different than my 360|Flex preso and I left out code that I didn’t go over this time around.

Slides (1.1MB)

Greenthreading MSNBC Data Set (ZIP, 2.6MB)

Overall, it was a great day.

\m/\m/

Oh Em Gee, All of Those trace() Statements

Alright, so I saw this insideria.com article by Tyler Larson about conditionally compiling for cleaner Actionscript when it came out and figured that it would be a good idea for peeling out some performance.  And Procrastee McProcrastinator (that’s me) didn’t get a chance to try any kind of pruning yet.

Then tonight as I’m tidying up some code for my side project I see this tweet by Ben Clinkinbeard noting that adding a trace statement increased a loop’s runtime by 1 second.  So following Larson’s article with a little help from flexexamples.com for setting up a flex-config.xml file, I set conditional compiling for every single trace statement and then compiled a new release build.

Wow.  Just wow.  We’re talking seconds shaved off loading batches of images.  And I’m frequently loading these small batches of images so the additional time was just piling up.

I feel incredibly duh-I-should-have-known-that-I-am-such-a-noob.

But hey, live and learn, right?  And I apologize to folks following me on Twitter for the spam and gratuitous face-palming.

Update: Dave Rosenfeld informed me via Twitter that trace actually initiates some disk I/O.  No wonder.

CFUnited 2009: Code (sans Documentation) and Slides!

So this past Friday I got give my first presentation as a conference speaker at CFUnited, talking about using greenthreading in Flex/AIR.  I’m going to just sum things up quickly by saying that although there were some bumps, I had a great time and I think it went well.  I got some great feedback and some great advice and tips for next time.  For the hundredth and not the last time, thanks to everyone for coming!

As promised I’m posting my slides and my code, though I still have to document (always important: document, document, document!) the code.  But for right now here you go.  If you have questions, comments, suggestions, please feel free to email/tweet/IM me.

Can’t wait till next time!

Slides (PDF, 1MB)

Demo Code (ZIP, 10MB)

I be bespeaking at CFUnited

Yes, charitable readers, with much excitement I can announce that I will be a speaker at CFUnited 2009!  I have been really trying to get into speaking and presenting, trying to participate more in the RIA community and in particular the Flex/AIR/Flash subset, since I adore the platform and the developers.  So here’s my first go at becoming a more vocal and hopefully informative part of the community: Divide and Conquer: Greenthreading in Flex/AIR.

If you are attending CFUnited and have a free slot, stop on by and watch me either kick ass or go down in flames (not so much with the flames, me hope).  Either way I hope it’ll fun!