agitcraft

I managed to complete my last minute registration for AdobeMAX yesterday and even managed to sign up for some sessions. Here is my tentative schedule for tomorrow morning:

• 8:00 am – 9:00 am: Deep Dive into Mobile Development with the Flex SDK
  • Learn how the next version of the Flex SDK will enable developers to easily create applications for the desktop and mobile devices. This session will show you how you can use the new mobile features in the SDK together with familiar Flex concepts to build mobile applications. You will learn about the new mobile-specific components and capabilities being added to the Flex SDK, as well as learn tips for optimizing both the design and performance of your application as it works across different devices.
  • Speakers: Glenn Ruehle, Chiedo Acholonu

• 9:30 am – 10:30 am: Deep Dive into Flash Player Rendering
  • Dive deep into the Adobe Flash Player renderer with Lee Thomason, Flash Player architect, and see how to optimize the rendering performance of your applications. Thomason will cover mechanisms like the display list, text rendering, shaders, GPU hardware acceleration, and exclusive features coming in a future version of Flash Player. After this session, Flash Player rendering will no longer be a mystery.
  • Speakers: Lee Thomason

• 11:00 am – 12:00 pm: Creating Testable Flex Applications
  • Join the expert team responsible for the FlexUnit 4 framework as we look beyond writing unit tests toward the real issue: writing testable Flex code. We’ll examine the techniques needed to change functional but untestable code into cohesive classes whose functionality can be assured continually through automated unit testing. If you ever needed to know how to architect testable Flex applications, this session will prove invaluable.
  • Speakers: Michael Labriola, Jeff Tapper

• 1:30 pm – 2:30 pm: Performance Tips and Tricks for Flex and Flash Development
  • Investigate Flex application development from a performance perspective and learn techniques to improve and optimize your Flex and ActionScript code. Join members of the Flex engineering team as they identify common performance pitfalls that new — and even advanced — developers run into, and share best practices for creating the most optimal Flex and ActionScript applications. We’ll share tips and tricks for desktop and mobile development, as well as methodologies to identify and fix problems areas during development.
  • Speakers: Ryan Frishberg

• 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm: Having Fun with Layouts in Flex 4
  • Join Enrique Duvos, Adobe Flash Platform evangelist, as he introduces you to creative layout techniques leveraging the new Flex 4 SDK component model and layout architecture. You’ll learn how to develop sophisticated layouts from both a technical and user experience point of view. Topics will include assignable layouts, transformations, 3D, visual orchestration, and more.
  • Speakers: Xavi Beumala, Enrique Duvos

• 5:00 pm – 6:00 pm: FutuRIA: The Convergence of Rich Internet and Enterprise Applications
  • Hear top design professionals explain how to unlock new value hidden in complex enterprise systems through the expression of user-centric goals in design patterns. You’ll learn how Adobe is converging solutions, platforms, and tools to help you better serve your customers or constituents by delivering great experiences. This session equips you with business cases as examples of current cultural shifts, as we share our user experience vision, some technology sneak peeks, and a vision for the future of enterprise applications.
  • Speakers: Ben Watson, Andy Mulholland, Matt Butler, George Neill, Tadeusz Chelkowski

As you can see, I have a full day lined up for me despite being quite late to register and prepare. I’ll try and blog and tweet about each of these events as the day goes by.

For those of you carrying Android phones that spend far too much time thinking about flash/flex development, I’ve found a very handy little app.

From the publisher’s website:

After seeing that someone wrote an ActionScript reference application for the iPhone called ActionScript 3 API Reference for iPhone, I decided to take matters into my own hands and make the same application for the Android platform which the t-mobile G1 works on.

For well over a year now, I’ve been engaged in the process of moving and redesigning my professional portfolio. The current (a term I use loosely…) version is over 3 years old, and it’s sitting at a domain I don’t really use anymore. I initially began work on a relaunch almost immediately after my portfolio landed me a permanent job, but over the years I’ve been indecisive, full of excuses, and just generally unable to commit to any planned redesign.

I’m sure you know the cycle: You come up with a great design concept, plan about 80% of it, and jump excitedly into development. You make rapid progress initially, but as you delve deeper into the project you come across roadblocks and development stalls. After hammering away for weeks at a time on bugs that seem to multiply faster than you can fix them, you eventually come to consider the project too flawed to complete and scrap it.

Where do these flaws come from? In my case the culprits are poor planning, over-ambitious development goals, and lack of a consistent process for developing large scale applications.

What I once considered the “Redesign Cycle,” I will now be calling the “No-Design Cycle,” as the use of the prefix “re-” vaguely implies that eventually some new design is produced and launched.

This post, however, is not just about my failure to produce a new portfolio in several years, or about my enthusiasm for the current draft I’m working on. It’s about what, thus far, is proving an effective solution to this terrible problem. It’s called PureMVC. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

The claim made by proponents of PureMVC is that it allows you to program “at the speed of thought.” Outrageous, right? After picking the framework up several weeks ago and developing with it in the time since, I can mostly agree.

If you’d like to start working in PureMVC, you can download the AS3 port, check out the full API documentation, and follow the tutorial I used to get started learning the framework, courtesy of Ahmed Nuaman.