So I got back from 360|Flex just the other day, and I am still excited about all of the people I met there, the things that I participated in, and the knowledge that I gained.

The sessions were nearly all good, I gained both knowledge and varying ways of presenting from them. I did record most of the sessions that I participated in, but since I am behind on getting Flex Camp Chicago recordings to you, and I didn’t get permission to post recordings, they won’t show up here. Don’t despair though, the Flex Show recorded all of the sessions and will be releasing them. When they do I will notify you here.

A note for all future presenters, if you use an internet connection for your presentation make sure you have a backup plan or can talk past it. I saw at least two presentations where the connection was too slow to be useful. One handled it smoothly, the other was derailed and was less engaging because of it.

I participated in the Charity Code Jam for the Leukemia & Lymphoma Society (LLS). It was an app that would track runners in a marathon via RFID and display the runners on the map. It also allowed coaches to look up and change runner information, volunteers to check in runners, and had an interactive mode for spectators to look up individual runners. It was an amazing time, and I met a lot of great developers of all skill levels. We got the app to about 70% for the Wednesday keynote speech, and since I had been up for more than 24 hours straight at that point I ended my participation there. The code is open source, and will be released for further development and use in other marathons. So when I find out where the project is going to be hosted, I will post that here too.

The people I met at the Charity Code Jam and around the convention are people that I look forward to keeping up with. They are developers of varying stripes. People that do pure Flex, some PHP, Perl, ColdFusion, you name it and I probably could tell you someone who did it. Definitely more on those folks as I gather the business cards, twitter handles, and email addresses for them.

As I keep saying, more to come in later posts. 360|Conferences is starting to host more conferences, so if you aren’t a Flex developer they probably will have a development conference for you at some point. Right now they have an iPhone developer conference, an RIA and mobile conferences are scheduled. The blog site for 360|Conferences is very basic right now, but don’t let that put you off. This conference was excellent and if I have the time I will be going to more.

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This second episode is from the session by Kevin Hoyt, he is an evangelist with Adobe, and gives the keynote for the first day of Flex Camp Chicago. He talks about the Flash platform, what is upcoming for Flex and tools for designers to create user interfaces that work with Flex so that the developers don’t need to figure out how to do them as non-designers. For those of you who are designers and developers it looks like a great workflow improvement.

I did try and capture the questions this time, so you will hear some differences in the background noise levels as I normalize the audio to get the questions to be audible. They are still hard to hear some times, but most of them should be understandable without killing your ears.

If you have any questions or comments about the podcast recordings, feel free to contact me at http://vandermore.com. If you have questions for the presenters, most of their contact information can be found on the Flex Camp Chicago website, http://flexcampchicago.com.

I hope you enjoy the sessions, now on with the show.

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This first episode is from the very first session, Overview of Flex and the Flash Platform for Newcomers and the Non-Technical, presented by Michael Epstein. Michael gives an overview of what Flex is, some of it’s roots, and also some of it’s competitors.

I recorded all of these from a portable recorder, and the quality is fairly good, but the mics are facing towards the front of the room, so while I was able to capture Michael very well, the last questions from the audience were too soft to capture so I had to cut them.

If you have any questions or comments about the podcast recordings, feel free to contact me at http://vandermore.com. If you have questions for the presenters, most of their contact information can be found on the Flex Camp Chicago website, http://flexcampchicago.com.

I hope you enjoy the sessions.

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Today is day two of Flex Camp Chicago (#flexcampchi), yesterday was really informative even though I have been working in Flex for about nine months now. I got a chance to see a great deal of things that I haven’t needed to use yet in the platform, like video, 3D, and bringing up web pages in Flex and AIR apps. Since working at ShopLocal, we didn’t have a call for those things in our projects. Seeing them opens up a whole creative realm of things that I could do with them.

There was also an all to brief introduction to AMF and it’s capabilities. I would love to be able to use BlazeDS, but I am fairly sure that my current ISP won’t support it. I may have to set up a box at home just to play around with it. It has a lot of capabilities that I would like to use both for The Stone Table (more on that in a later post), and PodioBooks.com.

It’s about 20 minutes until start time here, and today looks to be even better than yesterday. Today is supposed to be the expert session, while yesterday was the beginner session. I consider myself fairly well versed in Flex and ActionScript 3, but I can see that there is a whole lot more that I could dig into, and that excites me to no end.

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Edit: I forgot to mention, I am also Twittering during the sessions, and recording them. Follow me on Twitter today (vandermore), or search for #flexcampchi.

A podcast of the sessions, hopefully with the demonstrations, should be coming as soon as I can edit things and get the files.

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