Adobe Day

I’m actually blogging this during a break at Hong Kong’s first Flex/AIR user group meeting. Of course, the event was timed to coincide with the public release of Adobe AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0. The event here in Hong Kong was very well attended. Looking around, I’m guessing 80 some people. Could be way off. Still, pretty impressive.

While it might not be making as much news as the AIR and Flex releases, I’m interested in the launch of Adobe’s open source site currently hosting the Flex SDK, BlazeDS, and Tamarin. While none of these projects are new, it’s encouraging to see Adobe supporting open source software this way.

As for the user group meeting, Vicker, the organizer, provided a pretty classic overview of Adobe AIR and Flex mostly using Adobe marketing material. We got to watch a release video produced by Adobe and, when the internet was working, some other videos of users and demo apps. My favorite was this one. The meeting finished up with some local Flex developers showing off their products, such as Zip 2 Zap. Adobe had some people attending as well and gave out t-shirts and gifts. Overall, a pretty good start to the user group.

Of course William and I have been following Flex and AIR for some time now. Indie Arcade, the focus of our hopes and dreams at JadeTower, wouldn’t be possible without these technologies. In fact, we had the idea for Indie Arcade some time ago, but felt the supporting technology just didnt’ exist at the time. We’re still not sure the supporting technology exists today, but we’re working hard to find out. So far, AIR and ActionScript 3 are the best platform we’ve found for our particular goals.

And we’re looking forward to sharing what we’ve learned. We’ll be running a rich internet application workshop, focusing on both ajax and Flex/AIR, here in Hong Kong this spring. Dates and registration fees are still being figured out, but we should have that published soon. We’ll publish updates here as we get them, or you can email us.