We’re rolling into Vancouver today after a great event yesterday in Seattle. Elysian Fields was a great venue and it had the same vibe that we had at ApolloCamp in San Francisco. We wanted to capture the feel of that event take it on the road with us and it worked well in Seattle.

The event kicked off with a keynote by Kevin Lynch, the Chief Software Architect at Adobe. He shared an overview of the Adobe ecosystem and explained how AIR fits in. He also gave us a look at AIR and showed off a couple of demo applications including San Dimas and Finetune. He also gave a roadmap for releases. We’re planning to do another release before the end of the year and then a final release in early 2008.

Then Mike Chambers presented an introduction to Adobe AIR. He went through some of the new APIs, talked about features and in his second session took the attendees through building their first AIR application with Flex. The last session before the break was an overview of San Dimas by Alan Lewis from eBay. He talked about the app and why eBay decided to do a desktop application.

After the break we got into Adobe AIR with Ajax. Kevin Hoyt demonstrated building an Adobe AIR application using JavaScript and HTML. He showed support for both Dreamweaver and Aptana. After lunch Kevin dove deeper into the Ajax side of AIR and explained some of the JavaScript and ActionScript script bridging. You can do a lot with the combination of Flash and JavaScript in AIR and the crowed seemed surprised and impressed.

After that session Daniel Dura started to give an overview of the new AIR APIs. As he plugged the laptop in his computer froze and wouldn’t boot. Mike Chambers took the session and answered questions while Danny worked with IT to get the laptop back up. Once that was finished Mark Piller of MidnightCoders fame gave us a rundown of using Adobe AIR and .NET to create client/server applications. He demonstrated a fully working Skype client that he built in AIR and served up with .NET. It was a very cool demo.

Finally we had Andre Charland from Nitobi talk to us about using JavaScript frameworks within AIR. Andre made it a point to show how you can use whatever frameworks you’re currently using within an AIR application. The last session of the day was by Lee Brimelow from Frog Design. He talked about transitioning from the web to the desktop and what developers needed to be aware of as they thought about using AIR.

We recorded all of the sessions so we’ll be posting them for you to check out if you couldn’t make the event. And we’re doing some of these in our stops along the way, so if you’re near one of the venues, come check it out so you can get in on the Q&A and free food.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 11th, 2007 at 7:43 pm and is filed under Code, General.