Another city down, another batch of web developers filled with AIR knowledge and free beer. Portland was an evening event so people started rolling in around 5:30 and we got underway as quickly as possible. Kells was a great place to hold an event like this.

We started off downstairs where Kells rolled out some food for us and then everyone headed upstairs for sessions, beer and Q&A. The sessions all went well and the Portland crowd was one of the more active crowds we’ve had. They asked a lot of questions and did a great job of making the event their own.

We’re off a bit this weekend but you’ll still be able to follow along on the web cam. We’re going to Hoover Dam and Ted has cooked up an AIR chat client so we’re going to see about scheduling a time to chat. I think most of us will have it open on our way to Los Angeles.

We just crossed the border back into the USA after the Vancouver event. The event was a huge success and we packed the room. We had it in an Irish Bar downtown and took up two floors. The main sessions were on the top floor in what is usually an outdoor area. They had a retractable roof but because we’re in the middle of a heat wave in the Pac Northwest, they tried to close the roof so the sun wouldn’t bake us to death. All that really happened was it was like a greenhouse and as a result, the sessions were very, very warm and the big crowd didn’t help.

Luckily right next to the sessions was a room with air conditioning and beer. That’s also where we had the game room so during the breaks people could hang out in the cool air, play Xbox or Wii and drink a beer. The food at this event was pretty good. They had grinders, wraps, some shrimp and then they served us desert as well. It was a good venue and the beer selection downstairs was excellent. Next stop is Portland.

We got some new Flair for the bus tonight from some of our friends at AIR Camp Vancouver.
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Edward Mansouri of AirApps.net has put together a really cool mash-up of the location data from the tour. He has mapped the path of the tour, and plays it back over time, showing the time and temperature of the bus during the drive up the west coast.

Ive actually started seeing a bunch of cool stuff being done with the APIs, and we are going to put together a showcase page on the site over the next couple of days. If you have built anything with the APIs, either web or AIR based, then post it in the comments so we can include them on the showcase page.

You can find all of the bus APIs and feeds here.

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.

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We need some help tagging the bus with bumper stickers for all of the cities where we are holding AIR camps. If you are attending one of the AIR camps we are holding over the next couple of weeks, you can help us out by bringing us a bumper sticker for the city we are in. We will pick the best ones and slap them on the back of the bus.

Just a quick note, but if you upload any images, videos or other content for the bus tour, make sure to tag it with the following tag:

onairbustour

That will make it easy to search for content from the events. Also, check each city’s event page to find the city specific tag.

The bus is finally on its way, on the first leg of the on AIR Bus Tour. We left this morning around 6:30 AM and are about 2 hours north of San Francisco right now. Scoble is broadcasting on the live video feed, Ryan is playing guitar hero, and everyone else is working on code.

We pushed a new version of the website today, including a new homepage, that maps the images and twitters from the tour, a live video feed from the bus, and a ton of new APIs for the bus, including location data, and a geo-encoded twitter feed.
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We just left San Francisco on our way to Seattle for the first AIR Camp (tomorrow). Ill make another post about some of the updates to the website, but in the meantime, I wanted to make a quick post and let everyone know that the live video feed from the bus is online now.

View Live Video Feed from Bus

It will be up any time we are on the bus, although it may go down from time to time if we loose the data connection. If the connection does go down, then you can view a slide show of images automatically taken from the bus. We will have audio on at time, but not all of the time.

Leave any comments about the video here.

As part of the Adobe AIR applications we are building for the bus, I ran into a need to log information about the app state to the file system. Luckily, Flex has a pretty complete logging framework, so I was able to quickly create a FileTarget class for logging to the file system when running in Adobe AIR.

Here is a quick example:
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