As I writing this, I’m sitting on the return flight home to Salt Lake from Indianapolis, wedged in between two of my coworkers. Neither of which can’t seem to get enough of GeoDefense on their iPhones. (Though, I don’t blame them – the game is damn addicting.)

I’m just renewing my notes from the last few days, and making plans for the rest of this week. I’ve been so busy lately trying to prepare my presentation and meet some deadlines that I’ve been neglecting the blog, so I figured I’d at least take advantage of this time to get caught up on at least one thing. Rather than bore you with a minute-by-minute recap of the last three days, I’ll just call out a few things that really stood out to me.

The Venue

First off, John and Tom outdid themselves with the venue selection. The Crowne Plaza Hotel at Union Station is one classy place. Sure, there’s an Amtrak station next door, and you could occasionally hear a train rumble through in the middle of the night, but it wasn’t anything that the hotel-supplied earplugs couldn’t take care of. It was one of the nicer hotels I’ve stayed at, and having the conference in the hotel meeting areas was very nice.

The grand hall where keynotes and meals were held was beautiful, and the food was top-notch. (Especially the chicken tortilla things – those were tasty.) Best conference-supplied meals ever. As for the meeting rooms, it was fantastic having tables for every seat, and power strips under each table. I only ended up with a dead battery once, and that was because I forgot to plugin. Also, zero issues using the wifi. How often do you see that happen when hundreds of geeks converge on one location?

addEventListener() – Now what?

After the keynote, the first session I attended as pretty much the best session ever, titled “addEventListener() – Now what?”. However, I only get to say that because I was the presenter. This was my first time presenting at an event like this, and I loved it. While it was also slightly terrifying, and I was pretty nervous presenting (I’m sure it showed), it was still a lot of fun. I’ve presented several times to our local user groups, at work, and even taught a few Flash classes locally, there was a big difference between the groups of 15-30 people I’m used to, and a room with almost 80. Still fun though, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat. I’ve heard mostly good things so far, so I think it went fairly well.

I thought the sessions would be recorded this time like they were last year, but they weren’t. I’m almost done writing up an article based on my presentation, so once that’s done, I’ll post it here, with all of the sample code from the session. In the meantime, you can download the slides and sample code.

Phidgets – Leonard Souza

This one was awesome. Phidgets are a collection of hardware components that you can interface with your computer via USB and control via ActionScript. Stuff like servo motors, light sensors, relays, etc. I want some of these. They interact with AS3 via a downloadable socket server provided by the Phidgets folks. The demos in the presentation included controlling a webcam mounted on a servo, a light sensor that controlled the alpha values of some UIComponents in a Flex app, and a few strings of Christmas lights that served as an audio visualizer, pulsing to the beat of a music video. I now know what I need to buy in order to properly decorate my house this winter.

This session showed how easy it was get things setup and working, with really not that much code. It also inspired a few of us with a lot of ideas for future projects, from more interactive displays, to some ways to better hot rod the foosball table in the office back home.

Structured Log Testing – Renaun Erickson

This was an interesting session from a testing standpoint. Sure, unit testing is great and all, but sometimes you need to test things that unit testing won’t always catch. Or, there are instances where your testers won’t have access to those unit tests, but they’ll be complaining that your app keeps crashing. Structured Log Testing is designed to help in situations like this. You place logging statements throughout your application, and as your app runs, these logs are collected by a standalone application that can save the series of log statements. This can then be used to generate a script which can be used to help replay the series of actions that led to any failures in your application. Cool stuff, and worth checking out.

Advanced Data Visualization – Tom Gonzalez

This session was the premiere of the Axiis Data Visualization Framework. Rather than being another set of charting components, Axiis is a framework that helps you to easily build something to visualize your data using MXML, similar to creating graphics using Degrafa. Anyone who has had to extend the Flex Charting components would be very interested in Axiis, as it seemed much easier. Also, it’s been released under an MIT license, so it’s much cheaper to use than the Adobe set. Open source FTW.

Cool “Sugar Honey Ice Tea” – Doug McCune

(Keeping it family-friendly here.)

Doug delivered as promised. Sessions like Doug’s are some of my favorite things at these events. Sure, in other sessions you get to see great new tools, learn new techniques, or insider tech info from Adobe folks, but sometimes it’s just fun to sit back, and get inspired by what someone else has done. And, knowing Doug, you know it’s going to be entertaining, and at times, just downright disturbing.

One of the projects shown off was something called STEGAsaurus, based on a technique called Steganography. This was an AIR app which can embed text or even other files into an image file. The image still looks normal, however at first look you wouldn’t suspect that there was a secret message lurking in the pixels. He also demonstrated some face-tracking code, that really worked pretty well. It was used to implement his “Safe SEXTing” app, which can be used so that if you decide to take nudie pics of yourself to send to your friends, at least your face would be blurred out automatically. Even cooler, the face tracking was used to implement Johnny Lee’s famous Head Tracking tech, using only a webcam, rather than a WiiMote and infrared-equipped glasses. Very cool.

Of course though, the one thing that will forever be etched into my retinas for better or worse is the sight of Doug with female breasts. Cool demo, frightening end result. Using the FLARToolkit, and a marker drawn onto his chest, Doug was able to give himself a brand new body – at least on the computer screen. Still a pretty cool demo though, and a fitting end to what was my favorite session of the show. You can’t help but leave wondering what crazy ideas you might be able to pull off, if you just sit down and start coding.

Summary

360|Flex is definitely worth the expense, both in the financial cost and the time away from the office. The guys behind the show aren’t in it for the cash, but the community, and it shows. They’ve worked hard to make it enjoyable and affordable, and it’s a great product I’d recommend to any Flex developers out there. I always enjoy going out to these conferences, as it’s great to learn, be inspired, or just catch up with friends and meet new ones. You also get to put a face behind the blogs you normally read, and spend time generally just hanging out with a bunch of immensely talented folks.