It wouldn’t be a 360Flex wrap if I didn’t give out my Lego Vagina award for the most Flextastic or Actionscripty new something-or-another.

The three nominees for this conference are:

The Flex 4 framework
Lets put it this way: The Flex 4 framework is still in beta and yet many people are already saying, “Remember back in the Flex 3 days how we …” The component/skinning of Flex 4 is just amazing. But that’s not all. We have all new effects and transitions and . . . wait for it . . . STATES that don’t suck ryno-ass.

The new Flash Text Engine
Matt Guest did a great job in his session showing off the power and simplicity of the FTE. The FP engineers deserve huge kudos for their efforts. The best I can describe FTE is that it’s like PixelBender for text. I think the only limitation with Flash and Text is now our imaginations.

Push Button Engine
PBE is a new open source modular gaming engine and framework. Nate Beck showed us the goods in his session and I think everyone would agree – WOW! Power and simplicity meet finger-tips. I can’t wait to get busy with it.

The winner is:

PBE!!!

All three are hugely deserving. The only problem is that I have come to expect wowing new things from the Flex framework team and Flash Player engineers. But PBE came out of nowhere. I can’t wait to finish up a few projects and get busy with PBE. I gots some ideas. gonna have some fun.

If you’re wondering lego vagina is an inside joke that goes back to the original 360Flex conference. Nuf’ said.

Dinner with legends
I’ve never had more fun and learned less at a 360Flex conference before. I had a great, GREAT, time because there were so many amazing people there. I had dinner with Jessy Warden, Ben Stucki, and Doug McCune. That alone is worth the price of admission. :) I know these guys are legends in the community but in person they are just like everyone else working their way through life. So more than hanging out and talking about code and frameworks it was great to talk about things like religion. ( What happens at 360Flex stays at 360Flex. )

I may be synthetic but I’m not stupid
I think the reason didn’t learn much – at the sessions anyway – is that I’m a much more mature developer now than I was at the first three 360Flex conferences that I attended. And I’ve been working with Flex 4 now for 5-6 months solid so there wasn’t anything there I didn’t already know. I didn’t even learn anything new in Deepa’s session which I didn’t think possible. I feel pretty good about myself in that respect.

Best sessions
There were two sessions that I learned a lot from. Matt Guest talked about the new Flash Text Engine for the Flash Player. I’ve messed with TextLayoutFormat ( TLF ) a bit but haven’t touched the FTE at all. I think the best way to describe FTE is that it is like PixelBender for text. We now have access and control of text on a resolution never drempt of before.

The other eye popping session was Nate Beck’s Push Button Engine presentation. I think PBE is going to be at least as important to the Flash Platform as PaperVision3D was/is. You better strap yourself in because Flash games are about to go off the charts.

Speaking virgin
I got to speak for the first time ever at a conference. There weren’t very many people in my session but I was very happy to make them all laugh more than once and I got a very resounding applause at the end. All the feedback was very positive. I think my speaking and presentation skills have lots of room for improvement but I’m happy with my first attempt.

Impressions
My best friend from high school – Tom Driggers/@EyeOfTheOwl – was there. One of the cool moments for me was in the lobby after the keynote address by Deepa. I walked past her in the lobby. She called me by name and said she wanted to talk to me later. Tom looked at me with a bit of amazement and said, “Wow, she knows who you are?” My response, “Well, Duh!” :)

By the way Deepa: Be thankful that I was late getting to your session. But you won’t be so lucky next time I promise . :)

( Getting lost )²
It was an adventure staying at the Marriott in downtown San Jose. On Monday morning me @DavidOrtinau and @EyeOfTheOwl got a little lost. Correction. My passengers were lost. I knew we were going in the wrong direction but they had GPS on their side so I mistakenly followed their directions. Seems that brilliant Mr. Ortinau didn’t realize that there was more than one eBay in town. Long story short we ended up at the wrong one. I was careful to point that out to my navigators on numerous occasions throughout the rest of our stay.

Then, to top it off, I got just slightly lost on the way to drop @DavidOrtinau @AllysonOrtiz and @Oztune off at the airport. I got off the interstate at the wrong exit and then they kept giving me directions on how to fix it. But no one was consulting their GPS. Again, here we are in the middle of SJ and there are three GPS devices in the car and no one is using them. Brilliance!

Kudos to Nick Kwiatkowski/@Quetwo. We never got lost with him working the GPS.

Summer Camp
As a speaker I get a free room so I shared it with @DavidOrtinau and @Quetwo. I normally like to sleep on the floor so it was no big deal. Then with less that a week before the conference we managed to swing a free ticked for my best friend Tom. So he got piled into the mix as well. Four geeks in one room. It was like summer camp.

Lets do it again
I don’t know when the next 360Flex will be but I plan on being there. It’s just too much fun to miss. Hanging out with old friends. Making new friends. Great times. Great conversations and getting to learn a few new things. Yeah, that’s worth the time and money. No question.

Lego Vagina
If you’re interested in what the most wowing new thing at 360Flex was then read about who gets the Lego Vagina award.

My 360|Flex session Under the Hood of RunPee.com is, according to Ryan Stewart, by FAR the toughest slot at the conference. The other sessions I’m up against are Renaun Erickson talking about Tips for Actionscript based iPhone apps, Jeff Tapper talking about hurting himself – designer/developer workflow, and Sim Bateman talking about Git.

I know from experience that people pick sessions mainly based on the content. Therefore I want you to know as much as possible about what I’m going to cover in during my session so that you’ll know if it’s for you or not.  Besides, I’m going to make fun of anyone who gets up and leaves during my session. :)

And one more thing: there will be trivia questions during the session and cash rewards for correct answers! And humiliations galore for incorrect answers. :)

Session Outline

1. Be your own client
2. I built it. Now what?
3. Show me the code

Be your own client
I’m going to quickly run through the history of RunPee.com from where the idea came from to how it became a media sensation. The purpose of going over this is two fold: first, to show you that I really had no idea what I was doing and still managed to create a commercially successful website; and secondly to show off. :) Seriously, in my wildest dreams I never thought that RunPee.com would provide enough income to support me and my wife – modestly. So yes, this can happen to your idea as well.

Most of this portion of the session will be to help inspire you to bring your own ideas to market and to think about ways to make that happen.

I built it. Now what?
I’ll cover a few things that I learned from my mistakes and things that you might want to look out for.  This portion of the session is pretty short.

Show me the code
This is probably the main reason people will come to this session. For the same reason that people go to NASCAR races: to see the crashes.

Rule #1 in the speakers handbook is: Don’t write code from scratch during a session.

Good thing for you that I don’t follow rules very well because I’m not just going to write code from scratch. I’m going to create an entire project from scratch including making a database table, writing the PHP and MySQL to retrieve data from it and then a Flex widget that will use AMFPHP to get that data, display it and, if there’s time I’ll even create the code to update the database.

This is mainly aimed at people who are relatively new to Flex but even if you’re a seasoned Flexer you can at least see someone else’s workflow to see if there are parts that you can add to yours.

Other coding topics covered

• Using SWFAddress to make your application deepLinkable
• Integrating your Flex applications with Google Analytics
• Automatically translating content with the Google Translation API
• How administrative users can edit the RunPee UI directly from the site
• My one-class-framework: MCP
• A few tips on optimizing your site for heavy traffic loads
• And lastly, given time, I’ll take a quick dive into creating a custom component in Flex 4

So you might want to fasten your seat belts for this last bit because it’s likely that there will be crashes. :)

In no particular order:

1. You don’t like free beer.
2. You don’t like talking to other developers about geeky things like which framework is best or which episode of FireFly is the worst.
3. If you already know everything there is no know about Flex and Actionscript and building for mobile and Phidgets and LiveCycle and Axiis, and Typography, and Greenthreading and Agile development, and Flash Analytics and Flex 4 and Enterprise Multi-user applications and Git and Flexible games and Cold Fusion 9 and . . . you get the point?
4. If you don’t need to network with your peers – which means you already have the best job in the world and make more money than you know what to do with.
5. If you couldn’t get anything of value from talking with team members on the Flex Framework team.
6. If you have no interest in more cool swag.
7. If you would rather sit at your desk and read the tweets from the 360|Flex attendees about what a great time they’re having than actually be there tweeting about the great time you’re having yourself.

I could go on and on. Comment below if you can think of other reasons not to go.

I’d still be excited to attend 360|Flex – San Jose, March 8-10 – even if I weren’t presenting. That’s because there are some knockout sessions lined up that I can’t wait to see. Here’s my list of the sessions I’m most looking forward to.

Sunday: Hands on
I can’t wait for the all day training hands on training on Sunday before the conference kicks into high gear. Justin McClean is going to be presenting on Flex and Hardware. That should be some fun stuff.

Monday: Session #1 at 10:00am
I’ll probably land in Michael Labriola’s Eternal Sunshine of the Component Developers Mind because building components is about the most common thing I do and I’ll never be good enough at it. However I’d like to learn a little more about Flash Analytics Throwdown – Google vs Omniture from Chase Brammer. I use Google Analytics for RunPee.com and a few other apps and I love it. However I’d like to know if Omniture offers something that might convince me to switch.

Monday: Session #2 at  1:00pm
No doubt you’ll see me in Ryan Stewart’s Creating Collaborative Apps with PHP and LiveCycle Collaboration Services. I have a project coming up that could use some LiveCycle goodness. This should be a great start to getting me going.

Session #3 at 2:30pm
Are you kidding me? Kevin Hoyt is doing Flex + Phidgets = Beer at the same time Jesse Warden is talking about RobotLegs on Top of Gaia Flash Framework? Noooooooooo! Frak me sideways! Not that I EVER plan on using RobotLegs on top of anything but damn I want to see Jesse rock the house. Jesse could be talking about selling insurance and I’d want to be there. But oh well. I guess I’ll have to miss it because Hoyt is a great presenter as well and he’s talking about fun stuff with hardware. I guess I’ll just have to soak up all the Jesse I can at the parties and at least we have weekly episodes of JXLTV now.

Monday: Panel discussion at 4:00pm
This should be fun considering the Apple controversy and all the Flash Player news recently.

Tuesday: Panel Discussion at 8:30am
RIA Design Principles panel . . . I already have very ridged design principle that I adhear to. It’s called making it up as I go along. yeah, I might be sleeping in on Tuesday. :)

Tuesday: Session #1  at 10am
Toss-up between Deepa’s What’s New in Flex 4 that’s NOT Spark! and Aaron Pedersen’s Flex 4 Component LifeCycle Best Practices. It sucks that there are two Flex 4 oriented sessions at the same time. I’d say that’s a scheduling FAIL!

Tuesday: Session #2 at 1:00 pm
There’s more component love from Jeffry Houser on The Flex Component Architecture Showdown: Halo and Spark Side by Side. But I’m probably going to miss that because Dave Hassoun and Jun Heider are talking about Adobe Stratus and Flash Player 10 P2P. I think I might want to be in on that.  Sorry Jeffry. :)

Tuesday: Session #3 at 2:30 pm
No conflicts for this time block. I’m all over How to talk “Satellite” – Throwing GPS data at Flex by Randy Troppman and Andrew Westberg. I have a big GPS project coming up soon and this is stuff I need to know.

Tuesday: Panel Discussion
Let the parties begin. I’m pretty sure I don’t need to know anything about how to speak to executives. Executives need to know how to talk to me. :)

Wednesday: Session #1 at 10:00am
Well, I’m speaking during this time slot so it’s a given where I’ll be. But I wish I could catch Paul Robertson talking about Building AIR applications for mobile devices. At least I’ll be able to grab his slides later.

Wednesday: Session #2 at 1:00pm
Not to miss: Nate Beck’s Flexible Games…game development with stuff you already know. I got to hang with Nate down in Phoenix at FlashCamp a few weeks back. Great guy. I can’t wait to see his presentation.

Wednesday: Session #3 at 2:30pm
Great, two more sessions that I really want to see that run at the same time. Tom Gonzalez is talking about his Axiis 1.0 release. Axiis is WAY COOL. I want to play with it. But, my HP TouchSmart laptop will be here next week and I could use all the multi-touch info I can get which is what Shashank Tiwari is talking about with Simple Expressions at Play ( Multi Touch ). Might be a coin flip between these two.

Wednesday: Session #4 at 4:00pm
I’d like attend Huyen Tue Dao’s session Greenthreading in Flex because I’d like to know more, okay anything, about greenthreading but I’m guessing that might be a little over my head. I also need to know more about Flex Typography using the Text Layout Framework so I’ll probably me in Matt Guest’s session.

What sessions do you have on your can’t be missed list?