Last year when I was in Seoul in got the chance to chat with Jason Calacanis, whom I told him about The Actionscript Conference. When I told him that it is still small, he told me “give it a few years”. His words bring me far and I am determined to turn TAC into one of the biggest Flash and Flex conference in South East Asia.
This year, TAC will be held on the 14th and 15th September, in the 550 seater of NTUC auditorium at One Marina Boulevard. For many attendees, it simply means crossing the road of Shenton way from their office to the venue. 2 Full days means we are invite more speakers, more topics and give you the updates and knowledge of Flex, Flash and Flash Player, and AIR that you are craving for.
I am proud to announced that ticketing is now opened. So register now!
It has been a great week at MAX ‘08, providing great experience for me and looking at all the new technology Adobe has to offer. Love the Keynote, Sneak Peaks, Great People and the excellent MAX Party!
Developer Point of View Particularly interesting to me, in order of interest is Alchemy - C and C++ codes for Flash, Cocomo, ability to have P2P video in Flash, Flex 4 Gumbo and Server Side Actionscript, and Flash Catalyst (formly Thermo)
With Alchemy, it simply means the ceiling is now higher for us the developers. Anything is now possible now on the client side and developers will have to at least have an overview of how it works in order to be able to utilize the wide array of libraries existed nowadays and incorporate them in their client. Website owners should seriously look into this piece of technology to see how they can use Alchemy to create new experiences for their users. Using Alchemy, you can achieve things that are never possible in Flash (like the Quake demo in MAX ) and thus it also give rise to new business opportunities. I will be spending the next few weeks to dive deep into Alchemy and will post up some experiments I have here.
Cocomo is SaaS from a Social Networking point of view. Tied closely to Acrobat.com, it allows developers to tap into existing components in Acrobat.com, like video chat capability and real time file sharing, and use them in their own application. It is definitely a welcoming for us developers as it gives us another option to create RIA without installing our own infrastructure.
Flex 4 , as most people might already know, will have better skinning workflow, better performance, separation between component business logic and UI elements, support of shapes and graphics in MXML (like degrafa). It also introduce a own new set of components extended from the FxComponent (like UIComponent in Flex 3), 2 way binding, and the feature that makes everyone claps - a “layer” property in the component that defines the depth rather than the childIndex! All these in a new MXML 2009 namespace
And of course, Flash Catalyst (Fc), formerly Thermo, is also heavily showcased during the event. Fc allow designers to create their graphics in Photoshop or Illustrator, export them in a format FXG, and continue to work in Fc, and effectively saving the files as MXML into a Flex project! While I personally do not think Fc take off quickly as a tool of dictating the entire site UI (remember the Dreamweaver symdrome? ), but I do believe it will become real popular for developers in terms of component skinning. As Ryan Stewart demoed in MAX, with just a few click, it will skin a component like scrollbar automatically, which is a huge step from Flex 3.
Community Manager Point of View
MAX provides a lot of opportunities for User group managers (UGM) to network with other User group managers and Adobe’s community managers . This time, Adobe launches Adobe Group, which FUG is part of it!. Flex Camp is also now officially Flash Camp. It is very encouraging that Adobe is pushing for the community than ever before, providing us the UGM with valuable resources and directly support.
I also meet up with the UGM from Hong Kong, Taiwan and Seoul. Try to spot us in the photo below.
It is great when we start to see people from SEA and who knows, we might start seeing some asia speakers for MAX in the future!
Overall
Its been a great 3 days at MAX and an even better week in San Francisco. Now there is lots of new technologies to play, with the bar rise much higher than before! Work hard developers!
Lastly, not related to MAX, but hey I am on Seesmix!!!
I am very honored to be part of the speakers’ panel for Digital Media Festival 2008, the augural conference in Singapore for Web 2.0 and Social Media. I spoke on Building your Community 2.0, using Seesmic as one of its examples, as well as sites like GetSatisfaction, Twitter and ways to gather feedbacks from your Community.
At the backstage, I go around interviewing the great speakers. I managed to get Hugh Hancock, the man to coin the term “Machinima”, answering some questions the seesmic community posted, as well as Timo Vuorensola, director of Star Wreck, on community collaboration of videos
The event boast a wide variety of booths and technology showcase. I managed to interview with a couple of companies like Paymo as well as Garena
Paymo is a mobile payment solution, similar to Paypal, but enables anyone who has a handphone to pay using SMS. Definitely a good micropayment solution that I can look into for future events or even donations!
Garena is a Community Portal for Gamers to find fellow gamers to join in games like DOTA, WoW, CS, etc. At the point of interview, over 100k of gamers are connected on the portal playing games, a very impressive numbers!
Stefano Virgilli on his talk and creative crew:
Congrats SITF, @itr8 and the organizing committee for the success! Its been a great experience and I am looking forward to DMFest 2009!
Singapore is infamous for the lack of CF developer. Almost every person I met tried to find one, and ends up have to get one oversea. Either something is wrong with the education system (Java is still the main topic) or on how it is marketed in SEA.
Are you a CF developer _thinking_ that you are the _only_ CF developer in Singapore? If so , do give him a ping. It will be exciting to see a CF Usergroup in Singapore!
The price for The Actionscript Conference is $60 until 1st October, which will include lunch, delegate bag and access to post-event party, and of course, many interesting sessions that the invited speakers will be talking about. 25 tickets has been sold in a day and that is very encouraging to us!
Whether you are in Singapore, or nearby countries like Malaysia , Thailand and Philippine, we welcome you to join us! Reserve your ticket today!
I will also be heading to SgDotNet Usergroup Meeting tomorrow to spread the event to the .NET users (in fact, the backend of the TAC registration runs on asp.net).
For those who wish to meet the organizers and the usergroup, learn about BlazeDS and Gaia Framework, feel free to join us at Yahoo! next week by RSVP here. There are just a few seats left at the time of this posting so do reserve one now.
