360|Flex San Jose 2010 Review

It was my first 360|Flex event that I've attended (other than speaking at the 360|Flex unconference at Adobe MAX last year) and it met all my expectations and more.

My hands-on connecting hardware to Flex all day session on Sunday was filled to capacity (40 people) I got great feedback from it and everyone got to take home an Arduino and a components kit (thanks to the sponsors of 360Flex and SparkFun). So anyone who was on the course tell me what you've done with it or what your plans are and if you need any help or inspiration contact me.

If you somehow missed out on the slides and code (they are on the 360|Flex USB stick) or were unable to make it on the day get in touch and I'll give them to you.

I know the Flex Unit team have done something cool with it already, but I'll save that for another blog post.

There were a few sessions I was unable to attend because they clashed or they were totally packed out and had standing room only (like Michael Labriola's session).

My highlights were:

• Richard Lord's talk on a developer/design workflow that works which started out by rejecting MVC style architectures. Also showed what can be done with smarty pants dependency injection and AS3 signals - no idea how I'm managed to miss those.
• Kevin Hoyt on creating a flex controlled beer keg with phidgets. Hope to see it working for real next year at MAX.
• Ellie Khabazian's session of what developers should know about contracts. I'm never going to look at a contract the same way again.
• Deepa Subramania on what new in Flex 4 that's not Spark, also announced that the data components are now part of the free Flex SDK.
• Jacob Wright and Tyler Wright's session on a lightweight but powerful component framework called Reflex. Skinning looks so much easier and flexible than Halo or Spark.
• Aaron Hardy's insights into queuing and caching and how you can use them to overcome issues with images in item renderers in the FLex SDK.
• Jeff Tapper's talk on how to easily solve common issues with the Flex SDK
• Andrew Powell's session on user experience and why developers need to know more and be more involved in the design process.

Finally it was great to have met so many people and put so many faces to names that have been involved in the Flash and Flex community for many years.

Thanks goes to John and Tom for putting on a great conference and I'll be back next year.