Tom Bray of Search Coders on stage

Here are my notes from the LA stop of the tour.

[Getting There]
The large orange juice before the drive up from OC might have been a mistake. Finding a rest stop in East LA is a potentially a pant wetting experience with an empty bladder, so having an Austin Powers’ cryogenic pee on deck makes it doubly dangerous.

If you’ve never tried to get in the LA Center Studios it’s an experience akin to infiltrating the Green Zone in Baghdad.

[Morning Session]
Mike Chambers introduces Mike Downey for the keynote, MC Chambers deserves a raise, he will spend about 3hrs total on stage over a 12hr+ day. Downey gives an overview of AIR and then shows off some AIR apps including Pownce, Finetune, and Buzzword.

Chambers runs through an introduction to AIR and a HelloWorld app. He asks for a show of hands of Flex and JavaScript developers, it’s a 50/50 split.

After Alan Lewis of eBay shows off their San Dimas project I overhear an investor on the phone: “Buy more Abobe stock”.

Kevin Hoyt introduces AIR to the JavaScript folks. While not my area of focus building AIR apps with JavaScript is remarkably similar/easy as building them with Flex. Part of the session uses the Aptana IDE, there’s also an Aptana RadRails environment.

[Afternoon Session]
Kevin Hoyt also deserves a raise as he is back again talking about occasionally connected applications.

The salesforce.com dude then runs into a perfect storm for audience ADD, dry subject matter, non functioning slides, and the onset of the post-lunch food coma. The problems were unfortunate as the salesforce.com Flex API looks pretty rich (and could also make you rich).

Adobe should have scheduled Lee Brimelow right after lunch as his presentation was a) Hilarious and b) inspiring and informative. Lee showed off a series of AIR apps built sans Flex Builder with Grant Skinner’s AIR plugin for Flash CS3.

[Cocktail Hour]
I managed to find the Rails folk out on the patio and got a preview of a cool music based app (not sure the details are public so I’ll keep it on the DL, but it’s a different angle than last.fm, finetune et al).

[Night Session]
After being schooled by Kevin Hoyt at Wii Tennis I headed back for the night session (I have an excuse for my Wiifutility, Kevin towers over me and I’m 6′2″, I had visions of an errant swing lodging a Wiimote permanently in my noggin).

My notes are a bit sparse as the free as in beer beers were setting in. Tom Bray of Search Coders showed their Dashboard app which is one of the most fully realized AIR apps out in the wild. Tom’s partner Robert Cedana showed me the Search Coders Dashboard app earlier in the day and it can handle some pretty amazing amounts of a data. Check out the app if you’re looking for work as the ads are targeted at Flex developers.

At the end of the night there were still over 50 people in the audience, maybe I should buy some Adobe stock.

PS: If you can’t make it to a tour stop each event is being streamed live.