iceLife The half heard mutterings of a Kiwi a long, long way from home.

Hey all, just a quick note from my seat at Adobe's OnAIR London event.

OnAIR is a one day free conference from Adobe, showcasing their new AIR product (AIR allows you to deploy Flex and or HTML/CSS/JavaScript to the desktop, as a native application). Its cool tech and I think its going to be an emerging technology in the RIA space. These guys have been touring around Europe and there are still continental dates left - check the official site for registrations, dates, and all that.

As for this conference, its organised very well. Food's great, i'm on my third Red Bull and I already got the compulsory free T-shirt.

The compere for the day is Mike Chambers (site) who speaks well and has a good rapport. Mike's got a new book coming out on OReilley for Javascript developers.
Ryan Stewart gave a good quick Hello World for AIR using Flex, that was informative and easy. Then the morning was finished off with two gigs from Kevin Hoyt, who is doing the HTML/JavaScript side of things, not so interesting for me (I'm in this to get away from javaScrip! :-) but lots of interest from the audience. Its good to know you can do it, if you really must...

Afternoon sessions are about to kick off, some good stuff there.

The free WiFi is rock solid, the presentations have been concise, only downer so far is that I do feel like a bit of a loser with my not-Apple laptop out on display. But noone has been cruel enough to openly mock me..

Flex is going to be the next big thing, if it isn't already. Being able to compile Flex to a desktop app using AIR, then take advantage of file systems, clipboards, and run in no-network situations... all good. I'm still thinking most Flex will be in the browser - but if you need some of the preceding functionality, its great to know AIR is there.

Thanks Adobe - great gig, I really appreciate being part of it.
I'm thinking about Adobe MaxEurope 2008 in Milan now!