ScaleNine

I’m getting ready to take off for Webmaniacs to present during the FlexManiacs portion which starts on Wednesday. I’ll be presenting on Degrafa, its features and what the next release will bring. Of course, you can always check out the dev branch to get a hint.

One thing I noticed is that Degrafa session is listed under the “Advanced Development” category of session topics. However, working with Degrafa is anything but that. Sure, you can do some really advanced stuff, but it is super easy to work with at an MXML level. In fact, that’s one of our primary focuses. I’d say that if you know how to add a Button to a Canvas you can easily jump into Degrafa and do some really cool stuff. Working with the Drawing API is advanced, not Degrafa.

There’s also a session that was put together surrounding some of the current open-source projects going on. I’ll be sitting in with Adam Flater, Ben Stucki, Tony Hillerson and other open-source contributors to talk about the different aspects of open-source. Should be a good one.

I depart on Tuesday with fellow EffectiveUIers Tony Hillerson and Jim Cheng. It’s pretty cool seeing how many of the presenters are flying out of Denver. Anyhow, I’m looking forward to meeting up with people, so feel free to say “hi”.

See you in D.C.

Tomorrow I’ll be giving a presentation on Degrafa at the Rocky Mountain Adobe User Group (RMAUG). The user group is in Denver, CO, but if you can’t be there in person, the whole thing will be “broadcast live” via Adobe Connect. If you can’t make it at all I think it’s going to be recorded, so you can replay my lack of typing skills and those things that always seem to go wrong during a presentation.

If you haven’t heard of Degrafa, it’s an open-source framework for defining graphics programatically through MXML. It greatly simplifies the process of creating dynamic graphics, skins, data visualizations, etc. Features include a library of shapes, fills, strokes, advanced CSS, focus on code reuse and much more. I use Degrafa in every Flex project I’m get my hands on.

I’m glad to finally be able to do something like this. There has been a lot of expressed interest in Degrafa, particularly in a Connect Session. I plan on going in depth on the features Degrafa has to offer, what people are doing with it, running through some sample code and talking about what plans we have for the next release. There will also be more of a hands-on session, which I’m not quite sure how that will work for those following via Connect.

If you’re interested in Degrafa I think this will be a great way to get up to speed with the framework, get some questions answered or just another way to heckle me. I’ll also be listening for feature requests, although my answer usually always is, “We’re working on it.”

Get more details here

Degrafa links:

Degrafa Website, Samples, Community Showcase, Documentation, Discussion Group, Code Repository and Degrafa on Twitter.

What a week! 360|Flex was a blast and it seems to get better at each conference. I saw a lot of familiar faces and it was a huge mix of people all interested in Flex. It’s really cool to see the way the community is progressing. It was also a great experience being an employee of EffectiveUI rather than flying solo. I was able to hang out at the EffectiveUI booth to talk about our current projects and help some trouble-shoot issues with their own projects, as well as hand out some Degrafa shirts.

The 360|Flex conference definitely had an open-source tone to it. With talk of projects like Open Flux, Merapi, FlexLib and Degrafa, it was exciting to hear how developers are grouping together to push Flex in the direction they’d like to see it go. I sat in on a session surrounding the topic of open-source projects to talk about Degrafa, as well as listen in on what others are working on.

Doug McCune and I were also able to fill in for Jesse Warden to discuss “Making it big as an independent Flex developer.” This was a great session where Doug and I just shared our experiences and thoughts on the Flex market, branding yourself, etc. I’ve never been without a full-time job, but I have done consulting work simultaneously. I think it was helpful for people to hear that you don’t have to quit your full-time job to make it. Jeffry Houser also offered up his insights, as did others. It pretty much boils down to working your ass off.

For me, Wednesday was the most exciting day of the conference. Probably because I got to attend the most sessions on that day. The day kicked off with some time where members of the community got to share what they were working on. Again, there was a few open-source projects mentioned, I got to plug my session on Degrafa, and we all got a sneak peek at what other’s were working on.

By my session, on the last day and time, I was pretty fried, but I was excited to share Degrafa with those who hadn’t heard of it and discuss some of the new features in the new beta release. Ben Stucki and Pavan Podila were there to field technical questions and comment on some of the new features. I was able to hang out a bit after my session to answer more questions, but then headed to the airport in a hurry.

So, 360|Flex rocked! The very next day I left in a car for Colorado and am now officially in downtown Denver, a couple miles from the EffectiveUI offices. Needless to say, it’s been a hectic and exciting week.

Here’s the slides from my session. The examples I showed will be available soon as samples on the Degrafa site.

On February 6th I’ll be heading up to Los Angeles to talk about Degrafa at the LA AIR User Group. I’ll be covering the features of the framework, how it may fit into your development work flow, and where we see Degrafa going. If you can’t make it out to 360|Flex in February and you’re interested in Degrafa, I’ll be sharing some of that same material.

This event should also be a great opportunity to catch up on some of Adobe’s latest releases. You can learn more about the event on the LA AIR event page.

I’ll be speaking about Degrafa at the 360Flex Conference in Atlanta, February 25-27. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework for Flex that allows you to draw graphics, create skins, and more using MXML and CSS.

We’re getting really close to releasing a public beta and we’re pretty excited to see what people will do with the framework. We’ve been creating various examples to showcase some of the possibilities of what you can do and it’s really great to see. By the time the conference rolls around we hope to have more features added and possibly a second release.

In addition, several members of the Degrafa team will be there, which should provide for a pretty good session. You can learn more about the conference here. See you there!

The second part of the “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex” that Andy McIntosh and I did at 360Flex is now available for download. This is the hands-on portion of the “Skinning Mega-Session” and the supporting code and assets can be found here.

Check out the video here.

Day 2 of the 360Flex Conference started out with the “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex” back-to-back sessions presented by Andy McIntosh and I. We were up ’til 3am putting the finishing touches on our slide deck and hands-on materials to get it to where we were happy with it. The informational session ran a bit short to allow more time for the hands-on, which worked out great. Just for grins I thought I’d show the app we were going to build, which was a Mix Drinks Recipe type application. Here’s the mock up I did:

We ended up making a much simpler example for the hands-on session to insure people were able to grasp the core methods we were discussing, rather than getting caught up in the code. If anyone’s interested in making this an app let me know. All the artwork for this app is vector and those drinks are prepped and ready to go in Flash. You can check out the slide deck for the informational presentation and the grab the source files for the hands-on session here. There’s also a nice list of resource links on that page.

After the presentation I was able to get out of the hotel and explore Seattle a bit to grab some lunch. Later on I caught David Colletta’s presentation on Buzzword, which was great. I’m definitely looking forward to day 3 and a trip to the Space Needle restaurant.

The countdown is on ’til I leave for the 360Flex Conference in Seattle. I’m putting some of the finishing touches on portions of the presentation I’ll be giving with Andy McIntosh and grabbing handfulls of ScaleNine, Degrafa and AtomicCurve business cards. I’m really looking forward to meeting lots of people, learning a lot, checking out others’ projects and sharing a bit of my own. If you’re going, be sure to say “hi” and if you’re not sure who to look for, here’s my Flexcursion profile.

I just got back from doing a presentation at the Los Angeles Flex User Group organized by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of Search Coders. It was great to finally meet those guys and have conversations with fellow “Flexers” along with shaking the dust off some of my presentation skills.

The presentation, titled “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2,” was a test run of some of the topics Andy McIntosh and I will be presenting at the 360Flex Conference in August. Overall things went great and I got a lot of feedback. Some of the feedback I got was to be expected like, “You need more visuals.” I got into a time crunch and didn’t get to implement all the visuals I wanted to, I mean come on, I’m talking about something visual and I have no visuals. Completely understandable and I’ll make sure to get more in there.

There was a bit of redundancy in parts of the presentation that I breezed through to get to showing some actual live examples of what I was talking about. Everybody really responded to those, so I’m going to try to work live examples in the presentation even if I do have to break between the slides and FlexBuilder. I’ve got a bit of work to do.

Also, I mentioned to those who attended that I’d be making the presentation slides available so you can access a PDF of the slides below. The redundant parts were stripped out and the majority of the slides have general concepts that I went into detail while speaking.

Download Presentation “Creating a Visual Experience in Flex 2″