PRWD

Last night I gave a presentation to Manchester Digital’s Developing with Adobe AIR event, speaking alongside Andrew Shorten of Adobe, John Knott of InterDirect and Paul Kinlan, lead developer of FriendDeck and a couple of other very interesting projects.

Despite a last-minute change to the running order which saw me speaking first, ahead of Andrew’s introduction to the Flash and AIR platform, it all went smoothly and it was great to speak to people after the event, answering questions from people who were obviously interested in developing on AIR themselves. Even better, a quick show of hands at the end of the presentation suggested that a significant number of people were interested in further events about the AIR platform.

There was also particular interest in the possibility of Flash/AIR as a mobile platform. Whilst the iPhone is a great device, there’s still plenty of room for competition, and Andrew’s presentation contained many tantalising suggestions about future developments from Adobe, in collaboration with hardware providers, that could make the Flash/AIR platform a viable cross-platform mobile environment.

Below, you can see my slides, and I’ll post a link to the other speakers’ slides when I have them.

Next week, on Tuesday 30th of June, we will be presenting at Developing with Adobe AIR, a Manchester Digital event sponsored by Adobe. Registration is free for Manchester Digital members, and £10 for non-members.

What’s it about?

The event will be about the Adobe AIR framework, a cross-platform (Windows, MacOS and Linux) system that can be used to speed up development and deployment of applications, especially those based on web technologies. We’ve used it to power the development of internal business systems, mixing together our expertise in developing web applications with the tools that AIR offers for turning those into desktop applications.

Who will be speaking?

The event’s main speaker will be Adobe’s Andrew Shorten, who will be showcasing some of the most innovative uses of Adobe’s technology in delivering both consumer and enterprise applications. There will also be three presentations from people who have used Adobe AIR to create applications:

• Myself, talking about how we’ve used AIR in the creation of an internal business system for manufacturers
• John Knott of Interdirect, who have created an integrated content management system for kiosk terminals in public spaces
• Paul Kinlan, who has created FriendDeck, an open source tool for interacting with the FriendFeed service

What will my talk cover?

My talk will be explaining how and why we decided to use Adobe AIR, the technical challenges we faced and how our solution was ultimately implemented. We used AIR specifically to enable us to use our existing web technology background, so much of the talk will focus on AIR from a web development perspective.

I look forward to seeing you there!