Joey Lott kicked off this traveling tour by talking to us about Adobe Flex and AIR. The group was mixed with Flash developers and developers who were interested in transitioning their skills to Flash/Flex. Joey did a good job introducing AIR, comparing it to a runtime environment like Java and explain its key differences and benefits over Flash on the web. One of its key advantages is its ability to connect and work with the users file system.
Joey has a great sense of humor and walked us through the .air file structure, what is involved and how to use a certificate to verify no one has tampered with the program or install file. He then went into the details of creating a basic application to open and read html files.
The example walk through brought up some great questions from the group which in some instances even stumped Joey. But as the questions rolled in it brought everyone into a common sense of understanding of Flex and AIR’s capabilities and potential uses.
We were fortunate to get around $400 in giveaways of books and t-shirts provided by O’Reilly and Manning Publications. We want to thank Joey again for stopping by and giving a great presentation.
