OnAIR Stockholm 2008

The second leg of the OnAIR tour kicked off at the Munchen-Brewery in Stockholm. Despite the beautiful weather outside, the room was packed during the whole day. Not bad for a free marketing event?

Registration was swift with a light breakfast, coffee and ample networking opportunities. All attendants got the OnAIR t-shirt, stickers, the Adobe AIR O'Reilly book for JavaScript Developers and the brand new complete Actionscript Reference, a solid and very handy Swag item!

The day kicked off with an intro by Mike Chambers and Kenny Bogoe from Adobe Scandinavia followed up by a keynote by Ryan Stewart. Ryan went over the application stack, current software, the new services and Acrobat introduced today and also showed the current AIR roadmap. Next up was a series of introductory sessions on AIR with Mike Chambers intro to AIR and Kevin Hoyt on using AIR with JavaScript and HTML. Really good introductions for developers new to AIR.

Attendance stayed high during the entire day. The food served throughout the day was high quality and in plenty. Complimentary drinks and coffee was there all the day, but the Pop Rocks(!) was ripped away in an instant. Everybody loves candy - especially the the odd kind you don't find in Europe since it can make you choke!

Serge Jespers did a session on deploying and updating your AIR applications. Though the swedish crowd is not really vocal at all, I think this session opened up the eyes of many as to how easy it is and can be to keep your app up to date using the Update API. Daniel Dura was given the kind of "ungrateful" task of presenting the entire AIR API. It's really hard to cover it all but Daniel did a good job.

Peter Elst suggested that I'd take on Daniel in Guitar Hero III, but after seeing him and the other tour members playing in the speakers/gaming room I got kind of discouraged... The OnAIR team has countless hours on GH3 after staying on the road with two Xbox'es for almost a year.

Ethan Malasky is on the AIR development team. Ethan seemed a bit anxious at first, but he did well as soon as he got started. His session on Developing Secure AIR applications was really enlightening and not entirely AIR specific. Lot's of good input, so if you're going to any of the upcoming OnAIR events, this is a session not to miss.

I won't write too much about the rest of the sessions, but Enrique Duvos did a session on Data Intensive AIR applications and explained how to combine AIR and web apps with BlazeDS. Mike Chambers did a session on making a Twitter client and Andre Charland of Nitobi talked about Using JavaScript Frameworks in AIR apps. Last out was Lee Brimelow with his AIR Conditioning session - by far the most humorous talk of all. Don't miss this one either!

This kind of events are really just marketing geared towards developers, but I have a feeling that Adobe is getting their money back and word out from these events. This was one of the better marketing-events I've attended. Everything was well laid out and executed except for a few audio issues. During the event, there were raffles for O'Reilly books, t-shirts, eBoy posters and Adobe software (Flex Builder and CS3 Master Collection). Food was good and most of the 400 attendees stayed the entire day despite it being a spotless day outside.

If the OnAIR Tour comes to a city near you and you're curious about AIR, I recommend you spend the day. You'll get a solid introduction to AIR from both DHTML and Flash point of view, in fact we heard that about 40-50% of the attendees have an AJAX background, so this is not the typical Adobe sales-event.

Note: at the event, the Stockholm User Group announced an AIR competition at www.airbrowserwar.com. The competition is fairly simple - use AIR to create an alternative / cheezy browser alternative and win some neat prices, including the CS3 Master Collection and Web Premium!

 

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