My Friday night was spent at the FlashCamp SF. This is the second FlashCamp organized by Adobe and like its predecessor, it was held over at the Adobe San Francisco Office. For the uninitiated, the FlashCamps are free developer events focused on the Adobe Flash Platform.
This time, the event was mainly revolving around the next generation of the Flex SDK, code-named Gumbo. It was a huge night for the Flash community as Adobe presented a barrage of information on Flex 4, Flash Catalyst and the recently renamed Flash Builder.
FlashCamp came with a whole bunch of free swag: beta software (Flash Builder 4 Beta, Flash Catalyst 1.0 Beta and Flex 4), eboy stickers and a t-shirt.
For those who are yearning to lay your hands on the betas, it was alluded that they will be publicly released this coming Monday. Definitely watch for it over at the Adobe Labs.
The free t-shirt was surprisingly interesting and in all likelihood, the cream of the crop amongst the free swag.
It depicted a woman (presumably a personification of Photoshop) receiving a gift box from a suitor (predictably a male geek representing Flex). The gift box symbolizes the crown jewel of the next wave of Adobe software releases: the Flash Catalyst. All these done in eBoy-style pixel art.
I thought the illustration seemed pretty fitting, considering the role that Flash Catalyst fill, is essentially a tool that bridges the workflow between design and development. A gift from the developers to get the designers more involved.
I was a particularly happy attendee myself this time round mostly because my ticket won me a stash of ActionScript and Flex-related books at the raffle.
It was a total of 7 books, 5 of which from the O'Reilly series. Some of them were actually on my Amazon wish-list. Many thanks to Adobe and Mike Chambers who drew my raffle ticket. I can now strike these books off my list without spending a dime and they are definitely going into geek hoard. I am hopeful that the content in the Flex 3 books would still be applicable when Flex 4 is officially out.
The entire night was a series of informative sessions. Regretably for most, it was quite a challenge to hear the speakers amidst of all the ongoing chatter in the background. Despite attempts from the organizers to keep the volume down, it was really difficult to concentrate.
Generally, I think the event went quite well. Most people were pretty pleased about it and were typically curious about the new releases.