Well, I had the pleasure today of attending my first WebDU Conference. Thanks to my lovely friends at BuilderAU for the free ticket!!

So what were my first impressions? Well it wasn’t ‘WOW’, but it was very impressive. Here is how my day panned out;

Session 1: Keynote: Flash, Bang, Apolo
Mike Downey and Mike Chambers from Adobe gave some introductory talks to Open up the day. These talks predominantly focused around Adobe’s new ‘alpha’ product Adobe Apolo, Adobe Flex and we had a sneak peak into Adobe CS3. Now my background into Flex and Apolo was nearly a big fat ZERO, but I read up a bit on the two products before coming to the conference, and whilst they are young products, they defiantly seem to be a step in the right direction for Adobe.

Flex is basically an application framework that allows you to convert any Flash-based web-app to a desktop app (via the Apolo Runtime). Additionally, Flex allows you to wright feature-rich internet-based applications through it’s API. Adobe has a Flex IDE which comes as a Eclipse plug-in.

Session 2: Flex 101: Getting Started with Flex Development
So they got me hooked from the first Session, we had the option of going to 4 sessions after they KeyNote, but I wanted to hear more about Flex, and see it in action. So I did. I basically get the impression that Flex builds SWF files from XML files. Using the Flex Builder, you can use a GUI WISYWIG interface as well as some code to design your own UI interface with all sorts of widgets;

Its quite cool. One of the things that stood out to me was that once you built your Flex App, you could actually use your browsers ‘back’ button and that would go back within the panel’s you had built in Flex. Flex is basically all in MXML (just its own markup of XML, with stuff with additional tags). To do: Play with Flex.

Session 3: Getting Started with Apollo
So I figured I may was well double up on the other Adobe lecture – Apollo. It sounded like Apollo and Flex go hand in hand – and yes they do. We were showed how to create a basic desktop app in Flex, and that was pretty cool.

Session 4: Easy as MVC: Architecture and Frameworks for Non-Believers
For the forth session I went to this because I wanted to hear how MVC was implemented in Flex. The presenter presented a very good basic 101 type course for architecture and design patterns in programming in General. He discussed, ‘why use design patterns?’ and did a very good job in explaining that. Was a good session.

Session 5: Integrating Flash Video into Your Website
This was probably my favorite session out of the whole day. Greg Rewis ran this session, and did a very good Job at it. We first saw some absolutely amazing uses of Flash Video, one that stood out was this site and it’s use of fading effect around the video border. But the highlight of this session was actually seeing how easy it is to integrate flash video onto the web, and additionally, he went through an example of how to have a transparent flash video (without the alpha channel), and he embedded two videos on top of each other with some masking and showed us how easy that was. A very very good session this one was.

Session 6: Optimising Standards Based Websites for Search Engines
The last session I went to pretty much spoke for it’s self. Unfortunately I didn’t get too much out of this, it was all stuff I knew / heard before, I was hoping for some new tips and tricks, but same old. Content covered was very well done but as it was excellent if you hadn’t known all the search engine tips and tricks before – so all up it was very good. The talk was given by a guy from Sitening (an SEO company)

All in up – it was a good day, I look forward to tomorrow.

What I was insured to do after today;
- Get started on Flex
- Put something up with Flash video!!

Other blogs on WebDU Day 1:
Moca’s Blog
Man with no Blog
Ted on Flex: Q1 Presentation