A little late getting this out their, while most attendees went to Disney Land last night after the sessions I opted to come back to the room to get to bed early. I have been going nonstop since I landed in LA, so I thought the much needed rest was deserved.


So while I will have nothing to report on from the after hour parties last night I do have a lot of great info I picked up in yesterdays sessions. I started off the morning with Talking To Databases: SQL for Designers. It was an early morning class, 8:00am, but the speaker was great. Sean started off talking about writing basic SQL statements and then moved on to how to created more advanced queries using Dreamweaver 8. This is not an area I personally focus on, but after seeing well Dreamweaver handles things I may spend some time tinkering with it once I get back... maybe, maybe not :)

After that was the XD: Best Practices for Guided Selling Experiences, by Andrew Borovsky. Andrew demonstrated some project the XD team had worked on and talked about using Flash or Flex to design custom widgets for ecommerce sites. From their research they have found that creating these richer experiences improves sale completion on sites. And that although these experiences may be new to some users, they pick up on dragging and dropping items into a check out, or compare widget very quickly and enjoy the experience a great deal more. Not really a lot of new information but it was still very interesting in seeing how the XD team has handled some of these challenges.

Following this sessions was the day 2 keynote, which carried an Aussie theme :) They talked more about Flex Builder and Flex Enterprise 2. And then more about mobile development with Flash Lite 2.0. Also announced was an agreement with Brew to deliver Flash Lite content to mobile phones. The best part about this agreement is that if the user doesn't have Flash Lite installed on their phone with purchasing an application it will be bundled with the app and installed on the users phone. There is still not a firm release date on when we can expect to start seeing this show up on mobile phones, but this is another great step in allowing Flash Lite developers to distribute their content and improve the penetration of Flash Lite on mobile phones here in the US.

The afternoon was filled with an entire session by the XD team focusing on The Structural Design of World-Class Mobile Experiences. It was a 3 hour session split up by Winston Wang, Andrew Borovosky, and Josh Ulm. Winston talked about the state of mobile devices, approaching mobile experiences, and best practices for testing your content. One thing he mentioned that I have failed to think about in the past was designing applications that users will use without really looking at the applications (i.e. while driving). During the break I spoke with Nick and the guys from Blue Sky North about ways to approach this using sound, and or vibration. I am planning to do a few tests on this in the future so be sure to keep an eye out for a few example swf's. Andrew focused his time on design, and how designing for mobile devices (particularly mobile phones) requires a new mindset then designing for the web or desktop. He talked about how the XD team first approached it as creating miniature web apps (Flex Apps / Pods) but quickly realized this was the wrong approach. He stressed how important it was to focus on the content you are delivering and how letting that become the design elements, not menu's and chrome. John ended out the session talking about the development of mobile applications. The demoed developing a photo gallery in Flash Lite 1.1 and then showed how you can create the same app in Flash Lite 2.0 using AS2. He also spoke about best ways to handled calls in Flash Lite 1.1 and things to keep in mind to improve performances on the device.

The one evening event I did attend before calling it a night was the Sneak Peaks. Here Macromedia showed each product and talked about where they are hoping to take them in the future. Blog in Black has a great detailed post on everything that was talked about so I am going to refrain from reposting it all here.

Well I am off to start day 3, about to go grab some breakfast then after that will be attending What's New in Flash 8, Object Oriented ActionScript, Flash 8 Professional authoring for Mobile Devices, ACCESSIBILITY: Developing Accessible Rich Content with Flash, and then finally Flash On Every Screen. If you will be in any of these sessions be sure to stop by and say hello.