It was raining the entire evening so I left for Boulder fairly early. I actually arrived at the planetarium (the entire conference was inside a planetarium!) 20 minutes early and they hadn’t even begun setting up the registration tables. So I just hung back and had a look at all the materials posted along the walls. Lots of Planetarium articles, prints, and so forth. Not-so-interesting… but it passed the time.
When I did check in, I was given an Apollo-branded shirt and goodie bag. The goodie bag contained a copy of Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide, sticker, Apollo CD, and conference schedule. the CD contains everything that is currently available on Labs including SDKs, Flex Builder, Apollo extensions, sample applications, and goodies.
After check-in, I hung around in the main area and had a look at more planetarium displays. There is a really neat projection system which displays mapped images upon a sphere. These range from images of the moon to various earth mappings such as ocean currents and weather patterns. Very interesting to watch but it gets a little old after an hour… which was about the total time I had to stare at the thing before the keynote began. No fault of the presenters- I was just way too early.
The keynote was presented by Mike Chambers who presented a nice overview of Apollo for us. The following presentations were pretty informative as a lot of the weird details I was unsure of were taken up. One example would be that when defining an Apollo app- you don’t need to necessarily specify all 4 icon sizes- Apollo SDK does a pretty good job of creating derivatives based on your 128×128 icon so that’s all you really need. Nice to know. Also the advantages of synchronous vs. asynchronous file handling was very informative.
I stayed for most of the presentations but decided to leave at around 10:00 for a number of reasons:
- It was way past my bedtime anyway (now that I have a baby in the house)
- We normally go to mass pretty early on Sunday and with a baby… it takes some time to get ready.
- I’ve been sick since the VRA conference in March. I’ll blame my daughter for this one too :)
- Lastly, I was just tired and ready to get home. Having been gone since 4:00- that’s a lot of time to spend away on a Saturday evening.
All in all- a really nice event. I’m still a big supporter of Apollo and am looking forward to the public beta this summer.