The conference, held at the 3LD (3-Legged Dog) Art & Technology Center, will feature tracks for Technology and Inspiration, along with the City track for exploring local landmarks. The Technology track will focus on coding and wiring for application architecture while the Inspiration track will center on design and user experience. The venue, which is a gallery for new media and experimental artwork, is meant to mirror the tone of the conference in the way it joins art and technology.

As part of the Inspiration track, I’ll be giving my talk entitled “Building RIAs with Style,” which I premiered at Flash Camp Chicago in February and have continued to refine since then. The talk starts with an introduction of lower level concepts about web graphics for developers, continues with exploring how some popular RIA frameworks handle styling, and wraps up by comparing two important workflow tools—Adobe Flash Catalyst and Microsoft Expression Blend—to demonstrate how the different platforms operate.

My goal with this talk is to provide rookies with a basis for understanding graphic assets, how to apply styles in RIA development, and the importance of styling as well as provide more advanced tricks of the trade for senior developers.

Check back to hear how it went, but first, watch my interview with Elad Elrom, Flash and the City conference organizer. Elad is a technical writer and senior Flash engineer, and he will also be leading a session entitled “Flex Data Binding Pitfalls: 10 Common Misuse Mistakes.”

Flash and the City is May 14-16 in New York, New York.

Vector Graphics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vector_graphics
Raster Graphics – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raster_graphics

F*CSS

Site – http://fcss.flashartofwar.com
Source – http://github.com/theflashbum/fcss
Quick start – http://fcss.flashartofwar.com/quick-start-guide

Jesse Freeman – @theflashbum
http://flashartofwar.com/

FlexFormatter

http://sourceforge.net/projects/flexformatter/
http://flexformatter.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/FlexFormatter/FlexPrettyPrintCommandUpdateSite/ (Eclipse software update URL)

Thanks to Flash Camp Chicago for having me present and to Roundarch for sponsoring my talk… it continues to be a exceptionally well-run conference and one of the highlights in my presenting year.

Here’s my abstract for the talk:

Advanced Skinning and Component Development

Building components for the Flex Framework can be a tricky task. In this session we will examine some of the best practices of component development as well as look at the tools available for skinning a custom Flex control. We’ll walk through a demo of building a custom component developed using MXML and ActionScript 3.0 and skinned using the Flex plugins for Photoshop, Fireworks, Flash, and Illustrator. As there is no release date set for Thermo no promises can be made about a demo of it’s capabilities, but if it’s available we’ll look at that too.

UM Speakers :
- Doug Knudsen : Custom components in a BRIA environment’
- Doug McCune : Session: Be Lazy, Use Open Source Flex Projects
- Andrew Powell : Building Java Powered Flex Applications

The 360|Flex Pitch

This 3-day conference is the place to learn about Flex and AIR from Adobe and community speakers. Sunday before the conference we’ll be offering an all day Flex 101 session, included in the price of registration. That’s right, a pre-conference all day training session on Flex. 360|Flex is the premiere Flex and AIR conference. We were the first Flex conference and we’re still growing and getting better.
Don’t miss out, only $480 for an individual or $1500 for a 4-person team. More details can be found at http://360flex.com