I am back home from the 360Flex Atlanta conference. I thought I'd share some of my thoughts about the conference. I'm not going to focus on the session reviews, just overall thoughts. A lot more people listen to The Flex Show now than they did at 360Flex Seattle. As such, my 'prominence' in the community has risen up a notch. I want to thank everyone for listening. At 360Flex, speakers are just "attendees with a little more responsibility.

The Flex Show is broadcasting semi-live from the 360Flex conference. On day 0, I was able to grab some people and do interviews after the pre-conference party. On the first day is just my own personal rambling about my day. I haven't decided if this is more, or less interesting than Live Blogging. The conference so far is a lot of fun. Flex 3 and AIR 1 were released. Matt Chotin keynoted about this along with some Flex 4 ( Gumbo ) features.

One of the benefits of Adobe AIR, over a browser based application, is that you can have access to the local file system. This question came up on the House of Fusion Flex Coders list; and I thought I'd blog the answer. I truncated the original question a bit. I've got an Flex/AIR app which contains a SQLite db and some photos which will be included in the install package.

My schedule got "Full" and I ended up editing a podcast last night instead of writing a post here. Tune in for free 360Flex tickets. I was recently talking to a client about creating a scheduling application. They wanted to display a Calendar-type data, either displaying a day's worth of data, a weeks worth of data, or a month's worth of data. They wanted to allow the user to be able to transition between days. The transition they were interested in was the FlexBook component.

What a week this has been so far. The in-house legal counsel of tracfone gave me a call regarding a posting on this blog. Someone posted the personal number of tracfone's CEO in comments to another post. They wanted me to remove it. Cindy (Tracfone lawyer) was rather nice about it. She said it was the first time she's done something other than send a cease and desist. After discussing the issue w/ my lawyer, we decided it was okay for me to remove the comments.

A few weeks ago I finally got to upgrade from Flex Builder 3 (Beta 2) to Flex Builder 3 (Beta 3). I had an AIR application in the works, so along the way I also got a chance to upgrade the AIR runtime and SDK. As with all upgrades, I strongly recommend reading the release notes. Read them twice. My software upgrade was not very smooth, unfortunately. The first step was to uninstall Beta 2. I opened up the windows control panel and uninstalled it.

I'll be speaking at the next 360Flex. 360Flex is the premiere conference focused on Flex and AIR topics. It takes place on February 25-27, 2008. I'll be there talking about code reuse between Flex and AIR. As if three whole days of Flex goodness wasn't enough, ll attendees are invited to participate in a hands on Flex 101 session on Sunday the 24th. This is a free all attendees.

I've been accepted into the Adobe Community Experts Program for Flex. The Adobe Community Experts Program is a community based program made up of Adobe customers who share their product expertise with the world-wide Adobe community. The Adobe Community Experts' mission is to provide high caliber peer-to-peer communication educating and improving the product skills of Adobe customers worldwide.

So, I was reading a story on Slashdot stating that McAfee may have to open source portions of their products due to the use of GPL licensed software. It is unknown if McAfee is actually using GPL licensed code in their closed source products or if this was just one of many annual report statements made to prevent a lawsuit down the line. This made me take a step back to think for a bit. Adobe is about to release Flex 3 under an open source license.

This question comes in from a reader. You did know that I love to answer reader questions, right? What is your recommendation for learning about AS3 design patterns? I looked at the books offered at Amazon, but the reviews are somewhat disappointing for the 2-3 titles about this. I'd say that Design Patterns are just approaches, or solutions, to certain situations. In most cases they are not language specific.