Stickfight

Category Flex London User Group
Mark Barton, Duncan and myself attended the Flex London User Group last night (August meet), its been a while since its been run, so it was a perfect time to pile in, it was hosted at skillsmatter's new place up near the barbican so the normal clean well appointed facilities (coffee/tea, wifi, etc etc) were provided.

The speaker was Mark Doherty who writes the http://www.flashmobileblog.com/ and unsurprisingly his talk was on the latest updates on the flash and air players with particular reference to mobile devices, all new stuff to me, if you head over to his site he has videos of all the stuff he demoed and you can even watch the podcast of it all here ,which saved me doing screen shots and writing loads of details, but some key point for me were:

- They now have remote debugging on the air platform on at least android.
- Multiple flash/flex instances now have a priority order so that when a CPU is pressed for power it can give all the effort to the in-focus app while lowering things like screen refresh (but not back ground stuff like audio).
- Due to different vendors using different chips, the accelerometer and geo locator functions vary from device to device.
- You can swap target runtime at anytime rather than only on project creation.

and some little useful bits are:

- If you press and hold on a flash app in a browser on a mobile device, a mobile menu pops up with options like full screen.
- The new TFL (Text Framework Layout) is very heavy on mobiles, avoid if you can.
- 128 dithering in photoshop really helps make the image smaller and is good for mobile apps.

Everyone was very friendly and I met some good people, unfortunately I left after the talk, next time I think I will do it properly and pop down the pup with the die hard's as that is where the real learning and fun begins. but it was a good beginning.

Oh, also discovered on the groups home page a comment from Bill Buchan and if thats not an endorsement I don't know what is :) .