Shaka Devoxx

I'm back from the annual Devoxx conference, a fun and thoroughly exhausting week in Antwerp spent presenting, attending, and generally hanging out. It's always a great time, despite the weather and the overall grayscale cityscape.

This picture from the show was taken during one of my sessions when I was either talking about a GUI frame or saying hello to my Hawaiian friends.

I presented in several sessions, including 4 sessions with Romain Guy about Android and UI programming and one on topics from my book, Flex 4 Fun. I spent most of the week either on stage or writing slides and demos to present on stage. There's nothing like procrastination to keep you busy at the last minute.

For anyone that missed the presentations, see below about their availability on parleys.com. We may also post the slides someday, although it's always better to get the full deal (slides+audio+video). Also, I intend to post a couple of the demos I showed in the Android talks (the Flex demos are already available on the book site).

The sessions this year were, as always, recorded and will be released on parleys.com, an excellent site for viewing presentations with lots of content from previous years as well as other developer forums. The talks are released incrementally during the year for free, or you can buy a subscription to view them all for 79 Euros. In fact, parleys just announced that the 2009 recordings are now all available and all free. The talks and the recordings are of very high quality, so you should check out the site..

Anyway, thanks to Stephan Janssen for another great conference. Shaka!

Amazon Restocks Massive Shelves

Flex 4 Fun is finally, once again, in stock at Amazon.com. It's been "Temporarily out of stock" for the past coupjle of weeks for reasons that escape me, but which are probably one of these two possibilities:

• Amazon is really new at this business of selling books and is still learning how to keep appropriate amounts of inventory on-hand.
• They lost all the copies they had and had to rewrite the book from scratch, based purely on the cover picture on their website. I hope their version is as gripping as the original.

In any case, you can now order it in peace. At the same time, they bumped the price a bit, to $26.60. This is fantastic news, of course, for two reasons:

• The book now costs just about a cup of coffee more than it used to on Amazon. This means that you may have to forego that cup when you read it, thus preventing unfortunate spills and mess.
• Even better, the new price means that the book is just over Amazon's Free Shipping limit here in the U.S. That's probably the thing that a lot of you were waiting for in order to finally purchase it.

So go ahead. It's ready. Now. Go.

Speaking of Flex...

I'll be joining Jacob Surber from Adobe this week to speak to the local Flex user group, SilvaFUG (which I think stands for "Silicon Valley Flex User Group." Or maybe it's "Silver and Fugly"). We'll be in San Francisco on Tuesday evening (the 12th) and San Jose on Thursday evening (the 14th).

The topic is "Fun with Flex Skinning." I'll start off with an overview of the visual aspects of Flex 4 (which, by bizarre coincidence, are exactly the topics covered by Flex 4 Fun. Funny how that worked out). Then I'll walk through an extended example of skinning a simple component to show how these visual elements are used to enable easy development of very custom-looking components. I promise there will be much more code than bullet-points. Jacob will then go into more detail about skinning, including possible workflows and tools for design and development of custom components.

More information about the events can be found on the SilvaFUG site.

I hope to see you there; it should be a Flex 4 Fun evening. Both times.

Flex 4 Fun: Only n left-- order soon!

Flex 4 Fun is finally available for purchase at Amazon. First, it went from looking like this on their site (with the depressing "Temporarily out of stock" message):

to looking like this, after they were finally ready to ship it out (I figure they probably wanted to dust off the copies first, then put them on the shelves to see how nice they looked):

Then for the past few days, the amount of stock appears to continuously change. In fact, they seem to have a hard time figuring out how much stock to keep on hand. Here are some screenshots from the Amazon page over the past few days. (Not that I've visited the site that many times or anything. After all, I already have a copy, so why would I need to? That would be silly.)

Get yours soon. Who knows when they're going to run out completely?

Oh, and don't forget about that free shipping for orders over $25 thing. Amazon toyed briefly with a price just over $26. And I mean briefly. I saw it at that price just once over the past two weeks. Now it's down at $24.39 (below the $24.93 price before it was in stock, in the first image above). Apparently the book is like pork bellies or flax futures and the price fluctuates with demand. Or their clerks just get the numbers transposed occasionally. Since it's so close to the free shipping limit of $25, you'll probably want to bundle it with another relevant, yet highly affordable book, like When I am King.... I'm just saying....

Book Montage

I ran across Flex 4 Fun in the wild this weekend and managed to get some photographs. I thought that it might help you to understand how you might benefit from the book. Here are some ways that others have found it useful.

First of all, the book makes a lovely objet d'art, and was being displayed alongside other great works of art when I encountered it here:

It also makes a nice decoration for some household areas, such as this aquarium:

This person apparently found the code recipes useful in the kitchen:

At 280+ pages, the book is a perfect size for some household tasks, such as leveling this piece of furniture:

A good graphics algorithm is always music to the ears:

This family apparently found the book more interesting to watch on a Friday night than television or a movie:

And of course the book looks great on a bookshelf, where it fits naturally with both the great works of literature:

and the less great works of children's literature:

But the book won't stay on that kids' shelf for long:

Even the family pet may enjoy the book - everyone wants to be an RIA developer:

And finally, this Flex developer was so excited by the book's arrival that he bought two:

As you can see, there are plenty of uses for the book. What will you do with yours?

Done? Done. It's Here.

For anyone that doubted the outcome (including me), I offer the following physical proof that Flex 4 Fun exists. I received a few of the early copies today, and I took a picture of one in its natural habitat. I wanted to capture how nice the book would look on a random bookshelf. Here, you can see it surrounded by a few of my other favorite books:

This is probably as good a time as any to call out to some of the many people that supported me in this huge and questionable effort:

• Romain Guy: Thanks for the ideas, the help, the beautiful pictures (including the lovely and bizarre sea dragon on the cover), the foreword, and the encouragement. I only regret that you didn't actually write the book with me instead of just making me get started on it to begin with. But I'm learning that there's not a lot of time outside of Android development to take on that kind of project...
• Daniel Steinberg: Thanks for helping me get the project rolling at first and giving me some great advice and editing assistance. I'm sure it's a better book for your help.
• Bill Venners (a.k.a., the publisher): Thanks for taking the book on and getting it out there in very quick order. Making it available early in online form that close to the Flex 4 release was important, albeit painful and nearly impossible.
• The academy: For voting for me and sucking up to me throughout my Hollywood career, I thank you most of all. Always thank the academy.

The books are being sent out to distributors starting this week. Amazon still shows the book as "Available for pre-order", but I expect that to change next week as they start receiving their copies. Assuming they can bear to part with the little darlings.

(By the way, this blog entry is reminiscent of an earlier one. My, how the time flies when you're too dang busy working on code and writing books about it...)

Final Article: Effect Choreography in Flex 4

Artima.com has posted another article from my book Flex 4 Fun. Check out Effect Choreography in Flex 4 for an introduction to using composite effects in Flex 4 to create more complex animations.

For anyone that's tired of seeing Flex content on my blog, you're in luck: this is probably the last bit of such material for the foreseeable future. This article is the eighth and last in a series of articles that were, er, borrowed from the book.

(Then again, if you're tired of my Flex content, I have no idea what you're doing reading this blog to begin with).

If, instead, you're pining for more content, might I suggest picking up Flex for Fun? The online version is done and the printed version is so close I can almost taste it (although I hope it reads better than it tastes).

If you're hoping to see some Android content, be patient. I'll get there eventually. I'm a tad swamped in actually writing SDK code and learning the platform first. I'll eventually come around to posting some geeky how-to developer content here. Because that's what this blog is all about.