Travel and Recent Events

It's been a little hard to keep on top of everything that's been happening lately, as I've been in the middle of a stretch of Flash Lite related travel.

I've just returned from a few days in Manila, where I was training developers in Flash Lite for the country's largest operator, Globe. This was part of a developer competition they had run and an attempt to start equipping the local developer community with the tools and knowledge they need to begin bringing Flash Lite applications and content to market. Many thanks to "Blue" and the G-Labs team for having me and looking after me while I was there, and also to the attendees of the courses for being great students. Manila turned it on weather-wise while I was there, with 1 typhoon passing by and another 2 waiting out to sea. The rain was so heavy on my second day of training that I had to stop frequently because I was having to shout over the noise of the storm outside! Many class members didn't make it that day either because of flooding and traffic chaos in Manila. I got a chance though to meet up with local FL developer Naz for a coffee and talk all things mobile and Flash. There's some seriously talented guys in the Philippines and I'm hoping we can collaborate with them on some upcoming Flash Lite work.

Next trip this week is to California for a week and half of time dedicated to a new Lynda.com training title. It's a Flash Lite related topic, but more details on that once we have some dates for release, etc.

Then in October I'll be demonstrating Moket's Flash Lite games at the 2008 Nokia Games Summit in Rome, and putting Flash Lite forward as a viable platform for developing mobile games. It'll be interesting to see what conversations I get into with a conference full of Java, Symbian and N-Gage developers!

I think the remainder of this year is going to be very exciting for Flash Lite developers. Moket has some interesting stuff to share over the next couple of months, and of course MAX is coming up in November. Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen's recent keynote at CTIA (available now on You Tube thanks to Bill) also gave some insights into where Adobe are pushing Flash Lite and the Flash platform in general.

So stay tuned, and I'll try and post from some of these exoctic locations I'll be visiting over the next few months. And in case you're wondering, Moket only flys me economy class so I'm not the jet-setting executive that all this travel might lead you to believe! Although, with all the frequent flyer miles I'm accruing, I did get enough points on the Manila trip to get access to Singapore Airline's Gold Lounge ... free food and drinks and comfortable seats are what you want when you're about to get on an 8 hour midnight flight!