Day 1 – 360Flex Conference

First day at 360Flex Conference in San Jose.   The most interesting presentation (besides the keynote) was given by Christian Canrtell, an Apollo Application Developer.  Christian covered the Apollo APIs.  The File System APIs will have several key features (that I was interested in):

• File object pointers to files and/or directories
• Ability to get the path to special directories (My Documents)
• Copying, moving, deleting files and/or directories
• File streams for reading/writing files

You will essentially be able to drag/drop files and folders onto and from Apollo applications using the File System APIs.  In addition, there is an Asynchronous APIs to handle “threading” of large file upload/dowload.   This means the system will not hang while Apollo is doing some heaving conversion or file handing in the background.   There was some question about the ability of Apollo to access the file directory of the operating system.   Christian demonstrated an application that looked identical to the file system browser in Windows for showing different file types and navigating the file system.   I think the File System APIs are robust.

Some other goodies included a integration of Flash CS3 with Flex.  You will essentially be able to use SWC files to pull in items from a Flash Asset library directly.  Grant Skinner gave a demonstration of a wrapper class that will allow you to import Flash files and control the timeline of those files.   In addition, the new Flash CS (formally Flash 9) will import Photoshop files and maintain their layers and vector shapes. 

Someone snapped a quick photo at the conference of Larry and I (I am front left, Larry front center) sitting in our first presentation.  You can see all the conference photos at the 360 Flex Flickr site.