I was so busy in the past two days that I couldn't even blog about the conference. Flash on the Beach kicked off for me with the party I threw for speakers and friends on Sunday. It was a blast and definitely helped warm up the new place (seriously, it was packed; I turned the heating off!) 
Yesterday, I presented my session and caught bits of Craig's before heading back home to undertake more domestic duties (someone had to clean up after the party.) Funny thing is, I must really love my new place 'cos it was actually fun to clean up for a change!
I sat through Jeremy's session today and it just plain rocked. Best presentation I've seen in a long time and his message was loud and clear: The Flash and Ajax worlds have a lot to learn from each other and Flash and Ajax can live in harmony. Jeremy sees web projects on a slider with document-based sites on one end and application sites (RIAs) on the other. He sees Ajax as most useful on the document end (with its usefulness diminishing as we approach the application side) and Flash/Flex as most useful on the application side with its applicability being reduced as we approach the document end. As the crossover point, his rule of thumb was that if you cannot apply progressive enhancement to a site (for example, using his Hijax method), then the application is probably too complex for Ajax (or will require lots of effort to implement in Ajax) and you should use Flash instead. He also mentioned that Flash is currently more accessible than Ajax and that Ajax developers can use FlashAid -- a little tool we developed together with Jeremy -- to enable Ajax sites to ascertain whether a screen reader is present and disable the Ajax functionality (the enhancement) in response to that.
I also caught Joey Lott's session and it was great to see design patterns in Flash presented by someone else. I also managed to see some of Craig's and Keith's sessions. All in all, the conference appears to be shaping out quite nicely indeed. Kudos again to John. I look forward to many more Flash on the Beach conferences in the years to come.
The Flash on the Beach update article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Aral,
Flash on the beach rocks !
Today’s sessions were great and I loved your memo to CEO too
Thanks for your great session.
Hope to find you available for saying hello
Sounds like it was a great conference! I’m really sorry I didn’t make more of an effort to get down there now, Brighton is a bit of trek though.
Looks like fun, I’m envious!
Hi Aral
Great, excellent Session, I really enjoyed it, do you have any planes on putting your keynote up for download I really like to show it to my CEO
Hi Aral,
Great talk thanks! The combination of you and Joey Lott has convinced me to move to Eclipse and start using design patterns. I even bought Joey’s book.
The thing now is to work out how to download Eclipse. That’s the frustrating thing with any Open Source stuff I’ve encountered; 2 billion links to all sorts of bizarrely named files that appear completely irrelevant to my needs. I have no idea what I need to download and what I need to avoid!
I’m a WinXP user. Can you clue me in on what files I need!?
Many Thanks,
Dave