Barcamp: Macromedia (Adobe) Flex & being a Mac snob

Ben Stucki was kind enough to give a talk this morning about Adobe Flex, which is a new development framework that sits on top of Flash 9. However, he had some technical difficulties getting his Sony Vaio to work with the projector, so I decided to step in and show off how easy it is to get my Macintosh to work with external displays. So, sure enough, my Mac detected the projector just fine. But I didn't want to take the time to install the Flash 9 beta, along with the Flex designer (which is based on Eclipse) on my Mac. Instead, I demonstrated how flexible the Macintosh is, by using the Microsoft Remote Desktop client to connect to Ben's Vaio over the WiFi.

So witness Ben giving his presentation on my Mac, connected remotely to his Vaio:

Ben Stucki talking about Flex, via some unholy Windows/Macintosh alliance

Anyways, setup drama aside, Flex seems reasonably interesting. In general, I'm not a big fan of proprietary development solutions that break the model of the web (any content in any browser). But flash is reasonably portable, and it does look like it is super-easy to generate rich applications using Flex. Apparently, this is targeted towards enterprises, and I would much rather see Flex getting adopted than Microsoft's crazy (and super-evil) Avalon stuff.

-Andy.

Technorati Tags: Barcamp, Flex, Adobe, Macromedia, Mac Snob