I spoke at the last 360|Flex in San Jose, but I’m already more excited for the DC conference, and here’s why.

1. I’m speaking about the most exciting part of the Flash Platform, AIR2
2. Jesse vs. Jesse ( Flash vs Flex throwdown )
3. It’s in Washington DC
4. My band The Compilers will be giving a lunch talk, as well as playing live at one of the parties
5. There is talk of Duanne Nickull’s band 22nd Century playing ( hopefully Sean ‘the flex guy’ too )
6. Doug McCune is giving the opening Keynote speech on Monday
7. I get to hang out with the Flex community

If you haven’t been to a 360 Flex conference yet I highly recommend it.  If you still need help deciding, here are a few conference questions for you.

1. Do you currently work with or have any interest in Adobe Flex?
2. Have you attended a 360 Flex conference yet?
3. Do you want to meet the community loudmouths you’re already following on Twitter?
4. Have you seen who is speaking at 360 Flex DC?
5. Have you ever heard The Compilers play live?
6. Are you still reading this blog post?

The last 360 Flex I spoke at was in San Jose and it rocked.  The city of San Jose bored me to tears, but I felt like I was living inside my twitter feed for three days.  My presentation was on the final day of 360 Flex, so I spent most of the conference preparing, and sitting in a few sessions here and there.  I spent almost half of my time in San Jose working and still met 10-15 of my twitter buddies, not to mention all the new contacts I met.  In a nutshell, if you attend a 360 Flex conference, you will meet the community.  In fact, you’d have to try pretty hard to not meet the Flex community.

If this sounds up your alley, go ahead and register to take advantage of the early adopter ticket price of $450.  I’m not sure when the ticket price will go up to $599, but I know it will so act fast.  If you make it to DC, be sure to find me and introduce yourself.  I promise it will be a good time.

Early adopter price $450	360|Flex Information ABOUT SCHEDULE SPEAKERS REGISTER

In case you missed the June RMAUG meeting, my band The Compilers played our first hybrid concert and presentation show. Who are The Compilers? As far as I know, we’re Denver CO’s only Tech Funk Fusion trio that use internet technology along with analog instruments. By day we’re internet programmers, and by night we’re rockers. Right now majority of our software revolves around the Flash Platform, so it was only natural that we play at RMAUG.

Below is a recap of our setlist, and notes about the technology we presented on. When you see mentions of a Flash movie, these are not run as standalone SWF files. They are actually played by our Flex based Compilers Live Player. This application runs on our guitarist Jun Heider’s laptop, and the entire app is controlled over MIDI, via a Behringer FCB1010 Foot Controller, MMJ, and MERAPI.

Intro Song

For the first song of our set we decided to use a funny and informative Flash movie to give the audience a hint at what they’re about to see. For the June RMAUG show, this movie was updated to include spoken thank you slides for the companies that make our technology, and special shout outs to all the people who help us put on a great show.

Watch Flash Intro Movie

I want an iPhone

Watch Flash iPhone Movie

Tweet Jam v2

James vs. Rick

The Flash Platform Rocks!

The Compilers Next Show

That’s the gist of how my current band formed. A handful of computer programmers who used to play in bands decided it was time to get back on the music horse. At first we had five or so people interested in jamming and seeing where things go. A few jams later and we were down to the power trio that is now known as The Compilers.

The name of the group didn’t come around until a month or so after we had been jamming as the April Fool’s.  All three of us are internet programmers who work with Adobe’s Flash platform, as well as contribute to our local Adobe community.  About the time we officially became a power trio we were kicking around the idea of becoming the house band for our local user group meetings ( RMAUG ).  In the process of laughing this one out, we were asked by RMAUG to play an upcoming Adobe technical event that was happening in two weeks.  That technical event was the “Next Generation Flex & Coldfusion Tour“.

At first we were hesitant booking a show when we didn’t have a real band, or enough material to play a show.  Long story short, we decided to play the show, decided to name the band The Compilers, and decided we should probably integrate some sort of tech into this show.  We didn’t set out wanting to mix technology with music, it just seemed appropriate for this first gig to do something technical.  That technical music nugget is now known as Tweet Jam, our smash hit that plays tweets from @thecompiler‘s Twitter timeline while the band plays underneath the robot voice.

That first show was fun, funny, and the beginning of an interesting musical project.  In the last six months we’ve played four shows, and we gave a presentation at the 360|MAX unconference at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, CA.  This really isn’t a lot of gigs, but considering we started this band in June, it’s been quite a whirlwind of musical and technical action.  Jun has built at least three versions of the TweetJam application, as well as integrated his midi foot controller with TheCompilers Flex player.  I’ve gotten pretty comfortable playing iPhone, made a few Flash movies for our set, and started looking into sound generation with Sonoflash.  Scottie has been the mad scientist behind the green velvet curtain.  Drummer man, electric drummer man, sound man, idea man, recorder man, crazy Brazillian ghord instrument player.

It’s so great to be back in a band.  These last six months have been a blast, and it was all started from a few jokes.  Speaking of jokes, below you will find two flash movies that I built for our 360|MAX presentation, as well as our talk.  The concept of melding tech with music is new to us, so this talk was a bit off the cuff, but it was still a great time.

360|MAX assets

It’s a Laser! – My first experiment with the Sonoflash library.  Adjust your laser properties then click shoot.  Each slider has a keyboard listener.  Attack = A, Release = R, and Frequency = F.

Click to launch the laser maker

By Note – This sample is the beginning of layering sounds and controlling notes and octaves.  This one can play the major notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B using your keyboard and the play button.  The octave controller on the right is powered by mouseover, 1 is low and 9 is high.  The sounds also have keyboard listeners.  Laser = 1 and Ping = 2.  Note, the event listeners don’t kick in until after you’ve clicked a button, so it may be quirky at first.  I built this on the plane ride out to LA and couldn’t figure that one out.

Click to launch this madness

360|MAX presentation : “Geek Rock with the Flash Platform”

411 on The Compilers

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Compilers/110943240897

MySpace : http://www.myspace.com/compilers

Twitter : http://twitter.com/thecompilers

Go ahead and add this to the list of reasons why Flash is awesome.

Here is their description :
“Liveplasma is a new way to broaden your cultural horizons according to your taste in music and movies. Look for your favorite bands, movies or directors to obtain a map that details other potential interests”

Anyways, it’s super bad ass.

While working with flash and asp.net web services I learned that you can send a custom class object to an ASMX. That service can then take your object and have it’s way with it. This is pretty killer because you can share custom classes between .net and as, assuming the class definitions match, and the datatypes don’t get too complex.

If you have to work with webservices from flash, checkout the WebService class. It’s sweet. So much so that I don’t understand why I even need Flash Remoting. I mean, I can send and receive my custom class on the flash side as well as the .net side.

Currently I only see the following limitations with this magic flash to soap communicado.

1. No test form on the .asmx page. For a typical asmx file, the .net server can generate a simple test form that you can use to test your webservice. It’s great, except for a service that expects your custom class as input
2. Simple data types. I haven’t tested the waters of what datatypes you can use in your custom object, but I’m guessing you can’t venture outside of the basic strings and numbers.

I’m pretty pumped about learning the AS WebService class. It’s so much nicer than the olden days of parsing name value pairs, or even a full on xml object. The WebService class does all the magic for you in flash, and you code up the result object as you’ve defined your custom object.

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