Tom and John have just completed the huge task of sorting through 130+ submissions and I am honored to have been chosen as a speaker at 360|Flex Indiana. My session is called "Bending and Flexing" and will be all about using Pixel Bender and Flex. It's slated to be a 200 level talk so all levels of Flex and Pixel Bender experience are welcome.  Here's the full description:

Learn how to use Adobe’s Pixel Bender technology to trick out your applications with a limitless variety of effects and transitions. Write pixel shaders with the Pixel Bender Toolkit and integrate them into Flex. Bring your shaders to life using the Flex effects library and other popular tweening libraries. Leverage Pixel Bender’s processing power for non-visual computations. Discover the pros and cons of using Pixel Bender vs. traditional AS3 approaches. Expect lots of demos and open source code to play with.

Now that I'm committed to a topic I'm going to be putting together a lot more demos and tutorials, so keep an eye out on my blog for a sneak peek at some of the content.  Anybody want to make me a "Bending and Flexing" logo?  For a free t-shirt perhaps?

The full schedule can be found at http://360conferences.com/360flex/downloads/schedule.pdf and tickets are available at http://360flex.eventbrite.com. Tickets are on a first come first served basis and are much cheaper if you buy early, so don't put it off until the last minute.

I submitted two alternate sessions:  Lighten your Load – Tips and Tricks for Asset Loading and Management, and Bending and Flexing. For some reason though, both of mine have been marked complete so they are closed for voting.  In any case, now is your chance to voice your oppinion, just click this link.

The problem: You or a team member exported a Flex project archive, and now you want to import it back into your workspace but you are receiving the following message -  A project with the same name already exists in your workspace. Rename or delete the existing project. It's nice of Eclipse not to allow you to overwrite an existing project, but an option to import it with a different project name would be nice.

The solution: Unzip your Flex project archive.  Open up the file called .project in a text editor (e.g. notepad).  Under <projectDescription> there should be an element called <name>.  Change this value to something unique within your workspace (appending a "2" usually does the trick).  Open Flex Builder and import the modified project.

Anyone know of a more automated solution?

As an R&D project, one of our .NET guys created cashforyourmustache.com using Silverlight.  Now the the general public can rate the progress of each individual’s growth.  This is the pinnacle of facial hair monitoring technology, the Interactive Transitional Community Hair Evolving Engine (aka the ITCHEE app). In mid December the final design will be posted of each person’s mustache. The winner of the contest will receive a cash prize along with all the bragging rights entitled therein.  Of course I can count on you - the readers of my blog to give me high ratings, right?

Don't forget, you need the Silverlight plugin to view the site.

http://www.cashforyourmustache.com

So is it as cool as Microsoft claims?  Well, yes... for the most part.  Here are my initial observations:

• It works just like any regular computer. You have to attach a monitor, mouse, and keyboard, and it runs Vista Business edition. There are a couple of pre-installed utility apps that enable the surface part. This setup felt kind of cheesy -- you have to run these apps in a certain sequence to get it to work, and apparently if you use the display settings in the control panel, the world implodes. For a $10,000 device, couldn't they have created a customized version of Windows that integrates seamlessly with the Surface?
• The default pond application is sweet.  Its a perfect combination of screen saver and display of the Surface's capabilities.  It does however, lose its novelty fairly quickly.  We remedied this by swapping out the background image with increasingly creepy images.
• The other default apps aren't very exciting, they're more for showing developers how to use the APIs than to show what the thing is really capable of.
• I noticed that a couple of the apps had some pretty horrible frame rates (the paddle ball one in particular looked like it was running at no more than 12FPS). I'm not sure if it's because of hardware limitations, or they just set a limit for that particular application.
• Interactions aren't as smooth as I had hoped.  I found myself fumbling to get things to react exactly as I wanted.  Maybe the technology is just still too new, or maybe I am just not very good at it?  Sounds like John Wilker had a similar oppinion.
• The Surface website is completely Flash based. <Insert sarcastic quip about Silverlight here>

Despite my criticisms, It's still really cool technology and I'm really excited to see what our .NET guys can come up with.  We've already got a list compiled of R&D apps that we want to make.  I'll definitely be posting videos of our demos as they roll out.

I expect this technology to keep getting better and cheaper... within 5-10 years I predict multi-touch tabletop computers to be household items (and with a much more convienent form factor).  My question is when will someone create a bridge/framework/hack to build Flash & Flex applications for the Surface?  Can someone tell me if it's theoretically possible?  I've had one person tell me no, but that just sounds like a challenge :)

After a bit of searching, it looks like there is already some work being done with multi-touch using Flash interfaces on other platforms by Ideo and NUI Group.  Does anyone know of any other similar projects going on, or want to start one?

I haven't checked it out thoroughly enough for a real review yet, I just wanted to be one of the first people who could say that.  All I can say so far, is it's working pretty smooth and installation and importing my firefox settings was a snap.

If you don't know what I'm talking about, check out the comic from Google, or download it yourself.

Update:

I was very impressed with this experience in the ease of putting together a taskbar based application. There aren't as many resources out there yet for AIR as there are for Flex, but I found most of the syntax fairly concise and intuitive. The major downside is AIR's memory footprint. This obscenely simple application takes up 20-25 Mb of RAM!  I've been reading similar complaints about other AIR applications too. Hopefully this will be addressed in a future release...

Note: I built this app for my windows box and haven't tested it on a mac... because OSX doesn't really have a taskbar, it may have some issues.

I'm really excited because everything we do here is cutting edge.  Advertising agencies want (and are willing to pay for) the most current and exciting technology.  Also - we're growing fast.  If you live in the area and are a talented Flex or .NET developer, check out the work@phenomblue site.  More details to come.

Upgrading is pretty painless. Just remember to backup your files and database before you start... I accidentally deleted my wp-config file (I am a genius) and it would have been a pain if I couldn't recover it.

Links:

WP 2.5 Download

Upgrade guide

Installation guide