Day 2 has come and gone. It was a solid day filled with lots of exciting presentations. I learned a lot in the different talks I was able to attend and can only wait for the conference to publish the rest for my viewing pleasure and yours.

Morning session: RIA Design Principles Panel. Panels are always difficult to do well but these guys really did a good job communicating some great ideas in a collaborative presentation. I walked in to hear Chet Hasse of the Adobe Flex team speaking about the importance of making interfaces contextual and not losing the user through gratuitous animations. This provided a great segue for Bill Scott, who talked about cutting animations in half (and sometimes half again) in terms of duration and gave many examples on context-killing transitions that took things too far. Bill taught us to focus on "interesting moments" and use transitions to highlight these - what a great metaphor for UI work. Finally Paul Giurata talked about Flex being used in "serious" software environments at enterprise companies and some of the design challenges he's encountered there. He said that most apps feature data that can be realistically presented or interacted with in 6-12 views. Finding the right views to use in your interactions and the right transitions between the views is the key to a good user experience, but mapping them all out can be very helpful. He taught us to focus on "panels" of functionality, and the value of manipulating data within the same geographical space.

Mid-morning: What's new in Flex 4 that's NOT Spark by Deepa Subramaniam. In this session Deepa covered, as you might guess, all the new things coming in Flex 4 unrelated to the Spark component model. This included the new Text integration, use of FXG as a first class citizen, advanced states, new styles, advanced transitions, and the use of new layout paradigms. This is a great 101 level course for anyone just getting into Flex 4 who might have some familiarity with Flex 3 but wants a quick baptism into the new stuff.

Lunch session: Fierce Hardware Integration by Leonard Souza. Leonard had good turn out in an ordinarily difficult talk to draw during the lunch hour. He presented some really interesting demos that integrated hardware with AIR 2.0 interfaces and took us into the realm of building real apps on native platforms (Win32, Java) to drive the devices. I got to spend some time talking with Leonard after his session over dinner and was amazed to hear what a smart and interesting guy he is, having some serious skills in both technical software, hardware and design. Definitely watch out for this guy as another up and coming name in the UI industry.

Early Afternoon: The Future of RIAs with Jacob and Tyler Wright. In this session Jacob and Tyler presented Reflex - their new component development platform for the Flash Player. Reflex draws on techniques and development models used in Flash and Flex to produce an extremely light-weight yet powerful framework. Components can still be written in Actionscript or the MXML familiar to Flex developers but do not rely on the Flex framework itself at all and are extremely light and performant. One of their core ideas I specifically liked was "pay as you go" - the idea that the framework itself shouldn't be a large amount of overhead in a swf, but should increase in size as functionality is added through increasingly complex components. Jacob and Tyler didn't dig into their framework code too much, but the demos they showed at the end definitely galvanized the audience and assured me that Reflex is a project to watch carefully in the future.

Late Afternoon: Test-Driven Development with Elad Elrom. Elad did a good job introducing his audience to TDD in this session. He started off slowly and methodically plowed through the material, stopping to answer questions and involve the crowd along the way. He drew from his own vast experience in application development and his current role as a technical manager and project lead. Elad demonstrated several different TDD applications but spent a lot of time on theory and the "why" of test driven development. Probably the most memorable part of his talk were the other types of development he discussed that most of us have experienced at one time or another, including:
ADD - A**hole driven development
CTAE - Cover Your A** Engineering
DDD - Duct Tape Driven Development (developing to the open source libraries and frameworks available.)

Evening: Panel - Why Business should be Your Business, how to speak to executives featuring Deepa Subramaniam, Andy Powell, Michael Labriola and RJ Owen (me.) This panel was a lot of fun to participate in and I think we covered some serious ground. We started with basic issues of how to talk about deadlines when they slip or features we think don't add value and moved to less tangible topics like solving the right kind of problem and getting recognition. The audience asked really insightful questions and added a lot to the conversation. We on the panel had some time to think about the topics ahead of time and I came up with what I think will be an enduring metaphor for software development: software development is like construction, but instead of building the house with wood and metal you have to build it with cats. They move, grow, claw each other, lick themselves, etc. and generally make walling off definition of any one piece difficult. Michael also had a really great anecdote about the famous "three-legged stool" of software development: You can pick and two to be "important" out of quality, deadline and budget, but if it's "very important" you can pick only one. A great way to think about addressing problems and their priorities.

We wrapped up the evening with dinner and drinks with the Flex team and different people in the community. I had a blast meeting all of the new folks and talking about different work we're all doing with Flex and look forward to another exciting day of presentations tomorrow.

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