Wines of the World has been a great class. Go to school, drink wine, boom. Done. But don’t be fooled - it is a serious class with serious projects. For my final project, I decided to have a crack at AIR and make something wine-related in the process - an RSS reader that takes Wine Spectator’s Daily Editor’s Picks feed and presents today’s wines of choice. Last night, armed with Matt’s extremely useful book and my free educational copy of Flex Builder, I began my first AIR app.

Of course, though, I ran into my share of problems, so I thought I would share what I learned here in case anyone else has the same problem.

• Custom Chrome: As you can tell from my comp above, I required my app to be free of the OS’s default chrome. There are countless tutorials out there about how to do this, and after reading all of them I still had not yet realized that you had to remove the comments around the <initialWindow> tag in Flex’s app.xml file. That was dumb on my part, but seriously, of the three video tutorials Adobe put up on the exact same subject, not one mentions it.
• Embedding Fonts: I found this very useful if you want to embed a PostScript font into your project.
• Publishing: It took me quite a while to find out that I don’t actually have to pay to have my AIR app published with a signed certificate, and that you can just make one yourself. Instructions on how to do that are here.

Over the course of this project, I have definitely grown to like the wild HTML/CSS/ActionScript fusion that is Flex and AIR. I think that with some more practice, I can get quite comfortable with it. And if you want to download a copy of my app, you can get it here. It’s missing a few features and details, but I think it’s a nice start. I feel like I should add that I am in no way associated with Wine Spectator magazine, they just happened to have the nicest RSS feed available.

I really hate to have to see this when I open Firefox. I like Flash. It’s just been a little abused, is all.

Due to the Hilton’s $15/day internet access (unbelievable in this day and age, as are their $6 bottles of water), I didn’t make any updates during the conference, but rest assured, I took notes!

My main reaction to the conference is “why didn’t anyone show me this before!?.” There are people out there who use code to do some amazingly creative things, both inside and outside of Flash. Websites, yes, but I was especially impressed by people like Andrew Bell and Robert Hodgin who used programming to do stunning and complex motion work. Up until now I had never thought of how I could combine coding with motion graphics but those guys have definitely pointed me in the right direction. Hodgin’s work was especially relevant to all the flocking we’re doing in Programming for Digital Media right now; I’m going to try out some of his Perlin Noise techniques when I get back to work on those projects.

After my quarter-long struggle with motion tracking, I was also impressed with Ralph Hauwert’s example of motion tracking within Flash. Not only did he get a 3D object into his tracked scene, but using Papervision he was able to move it around the filmed footage in real time with the correct perspective. That was definitely the “most jaw-droppingest” moment of the entire conference.

I was also very excited about Adobe AIR, and while I missed the main presentation on it, I was impressed with the bits and pieces I saw. Not much to say about it besides that I hope to be making some AIR apps soon.

There were a lot of other great presentations — I will be spending the next few days visiting all the websites and poring through all the notes I took. Hopefully during the summer I can really have a go at trying out Processing, Papervision, AIR and all the other tools I was exposed to (even hopefully getting a little C++ action going thanks to Mr. Bell).

So, all in all, great conference, and I’ll be back next year for sure. Open bars were pretty sweet, to boot. (Worth noting about the bars: RIT had the proud honor of owning / totally dominating the dance floor three nights in a row, so good job for us.)

This weekend (and until Tuesday) I’ll be up in Toronto getting my New Media on at Flash In The Can. Being the all-important Historian for the New Media Club, I’ll try to upload photos and write-ups as often as I can.

See you in Canada!

I just downloaded Adobe’s new Media Player. At first glance it seems like a grown-up Joost (it definitely has an easier interface), but with a slightly less eclectic mix of programs. It runs on AIR, which I am very excited to learn more about at Flash In The Can next week. Tangentially related to that is Adobe’s Flash HD gallery, with streaming 1080p content. Not too shabby!