The Latin Flash Tour is only 2 weeks away!

I can’t believe that in two weeks I will be back in Latin America and I’m so excited about it. If you live anywhere in South America and are even remotely interested in Flash then you have to attend. It is not often that Adobe gets to come down to see you, although I’m hoping this is the start of a new trend. One thing that is really important is that these events are a huge success. This way I can come home and tell my bosses how enthusiastic the community is down there. So please make every effort to attend and also please help me spread the word via Twitter, blogs, etc. If you mention it on Twitter please use the #latinflashtour hashtag so we can all follow it.

The official site will be up in a couple of days at http://www.latinflashtour.com. This site will aggregate the tour’s Twitter, Flickr, and blog posts happening during the tour.

I am having 5000 tour stickers made so everyone attending will be able to get one. The good folks over at Influxis are also creating some limited edition tour shirts that will be raffled off in each city. In addition to the prizes that will be given away by the local user groups, I will also be giving away two copies of Master Collection CS4 in each city as well.

Below are the registration websites for each of the tour stops. Get registered before space fills up!

Santiago, Chile Nov 7th – http://www.mmug.cl/index2.php
Buenos Aires, Argentina Nov 9th – http://adobetourargentina.eventbrite.com
Lima, Peru Nov 11th – http://www.garageflash.com/el-flash-latin-tour-llega-al-peru
Bogotá, Colombia Nov 13th – http://latinflashtour.eventbrite.com
San Jose, Costa Rica Nov 16th – http://www.techcampcostarica.com
Mexico City, Mexico – Wed Nov 18th – http://latinflashtourmx.eventbrite.com

Please come out and support the community and learn about all of the latest Adobe technologies that we are currently working on.

Lee

FITC Edmonton recap and dead drop

FITC Edmonton is now over and it was a really cool event. These smaller events are great because you feel like you get to know almost all of the attendees. During my stay I gave a full-day workshop on Flash CS4 in addition to a regular one hour session on the same subject. Based on the feedback I received, people really seemed to enjoy them and learn a lot. It’s funny because my evangelism actually starts to convince me. After the workshop I thought, damn Flash CS4 does have some great features.

I decided to do a mini dead drop and announced over Twitter that I would be embedding some clues in my presentation slides. Each slide had a little symbol on it which was actually from the Webdings font. If you translated them it gave you the code of balloonboy. Later, when I demoed Flash CS5, I had a custom panel with a URL in it which was also in the Webdings font. After going to the website and entering the code you were taken to a page with the GPS coordinates along with a photo of a rat. The dead drop coin was inside of a hollowed out fake rat that I procured from the largest mall in North America, the West Edmonton mall. The winning team was a group of developers from XGenStudios. They took the photo below after retrieving the winning rodent.

I missed the first day of the conference because I was trapped in my hotel room working on my slides and watching coverage of the Balloon Boy. I did manage to watch all of the sessions on the second day and they were great. I finally got to see Ralph Hauwert’s realtime graphics session and it blew me away. Most of us in the audience didn’t understand most of what he was talking about but you really didn’t have to. I especially liked the section of tessellation where he showed how to take a simple 3D object and continuously divide it into a much more complex mesh. After Ralph was James Patterson who I have seen speak before and is always a great time. He showed his progression from pornographic stick figures to VH1 ads to amazing 3D tool creations. His Rotten Fruit Tardis is one of the coolest Flash pieces I have ever seen. Go over and try it to see for yourself.

When I arrived at the Edmonton airport for my flight home I ran into Erik, Toby, Ralph, and Andy. They were trying to figure out whether or not the girl sitting across from them was Hilary Duff. They offered me $5 to go up and ask her. I did and it was indeed the Duff. She was wearing thick black glasses in an attempt to disguise herself. She didn’t seem exactly thrilled to be identified. But she hasn’t been a hit movie in a while so she should enjoy the attention.

Lee