Today we held the second stop of the tour in Berlin, Germany. Yesterday we had an interesting 17-hour trip from Stockholm that included 2 missed trains, 3 hours in a sports bar, and a ferry ride. The weather was on our side again today as it was a beautiful sunny day. The city of Berlin seems really nice and the rooms at the NH hotel were very comfortable.

Mike let those of us with afternoon sessions sleep in a little which I took full advantage of. I got to the venue around 10:00 am and it was a two-story club with the food and games downstairs and the presentation area upstairs. There was great light upstairs and the place was absolutely packed. The turnout for Berlin was awesome.

I caught most of Ethan’s session, which was great as he created a version of the AIR runtime without a lot of the security features to show the crowd why they are important. Having Ethan along is great as he can hear first-hand from the community about their experiences with AIR. It’s also nice because we can get answers to questions that only an AIR engineer would know.

We had tons of questions throughout the day about a wide range of issues. The German developer community has been very busy with AIR. We were lucky to have Twhirl creator Marco Kaiser stop by and give a session on how he built the wildly popular Twitter client. We also had Benjamin Dobler come by and show the crowd an AIR application he is building for parleys.com, which looked very cool.

The one negative aspect of the event was the heat in the presentation room. More than one person noted the irony of my session being titled AIR Conditioning, as it is was exactly what we all wished was there. The crowd seemed to love the presentation and definitely had a good sense of humor. Thanks Berlin for a great day!

Lee