Sounds fun, excluding the shark infested river, but as always up to her majesty, not me, hehe; I’m down either way.

…awaiting Geof to approve my speech proposal…

Love to see you and HM down here again, was good to see you two folk on your soil this time!

Make you a deal, come on down and I’ll put on another BBQ (like last time) next year for you and any other international speakers that make it. You can go mad jumping on the trampoline:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amuller/49488485/in/set-786067/

we can all go down to the river again:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/amuller/301799471/

and I’ll help HM find some nice tea she hasn’t tried before and some interesting wool to knit.

My initial problem with this presentation is audience skill level. Some designers have absolutely no clue what Flex offers, so without context, a lot of the technicals about how you utilize Flash content is pointless. Why go through showing how to load a button into UIComponent when I haven’t covered why MovieClip’s don’t work in Flex. Tough call. I think I failed to write an accurate assessment of what I’ll cover in the preso bio to better set expectations.

I clearly failed in showing the difference between CSS, skinning, and where Flash comes into play when you reach roadblocks with each, thanks for pointing that out.

Regarding wireframes and prototyping, I am not an Information Architect, and that is a whole other ballgame. There is a significant amout of process improvements one can do; I’m in Detroit currently working with both Engineering & Creative to implement a lot of great cross team processes.

To accomplish what I want to accomplish, I think I need to do 3 things based on yours, and others offline feedback:

– write a more clear description to set expectations to what the audience needs to know. 50% of the audience being like you, and 50% not even knowing what Flex is forces me to alienate half the audience

– focus clearly on the technical implementations. I really like integrating Flash into the workflow vs. the LocalConnection hacks.

– showcase more than 1, truly impemented, example

Again, you rock for taking the time to give feedback, thanks a bunch!

– Workflow: how should designers and developers work together
– What are the best practices for creating wireframes that can then be packaged for prototyping (perhaps show the UI templates for Illustrator, Fireworks, PS and give a summary of Jaramillo’s article on the subject
– To what degree can you use CSS and at what point do you have to actually re-skin components
– How do you re-skin components (simple example of a panel)
– What impact does UI redesign have on performance
– Best practice: embed UI graphics or load then at runtime

These are just some of the things I struggled with and I know other’s are dealing with, too.

When people dish out $2000 plus for a conference (conference, trave, hotel), they expect to get a lot out of it. Not every session can be perfect, but the ones that are carefully prepared gain the most respect by the audience.

An example of an absolutely phenomenal session is the ‘Cairngorm’ talk which was chock full of content delivered carefully and professionally.

Just my 2 cents.

Kai

I have seen tons of negative reviews too (as I’ve gotten my share –including book reviews that are less than stellar). I’d say the only explanation for mr. Anon’s travesty is that he simply expected something else. Perhaps his impression of the presentation title didn’t match the actual presentation. Who knows. Perhaps he/she will follow-up with something constructive.

Thanks