Harish Sivaramakrishnan

The video of my talk on User Experience at TEDxPilani is now live on you tube.

There is a lot of excitement after the release of Adobe Flash Builder and Flex 4 framework last week. I can’t wait to meet the Adobe User Groups at various locations to share the excitement and be part of the celebration. I am looking forward to the AUG tour events at the following locations in the coming month(s)

Crystal Gaze – Adobe User Group, Chennai, India (Apr 9th, 2010) The Chennai user group along with RIA-RUI society is organizing Crystal Gaze – a very special event to celebrate the launch of Flash Builder and Flex 4. Chennai has a vibrant and passionate community and I am sure this event is going to be rocking. The event promises a lot of fun with music performances along with the tech sessions. I will be speaking here along with fellow evangelist Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan. The event was sold out in just 8 hours!

Kerala Adobe User Group, Cochin, India (Apr 10th, 2010) Kerala UG is still young, but it has some really great and experienced developers passionate about Adobe Flash Platform. Cochin also happens to be where my parents live, its going to be a great event!

Flex User Group, Singapore (Apr 15th 2010) I was in Singapore last year speaking at RIAction – The Singapore Flash community totally rocks! I will be speaking about Flash Builder and Flash Catalyst, we also have a session on Flex 4 by the UG manager Shunjie Hu. I will also be catching up with some of my old buddies from Macromedia during this trip.

FX4Tour – Adobe User Group, Bangkok, Thailand (April 17th, 2010) Another sell-out event! This time in Bangkok.  I will be speaking about Flash Builder, Flash Catalyst and LCDS 3. There will also be a session on iphone development using flash by local community expert Apichai Ruangsiripiyakul.

Flex User Group, Coimbatore, India (May 8th, 2010) Will be kicking off the first ever UG meet in coimbatore. Topics are still TBD.

If you guys are in any of the locations, I would love to meet each one of you – do swing by and say hi!

I was invited to TEDxPilani to deliver a talk on rich user experiences at the TEDxPilani chapter on the 13th of March at BITS, Pilani – which also happens to be my alma mater. The event had an eclectic mix of speakers, it was a great privilege sharing the stage with some of the best minds in the country in their respective fields. The event started out with a talk by K N Ganeshaiah – a plant scientist and an award winning mythology book writer. My session was the next – I spent some time setting the context, speaking about the need for building great user experiences. I also got to sing a song on stage and closed my talk with a demo. My session was followed by Karthik Satyanarayan – co founder of WildlifeSOS, Cleo Paskal – climate change expert, Nitin Gokhale – a leading journalist with NDTV, Vishal Talreja – A social entrepreneur, Rahul Roshan (@fakingnews) – the funny guy who runs fakingnews.com and finally Nakul Shenoy – a brilliant psychic entertainer. We also had two TEDx fellows from Pilani present mini sessions.

It was hard to tell which one was my favorite talk – each one of them were great in their own respect. Overall, it was a fantastic experience to be part of TEDxPilani. A special word of congratulations needs to go out to the organizers, who painstakingly made sure everything was done to perfection – right from booking our flight tickets to setting up the stage. TEDxPilani has indeed set a very high standard for any exclusively student run conference with the poise they demonstrated with this event. Take a bow, Guys!

I didn’t have an elaborate presentation, just a few slides that goes with my talk. You can check out the slides below

TEDxPilani trailer is out! I am super excited to be part of this, especially because it’s happening in my alma mater, BITS, Pilani.

The next couple of months are going to be super exciting. I will be speaking in the following events in the coming months. If you guys are in any of the following events, do swing by and say hi!

Adobe Flex Bootcamp – 21 – 23 February 2010, South India. I along with Ramesh will be kicking off the Flex bootcamps in Tamil Nadu, South India with consecutive events in two leading technical universities – Sastra University at Tanjavur and Thiagarajar College of Engineering, Madurai. The events are already sold out.

Adobe Online Creative Festival, 23 February 2010 Take a deep dive into Adobe’s current technology, as well as discover what the future holds for you. Join this free online event and benefit from Adobe’s expert advice on how Adobe technology can help you extend your creative skills and deliver unimagined. I will be presenting a one hour talk on Adobe Flash Catalyst and Adobe Flash Builder. I will also be hanging around in the online chat rooms trying to answer questions on Flash catalyst and Flex.

India Game Developer Summit, 27 February 2010, Bangalore, India First ever game developer summit in India, With the mission to build a robust community, advance the careers and enhance the lives of game developers. I will be taking a focused session on Creating, distributing and Monetizing games on Adobe Flash Platform.

TEDxPilani, 13 March 2010, Pilani, India TEDx Pilani is slated to be one of the largest student-organized conferences in India. Organized by Center for Entrepreneurial Leadership, BITS Pilani, TEDx Pilani aims at bringing some of the brightest Indian minds to the prestigious campus of Birla Institute of Technology & Science at Pilani, Rajasthan. Will be speaking on Rich Internet Apps.

Great Indian Developer Summit, 20-23 April 2010, Bangalore, India GIDS is the gold standard for India’s software developer ecosystem for gaining exposure to and evaluating new projects, tools, services, platforms,languages. GIDS is also one of the largest tech conferences in India.

Had a fantastic trip to my Alma mater – BITS, Pilani last week for the first ever Adobe Flex Bootcamp in North India. It felt great to be back in the campus, spent a good deal of time going around all the places I used to frequent as a student (including the classrooms ) The bootcamp had about 300 attendees who turned up exactly at 10:00 AM despite the biting cold (it was almost 0 deg celcius in the morning) Me and Sujit had a great time talking about the Flash Platform, showing off some demos and some really cool stuff with Flash Builder 4 and Flash Catalyst. The hands-on lab was great fun too – BITSians are quite smart, most of them completed the 3 hour lab in less than 1.5 hours.

Here are some pictures from the campus and the bootcamp

I will be speaking at PHPCamp Pune on Building Rich User Experiences for your Flex based PHP apps. PHPCamp this year is oversold at 2000+ registrations. The event also brings together the best minds in the tech industry in a classic unconference set up. I am very excited about my talk. If you are in Pune, do gate crash to PHPCamp – It’s going to be a fun day for sure. Do swing by and say hi if you are there!

Adobe devsummit completely rocked! The event was a sell out (it was oversold, actually – we got a lot of people register on the spot for the event). The event saw 1300+ attendees join the party in hyderabad and chennai. (That is just 2 cities in south India) Earlier, Adobe devsummit bangalore edition saw 1200+ developers participate! This was also the *largest* Adobe Flash Platform conference ever in India! The kind of buzz that devsummit generated is a testimony to the passion that developers in India have for the Adobe Flash Platform.

I had a lot of fun speaking about Adobe Flash Catalyst and building a video player app ground up just using Flash Catalyst drawing tools. Catalyst generated a lot of buzz among the crowd both in chennai and hyderabad (Most of the flash authoring developers & creative designers were just blown away!) I got some really good feedback for my session in both locations. Many folks emailed me to tell how much they love working with Flash Catalyst

I have uploaded the presentation slides that I used in my talk on Acrobat.com. (Some of my slides are thanks to Ryan Stewart, He has a much more elaborate presentation in his blog, which is a great learning resource as well!)

Download the presentation here

I recieved a lot of messages via twitter and email with folks asking for the source code of the video player application that I built in 2o mins. You can view the application by clicking the following screen shot. You can download the source files (VideoPlayer.fxp) here

A special word of thanks is due to all our community champions and Flash Platform experts who made this event a grand success! Thanks a lot for your support and enthusiasm!

Adobe DevSummit is the biggest annual developer event focused on the Adobe Flash Platform in India. This event attracts a rich demographic mix spanning designers and developers in India. Adobe has consistently showcased path breaking technologies at DevSummit.

For the first time DevSummit is coming to Chennai and Hyderabad. DevSummit in Chennai will be on 24th November, 2009 and in Hyderabad on 1st December, 2009. Watch out this space for more information on venue and timings

We would love to have the experts from the Adobe developer community take the stage and share their knowledge and insights on Adobe Flash Platform. Please find more details and submit your session proposals at the URL below. Show off your Flash Platform Geekiness!

http://flashahead.adobe.com/events/devsummitsessionproposals/

A full house,additional 2 rows of chairs at the back for the folks who came in, kick ass demo’s and fantastic dinner – That’s what the Adobe Flash Platform tools review was.

The evening started with Arijit’s intro on the Flash platform and the new tools. The context behind renaming Flex builder to Flash Builder was captured well in this session and it indeed made a lot of flex guys feel confident about what we are doing in terms of re-branding. The general vibe was surely positive.

In the next 25 minutes, I presented the Flash Builder 4 beta.  I focused the first 10 minutes speaking about the new IDE features that we have added to the tool. (getter-setter generation, event handler code generation and network monitor generated a lot of excitement in the crowd.) In the last 10 minutes I went on to do a coding demo of building an interactive dashboard application using the DCD features of Flash Builder using HTTPService over PHP. Had a minor challenge with the screen resolution, but overall the demo went well. Many folks walked up to me after the event saying they would *absolutely* want to move to FB4 for *just this feature*.

Next was the flash catalyst session by Raghu. He spoke briefly about the need for an good designer to developer integrated workflow and how Flash Catalyst would bridge that gap. His demo was an end to end enterprise data viz app starting from Photoshop to Catalyst to FB4. The interaction design for states & transitions and component conversion features recieved massive applause from the audience. Raghu concluded the demo with a BlazeDS remoting workflow using FB4 DCD. We were bombarded with questions about catalyst features and there were many folks asking about the pricing and the release time lines.

Sujit spoke about the data management features and also did a whirlwind preview of model driven development on the FB4. Sujit also presented the new client side paging feature which recieved a lot of cheer from the audience. As always, Sujit had several guys asking him stuff on LCDS / BlazeDS integration – something Sujit is synonymous with. Ramesh followed Sujit’s session with the “looking forward” aspects. Ramesh also announced the launch plan of the Adobe India Evangelism portal = http://flashahead.adobe.com.

Dinner (quite an awesome one! Taj Residency serves some really good indian fare especially on the dinner menu.) followed and got fantastic feedback on that one too. In a whole, a fantastic event! All thanks to the community and the attendees who made it an astounding success!