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.

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

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!