Austin, despite the fact that is centrally located in Texas, one of the most notoriously conservative states, is actually quite a liberal community with a hip, happening night life. East 6th Ave. is populated by upwards of 100 bars and interesting local venues in an area of only a few blocks, and good restaurants are very easy to locate. On top of that, the locals are outgoing, polite, and the Internet industry is thriving there, making Austin a refreshingly fun place to be.

The conference itself was awesome too. I spent time hanging out with some of my favorite people in the industry; people who’s work I have admired for years; people like Branden Hall, Mario Klingemann (a.k.a. Quasimondo), Craig Swann, and Trevor Dodd. It was awesome having a chance to hang out with those guys and discuss whatever interesting subject matter was at hand.

I saw some amazing things there as well. Jared Ficklin from Frog Design did some amazing things with audio visualization. Basically, he took a tube and attached a speaker to one end, and attached a propane canister to the opposite end. He then drilled holes in the tube, turned on and ignited the propane. He then began to play music through the speaker. As a result, you could see the waveform in the actual flame! He then photographed those images and used them in a Flash audio visualization.

Also, Beau Amber of Metaliq showed off some amazing ActionScript 3 projects. Most notable of which was a geo-data visualization in which he plotted a mesh on top of the San Francisco bay area, which represented the wind channels passing through the region. He then simulated wind speed by animating pixels across the wind streams. It was very interesting indeed.

I spent the entire first day at a Flex 2 workshop hosted by Aral Balkan of OSFlash. Flex is definitely a powerful tool. Although without robust skinning capabilities, it is not quite flexible enough to serve a company like Yahoo! as a realistic deployment and development alternative.

Everyone at the conference was really interested in what Yahoo! is doing. I introduced the Yahoo! Developer Network to a lot of developers, many of whom had never heard of it for whatever reason. I was also doing my best to push the public Hack Day, YRB’s Brain Jam, and whatever open Flash positions/internships we have available throughout the company.

My speech itself was well received. The conference room was completely packed, there was standing room only, and no one really left until the end, which I think implies that people were interested. I basically introduced the difference in the approach I had to take in developing the ActionScript 3 version of the Flash Yahoo! Search API as opposed to the ActionScript 2 version. In short, the ActionScript 2 version required me to write several packages of supporting code in order to adhere to sound object oriented programming principles; however, the ActionScript 3 version required exactly none of that. I only had to write the code to accomplish the objective at hand…go figure. I also touched on remoting with AMFPHP and how easy that is to accomplish in ActionScript 3.

All in all, I have to say it was quite fun and interesting, and I think everyone was happy to see Yahoo! taking Flash seriously. It also gave me an opportunity to re-launch caleb.org, so check it out if you have a chance.