The Adobe onAIR Bus Tour went great!

Last night, my company, PStrat, hosted the Adobe onAIR Bus Tour for the local users groups.  Ben Farrell from the Raleigh/Durham Adobe User’s Group (RDAUG) and Critter from the Triangle Area ColdFusion Users Group (TACFUG) did all the hard work getting the event scheduled and organized.  We had about 30 people turn out for the event.  We started early with a pre-meeting cookout (thanks Dan!) with hot dogs, pizza, and beer.

Mike Chambers, Adobe’s Senior Product Manage for Product Relations, kicked off the night with an introduction to AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime). He showed off the Adobe Media Player, and AIR application that will surly be on all of our desktops very soon.  He then launched into a Flex based Hello World AIR app.  The app didn’t do much of course, but it gave him a great avenue to show us all of the setting options and basic method for generating an AIR app from Flex.

Next up, Kevin Hoyt, one of Adobe’s Product Evangelists, went through the same process, but this time building the application with HTML and Javascript.  Again the app was very simple, but he was able to go over some very cool stuff.  He showed the crowd the AIRAliases.js file which lets you call Actionscript 3 classes via Javascript in your HTML file (that becomes your AIR app).  He also went over how to read and write data to a file on the user’s machine.  All very cool stuff.

Everybody walked away from the event with a very slick onAIR Bus Tour t-shirt, and a goodie bag that included the “Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) for Javascript Developers Pocket Guide” from O’Reilly, 3 months free hosting with MediaTemple, and some AIR stickers. In addition to this cool swag, Critter gave away Actionscript 3 tag posters and Flex tag posters.  Ben followed that up by giving away an Apollo t-shirt and an “Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide“ O’Reilly book.  So if you came to this event you didn’t go home empty handed!

The evening ended with a tour of the bus and all the cool toys inside.I have posted the pictures that I took on Flickr if you are interested.  Check them out here.

Thanks again to everybody who helped organize the event.  A very big thanks to the Adobe crew for taking a 160 mile detour to come and talk to our groups.  We all really appreciate the attention Adobe gives our groups and we look forward to future events and building some cool apps!