Hot AIR Bus Tour

Everybody was talking about the heat. Canada is supposed to be the great, white north but the presentations were held in the stifling hot top-floor of Ceili's Irish Pub. The venue's name almost got Mike Downey in trouble because some one gave him directions to Vancouver's sleazy strip club, the Cecil. What a presentation that would have been.

• Talked to Kevin Hoyt who uses Aptana for AIR development using Javascript/HTML. He says it's one of the smartest editors for Javascript out there.
• Daniel Dura showed off AIR's differentiating features, such as border-less or even completely transparent windows, and, my favourite, powerful drag & drop integration.
• Andre Charland a.k.a. "Captain AJAX" showed a treemap of O'Reilly book sales in the different programming languages. He was pointing out that Javascript is pretty popular, and growing.
• Andre also mentioned something about passing image data to Flash for resizing. Interesting, but I like the idea of using ImageMagick or ppm a lot better. There are probably some situations where this is the only option.
• Kevin Hoyt also mentioned that Adobe and Google are working together to try to keep AIR and Gears' service monitoring APIs similar. Yay for keeping it easy for us developers.

Overall I had a great time and even managed to get excited about AIR! (-: