This time under a new name and with more tracks – catering for design oriented people as well (previously the focus was heavily on developers).

Here are the details:

• Pre-camp workshops on Friday, 28 October: “Adobe InDesign CS 5.5 – Beyond Print” with April Clark & “Enlightenment – a Zen Agile workshop” with Matthew Hodgson
• Main camp on Saturday, 29 October
• Three parallel tracks with awesome speakers
• Location: Natcoll Design & Technology
• Presented by your local Adobe user groups – from the community, for the community

Go and register now, early bird pricing ends 31 July.

Make sure you follow @fpcodecampnz on Twitter for further infos.

Organising the event was great fun. Approaching sponsors, finding a venue, inviting amazing speaker, ensuring awesome coffee supply, choosing a great conference bag, finding the best caterer, tweeting from @fpcodecampnz and buying lots of little goodies to make people happy during the day – all these tasks were a great team effort. Big thanks to Kai and Ross for being awesome organisers, and to all the helpers who lend a hand on Saturday!

Now that the event is over, I can say that most things went exactly as planned. Feedback is coming in via the survey we sent out the day after the camp, and most people really enjoyed being at the Flashcamp.

Unfortunately I missed most of the sessions myself. I did manage to see the keynote – Jack Yan on “The Evolution of Display Type” – and enjoyed Brenda Leeuwenberg and David Buck from NZOnScreen talking about Flash vs. HTML 5.

My own presentation was about embedding video with Acrobat, and I talked the audience through the process of adding a video to a PDF (including some potential pitfalls and how to make it a less out-of-the-box experience for the user). I had all of the Adobe and ex-Adobe people who came to the Flashcamp sitting in my session, which was great towards the end when a question was asked that I couldn’t answer, but overall it made me quite nervous – I’m sure that this was not my best performance ever. But anyway, I enjoyed sharing my knowledge, no one has complained so far, and overall we had a very awesome day. Have a look at my presentation (PDF, 50 MB – sorry for the file size, but it contains embedded videos), although it might not make much sense without context. But it’s worth having a look at the embedded videos – the are made by Wellingtonian Simon Burgin from CubicStudio and are pretty awesome.

Overall, all I can say: I hope we’ll do it again next year!

The Adobe CS5 Roadshow visited Wellington yesterday, and Mike McHugh, Andrew Spaulding and Paul Burnett from Adobe Australia spent a whole day on stage – entertaining the crowd with all the new and amazing features in CS5. Apparently reaction from the people was not what these guys are used to – usually they’ll get a lot of “Oooooh”s and “Aaaaaah”s when presenting – but Wellingtonians are a little bit more reserved. My personal feeling is, that because in Wellington a lot of people work for government, many of the attendees won’t get an upgrade to their current software anytime soon. They can only dream of all the new features that could make their lives easier and increase productivity, it’s simply not their reality. I was sitting next to three ladies, who have just recently been upgraded from CS2 to CS4, and would in theory be entitled to a free upgrade to CS5 by Adobe – but “impact assessments” required by the organisation’s IT department would take a long time and are apparently rather expensive, so they simply won’t be upgraded.

But apart from the crowd being a bit quiet, it was a great show.

After the roadshow Mike, Andrew and Paul joined the Wellington Creative Suite User Group for a very special meeting. Adobe New Zealand sponsored an enormous cake to celebrate the release of CS5, and all attendees got some further insight into the new features. A software raffle at the end of the meeting saw one lucky user group member walk away with a brand new copy of a Premium Suite license.

What a great day – big thanks to Mike, Andrew and Paul again, and to all the other Adobe people, who made the roadshow and the user group meeting a highlight!

Software Requirements without Tears by Robin Hillard

Define your requirements by asking the right questions. A mini-manual to get those requirements right before starting the design/development. Robin finished his presentations with a little quiz, and I teamed up with a friendly chap next to me. Although I paid attention during the talk, we really sucked at identifying some requirements. Certainly something I need to follow up on.

Usability: Thinking about the user, not for them by Richard Turner-Jones

Richard was around when I had the second-scariest experience of my life. Only 3 people witnessed me freaking out on the horrible ferris wheel at Disneyland during the conference party at MAX in Anaheim a couple of years ago. Surely I had to attend his session, especially since it wasn’t solely development focussed. The main take-away for me was the link to www.guimagnets.com for some sort of a prototyping on a fridge (or whiteboard), which I wasn’t aware of before. The talk covered some of the basics only, which was ok since it was advertised for general audience and it was my own choice to still go there…

Wireframes – From Screen Concepts to User Interaction by Mia Horrigan

Mia presented a case study and shared her experience with a project that went wrong in several areas, and she explained how she brought it back on track. I always appreciate a speaker’s personal experience – you can read about the theory behind a topic in books, blogs and magazines. But if someone tells me “That’s what I did and that’s why it worked or didn’t work”, that’s when it gets useful for me.

The Hotness of Agile Software Development by Matthew Hodgson

My favorite of webDU. I fell in love with Matt’s presentation style at last year’s webDU, and he didn’t disappoint me this year either. Unfortunately he gave some insight into how his team works, and that totally made me want to work for them. Look for yourself.

The Mobile User Experience by Rod Farmer

I now have a deep respect for all the designers/developers out there, who manage to deliver a consistent user experience across different mobile platforms, screen sizes, networks, carriers, etc, etc, etc.

The Value of a Ruber Chicken: better team development through shame… and tools by Tim Buntel

Tim just recently moved to Sydney from the US, and it was great so see that he and his family seem to have fully adjusted to life in the southern hemisphere. His talks are always fun and enjoyable – it doesn’t really matter what he’s talking about. I would probably even go and listen to him speaking even if it was about some alien hardcore coding language, but this time I was lucky and I learnt more about different approaches of version control.

After a Round Table session with some of the key speakers (highly entertaining, but no women on the panel) sadly the conference came to an end. On the day after the conference, us Adobe user group managers from New Zealand and Australia held a mini UGM summit (including a surf lesson), and in the evening I interviewed Peter Bell (which is available on createordie.de or interpreted by a robot via Google Translate). The legendary Aftershow-Party at Deamon HQ brought the whole conference experience to an end.

The slogan of the conference is”Like a Rock Concert for Geeks”, and I can totally relate to this statement. And for me it was a “Beach Party with Friends” as well!

* Photos from the webdu2010 Flickr stream

We’re moving into a new venue (Natcoll Design Technology in Wellington’s CBD) that allows us to cater for more attendees and we’re going to have 2 parallel tracks this year! If you haven’t been at Flash Platform Code Camp 2009 have a look at the agenda and presentations from last year to get started!

Come along and learn about Adobe’s Flash Platform and creative tools for building Rich Internet Applications: Flash, Flex, AIR, Flash Catalyst, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash Builder, BlazeDS, LiveCycle DS, LiveCycle Designer and lots more. This is also a place to meet and greet, share cool stuff, try out new technologies and code together with other like-minded people.

Make sure you follow @fpcodecampnz on Twitter for further updates and registration notification.

screenshot:www.ecocho.co.nz/blog.php

Does that mean Google don’t support the idea of making a difference for climate change? Apparently I have to use Yahoo as a search engine now, as they seem to support Ecocho massively. This can’t be in Google’s interest, can it?

And the interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood is interesting, too… ;-)

Hannah and Thomas from World Sweet World

My favourite product of the exhibition is Kitty Kat, a cat-shaped cushion from Small Village Productions – the cutest one on display found a new home in Karori!

My new Kitty Kat on my couch

You do your shopping as usual, and only when you approach the check out area, you have to decide if you want to use the self-check out or rather communicate with a human being.

If you feel like showing off your independence, you turn towards the check out machine and let it guide you through the process of turning the things in your basket from New Word property into your own belongings.

You scan your items, place them in a bag attached to some kind of scales (that’s how they know that you weren’t cheating) and chose the method of payment.

Finally you take away your bag. And that’s the only crucial point in the whole process – the machine definitely does expect you to take your bag. Just taking away your belongings and leave the plastic bag behind causes an error message. We chose to ignore it and got away with it. On the one hand it’s a nice way of stress-free shopping, but on the other hand it will most definitely cost some jobs. Why is there so often a down side on inventions like this?

If you’re living on this part of the hemisphere you should definitely go, but even if you’re living in other parts of the world it’s worth a trip (just combine it with a holiday trip around Australia or New Zealand).