I was fortunate enough to be invited to speak at the Chennai Java User Group during my trip to India.  I was expecting a small group of very devoted Java fans; however, I was surprised to walk into a room of over 200 developers eager to learn about JavaFX 2.0.  The venue was very impressive with rows of workstations that we later used for a lab, as well as plenty of seating.

Chennai User Group Venue at Tenth Planet

Also, Raj was a great host, and both he and the folks at Tenth Planet went completely over the top with this event.  This included:

• A life-size poster with the event details
• An ornamental flower arrangement with the event details
• Two gifts presented at the conclusion of the talk

Life-Size Event Poster

The session ran from 10AM through 4:30PM with a break for lunch in the middle.  When half the hands went up for returning after lunch, I didn’t believe most of them would be back, but we easily had 60% of the folks back in their seats by the time we were ready to start.

If you are interested to see the slides from the talk, you can find them on Slideshare here:

Thanks again to the folks in the Chennai JUG for being great hosts!

The folks at Marakana did a great job hosting the recent Flash Android event, as well as recording and publishing the talk. As a fellow user group leader, I can appreciate the hard work that went into preparing the video, including some fine editing and splicing by Max Walker (the presentation was not as flawless as he made it look!)

You can view the talk on the Marakana website, or here as an embedded video:

All the slides for the talk can be found on SlideShare: http://www.slideshare.net/steveonjava/beginning-android-flash-development

Flash Capability Reporter

Also, as promised I am going to start posting different samples from the book. The first of these is the Flash Capability Reporter. It is a simple application that displays your device characteristics in a scrolling text field.  Figure 1 shows a screenshot of the Capability Reporter in action.

Figure 1. Flash Capability Reporter running on the desktop

Read the rest of this entry »