Now that I am back in London and all settled into the work life again I realised that I did not have much of a chance to feedback on the most of the conference. The conference was great, pity about the distance and time zones. I don’t travel across so many time zones often so am really not used to the effects of landing back. But enough of me….

The talk that I enjoyed the most was Seb Lee-Delisle talking on Particles for the Non-Physicist. He had files that you could download (for all the geeks with laptops) and you could play with the samples as he was going through them. Then, for fun, you could send them through to him after and he would show everyone. I think that this was a very interesting approach to talking about code. Most of the time reading code on a small screen while someone whizzes around means that most people don’t get a good understanding of what is going on. I think that more delegates walked away with a better understanding from this talk than if Seb had approached it from the normal angle. Apart from that he is a great presenter so all in all it was a great talk and by far my favourite.

For fun I decided to go to Brendan Dawes, magneticNorth titled Analog In / Digital Out. It was a great idea as it was entertaining and he is a great speaker. Rich Shupe, FMA talked on The Ultimate Guide to Flash Runtime Compositing. I found this very interesting as it covered some issues that I am coming across with the current project that I am working on. It is very interesting how quickly the buzz of a new release dies down and you forget some of the cool new features that you can use, if you don’t use them for a project of course.

I was really sad that I missed Grant Skinner’s talk on Resource Management for AS3, Flash 9, and Flex 2 as the feedback I have heard on it was really good. I believe that he will be putting up notes but I may be wrong. I also missed Mario Klingemann, Quasimondo talking on mashups called Mashup Baby! I hope to catch him at Flash on the Beach though.

1 talk that was very interesting for me was that talk on accessibility by Scott McClurg. It was an introduction to accessibility that covered the basic steps to make a Flash movie accessible. It appears to me that the focus of accessibility in Flash is still too much on screen readers. I know I even asked the question at the keynote, and did not get a real answer, about future support of the Apple screen reader – VoiceOver. We need to get more focus on the areas that Flash is really good at that are being neglected by developers. We can add in controls to stop the flicker, create ways to change the contrast and colour, increase the font size (this is a big thing for me personally as I like to increase the fonts), have a decent tab order…. I will have to expand on this at some point (added to the never ending to do list).

There was so much going on I just got caught up in having fun, chatting to loads of different people, learning new things and not being on a normal time zone! Now the buzz of the conference has died down and I am getting back into the real world it feels like so long ago. Great conference.

And I did get my cowgirl boots!