AIR Launch in Hong Kong

Yesterday William and I attended the Hong Kong Adobe AIR launch event. Ryan Stewart spent the afternoon on a high-level marketing pitch of Flex and AIR. In the evening he led a smaller crowd through a short tutorial on Adobe AIR.

The choice of tutorial material was a little odd. Ryan guided the participants through the process of creating a simple AIR application that wrote a file to the file system and then accepted a native drag and drop. Given that these two features are unique to AIR and thus worth showing off, I can understand why Ryan chose to teach them. But at the same time, it wasn’t a particularly good way to introduce AIR as a platform or show it any of its strengths. Then again, we only had a few hours.

On the seminar as a whole, William pointed out, “If I know enough to know that there’s a meeting, I know enough that I won’t learn anything new. I go to meet people.” Good point. In that case, the events went very well, drawing a good crowd with plenty of time to network.

For anyone in Hong Kong interested in learning more about Flex, AIR, or RIAs in general, be sure to check out the Hong Kong Flex & AIR User Group and sign up for the 3-day RIA workshop William and I will conduct in May.