Today the keynote started with a trailer of the movie we're going to watch tonight: Beowulf. If you like the genre it's probably a great movie, and since I do like the genre I'm really looking forward to it. After the trailer Bruce Eckel and James Ward did the same they did Monday, talking about, and showing how to code Flex. It was actually fun to see it again a bit shorter. Bruce really know what an audience wants and makes a great team with James. I'll probably watch it on Parleys again. More about that when you read further. Bruce and James did show some new things which they did not showed before. A cool demo with an opensource component that allowed you to watch a book and flip through transparent pages. For example an overlay of organs over a sheet of the human body. It looked really slick. Something I did not know before, was the fact Flex can use multiple cores when rendering. It really speeds things up on multicore machines.
Parleys is a website created by the founder of JavaPolis, Stephan Janssen. At the website you can watch all the presentations of JavaPolis. The great thing is that you can watch both the speaker and the presentation slides. The application was build with AJAX technology, but that created a couple of problems. At the time Stephan made Parleys, prototype was not able to handle the back button, and it was really hard to test and debug the application. Since there was also a growing list of requested features, Stephan decided to make a new version. So the options he thought about were:
- AJAX again, maybe Prism. Prism is new, and far from ready to use, and other AJAX frameworks would not
solve the current problems. - Swing / JavaFX, JavaFX was still in an early beta version at the time, so that was no option either.
- Silverlight, no thx
- Flex / AIR
Then Stephan and Benjamin Dobler (thx Dirk Benedict for providing the name, I forgot it) presented the new beta version of Parleys. And I must say I was really impressed. They implemented the biggest new features:
- Full screen viewing
- Change player template (only speaker, only slides etc)
- Favorite list
- Thumbnail and list overview
- Direct links to slides in a presentation
The last feature was tightly coupled with letting the back button work. They used Flex 3 for this beta version, and Flex 3 fixes the back button. That was really cool. Another really cool thing they showed was the AIR version of Parleys. This enables to run it on your desktop. The greatest thing about that was that you're able to download presentations. You can put a few in a queue and the application will download it for you in the background. Ideal for watching during the commute. I usually go by car, but when I need the train I will make sure I have some presentations with me. Thanks Stephan and Benjamin.
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