(thanks for taking the pic Terry!)

Last week I was given an exciting opportunity to fill in for part of the keynote for webDU in Sydney.

I got a call from friend and Adobe guru Paul Burnett Wednesday telling me that a couple of Adobe presenters had flight problems and could make the conference and if I would like to fill in and talk about how Spinifex has been using Adobe AIR – the next day!

I’d never given a talk on what I do and with basically an evening after work to get something put together of some interest to an eagerly awaiting audience – so I thought… “why not!”.

I shared the keynote talk with Paul and 2 other guys – Adobe’s Renaun Erickson and Indie games developer Terry Paton.

Following up Terry was a bit daunting after his amazing demos of the Molehill API drawing some “oohs” and “aahs”, but I got up and gave my best go. I’d like to think my content was pretty solid – where as my voice was a little shaky!

I thought it would be easier to show some of my work in context whether it be it in use or in a test environment.

I showed a short clip from the TV show What Do You Know? as fitting 11 screens and 2 buzzers only a laptop was not gong to fly!

I then showed a video of a soon to be installed kiosk still in development but demonstrating the Peer to Peer communication available in Flash.

I started making some slides at about 11pm but they were taking too long and were rather bland looking – so for something different I scrapped all that – opened Photoshop and pulled out the Wacom tablet and drew some!

I even got a nice souvenir of the experience to remember it by

It was a fun first time experience (even with the crazy short preparation time!), thanks to Paul, Adobe and webDU, for giving me a shot, thanks for all those that where there and I hope there was something of some interest to you, maybe I’ll see you again!

JK