I have even used it a couple of times at customer’s sites, when discussing their form design. Because the tool is so easy to use, and everything is drag and drop, I can create an UI mockup within a couple of minutes, which lets me explore different designs with the customer directly.

I am a person, who still likes to hand-draw my mockups on paper first, so the fact that the controllers in this app all have a hand-drawn look to them, give these mockups the same feeling to them as if they were drawn on paper.

The user interface is intuitive and easy to use.

There is a library of more than 50 controls and 70 icons to choose from, in eight different categories. (Big, Buttons, Common, Containers, Layout, Markup, Media and Text)

When you resize the controls, it will always tell you it’s current size. Great when you have to design for a specific format. Furthermore every element has a property inspector (toolbox), with which you can edit it’s properties. Size, layer, group, colour, state, icon, font-size, borders, alignment, just to mention a few properties, can be changed.

The mockups can be saved as .bmml files, exported as .png or even as an .xml file.

I use the desktop AIR app, but there is also a version, which is integrated into Confluence, JIRA or Twiki.

Take a look at this video, if you would like to see an example of what this app can do for you:

You can find more sample mockups here.

The conference started with James (Ward) giving an overview over the state of Adobe’s software development platform.
Adobe is in a transition, moving away from people using tools to create flash content, to people creating software on their platform. Flex has been around for about around five years and started as a way for developers to create flash content. Today that tool is a platform for software development.

There are three critical pieces in this platform:
1. Runtimes
These are the critical core technologies and the software development stack.
Web runtime, Flash player, desktop runtime, AIR and mobile runtime (yes, they are currently working on this!)
2. Tooling
Flex SDK, Flex builder/Eclipse space and many different community tools
3. Integration
How do we actually connect these client-side applications to our backend servers and services?
BlazeDS -> open source product to connect to a Java backend
LiveCycle Data Services

Seen from the SDN community perspective Adobe still plays an active part.
Andre Salazar has recently joined the community, after Mathias Zeller left to work on Genesis.
Adobe is the title-sponsor for the RIA hacker night during this year’s TechEd. (so far it is confirmed for Las Vegas)

The technical integration between SAP and Adobe continues, and worth mentioning is:

• BlazeDS/LiveCycle Data Services
• Closer integration, into the development tools we already have, for instance with the Flash islands in Web Dynpro.
• FLOB, Flex integration into BSP.
• Muse; the Flex NetWeaver Business Client. Comment from Thomas Jung: Version 1.0 is available with ERP Enhancement package 2 and higher. Version 2.0 will be used for Business by Design. Version 3.0 will take all the good version 2.0 features and bring them to the core Business Suite as well.

One of Adobe’s tasks a head is to incorporate developers, as they struggle to understand them. (they get the designers)

One of the longest discussions of the day, was the discussion about the SAP-Adobe alliance ecosystem. I covered this discussion thoroughly on SDN, hoping to get the conversation started there.

James Ward also showed us the coolness of Flex/AIR applications:
(can you imagine the effect of showing potentially new customers something like this?)

Worth mentioning is also the Conference 2.0 aspect of this event.
We were live-streaming via Ustream.tv and tweeting about it at the same time, allowing those not physically present to engage in the conversation.
We had around 15 friends watching and chatting via Ustream.tv, and another bunch following us on Twitter.

I hope this was only the first conference of many to come!

Thank you James for organizing this, thank you James for stopping by, thank you Craig for editing the footage and thank you all for the great discussions!

You can find my flickr set from the event here.

Part 1:


Part 2: