Sean Moore posted his list of the “10 Awesome Flex Developers You Should Follow” and two people from Roundarch were included. We have always been very proud of the extremely talented people we have on our team. Both Adam Flater and Jesse Warden have established themselves as leaders in the Flex community and it is really great to have Sean mention their achievements.

On Thursday June 18th, a Chicago RIA community including the Chicago Flex Users Group and the Chicago Adobe Users Group welcomed the Adobe User Group World Tour that came to demo the latest version of Flex 4. Adobe Platform Evangelist Kevin Hoyt presented Flash Catalyst, Adobe’s new interaction design tool geared towards rapid creation of rich internet applications, Flex 4, the latest version of Flex, and Flash Builder, Adobe’s new offering for creating RIAs. Flash Catalyst was presented at Ascend training in the afternoon while Flex 4 and Flash builder were demoed at the Roundarch Chicago office in the evening.

Here’s a video of the Flex 4 Flash Builder presentation at Roundarch.

Last month Chicago had our very own gathering of great minds in the Rich Internet Application (RIA) space. Riapalooza, as it’s called, is a yearly one day conference meant to foster the RIA community in the midwest region. This year’s event was held Friday, May 8th at the Illinois Technology Association (200 S Wacker Drive 15th Floor Chicago, IL) and is the second one of its kind. Riapalooza aims to be technology agnostic and as such we had representatives from many players in the space including a contingency of Microsoft evangelists and few Adobe evangelists.

Adobe has been in the RIA space a long time with its Flash runtime being ubiquitous in over 98% of all desktops. Flash Lite, Adobe’s mobile Flash runtime is forecasted to be in over 1 BILLION mobile devices by 2009. Adobe’s AIR runtime, a cross platform runtime that brings RIAs to the desktop, already has over 100 million installs.

Microsoft on the other hand is a relative new player in the RIA space. Although they’ve been on the web with their .NET platform for a while, it wasn’t as rich an experience as some of the stuff people are used to seeing today. Even though Microsoft was a pioneer in the RIA space with their XmlHttpRequest, a cornerstone in rich AJAX enabled websites today, their early RIA offerings were met with limited success. Lately Microsoft has been pushing Silverlight, a cross platform RIA runtime meant to compete head on with Flash.

The event itself had a very good turnout. The conference room was packed with developers in the industry. The sessions covered a variety of topics from real world RIA problems, consuming 3rd party APIs in Flex, case studies, to RIAs controlled by alternative user interfaces. The six sessions were jam packed with material. I really enjoyed Corey Miller’s Building Interactive Applications Using UX Principles. His presentation can be found on his blog.

The “unconference” also had panel discussions during lunch which was great because it really engaged the audience through participation. Larry Clarkin did a great job of moderating and seeding questions and getting the conversation going. Topics included RIAs and the emerging mobile platform, the definition of RIA, what an evangelist is and what do they do, to how the various companies are approaching RIAs as well. It was great to see Adobe and Microsoft representatives butt heads in a friendly rivalry. What was also great was that user experience (UX) with respect to RIAs was probably given as much face time as RIA technologies. There were discussions of emerging computing areas that will be affected by RIAs such as mobile and touch screens.

Riapalooza is a definite must for developers in the industry interested in learning more about RIAs, meeting new people, connecting with experts and thought leaders in the industry, and keeping up with RIA news and technology. And at $20 a pop, $10 for early registration, it’s a no brainer.

A recap of the talk that Adam Flater and I gave on RIAs beyond the Mouse and Keyboard can be found here.

Follow the speakers and Riapalooza orgainizers on Twitter

• Michael Schaffner, Adobe Certified Instructor http://twitter.com/schaffner
• Anthony Handley, Microsoft Expression MVP http://twitter.com/anthony808
• Kevin Hoyt, Adobe Sr Product Specialist http://twitter.com/parkerkrhoyt
• Steve Holstad, Development Consultant @ Clarity Consulting http://twitter.com/steveholstad
• Josh Holmes, Microsoft UX Architect Evangelist http://twitter.com/joshholmes
• Mike Labriola, Adobe Community Expert at Digital Primates http://twitter.com/mlabriola
• Corey Miller, Magenicon & Microsoft MVP http://twitter.com/xamlmammal
• Chad Udell, Designer/Developer http://twitter.com/visualrinse
• Adam Flater, Technical Architect and Evangelist @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/adamflater
• Dave Meeker, Director of Emerging Technologies @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/dmeeker
• Pek Pongpaet, Lead Interactive Developer @ Roundarch http://twitter.com/pekpongpaet

In order to be truly worthwhile, organizers have thoroughly plan out how they want people to experience their trade conferences. The delivery of content must align with agenda and objectives of the conference.

Case in point - the Wall Stree Journal’s D - All Things Digital Conference (aka D7).

Over at PBS, Mark Glaser has an insightful article on the D7 conference, highlighting what they got right, what they got wrong, and what they’re still working to improve.

Glaser explains that in the conference program, there was a section titled Welcome to Web 3.0.

First off - the whole Web 2.0/3.0/20.0 crap is tired. Tired.

“Web 3.0″ about as relevant to the individual contributors/technologies/companies it claims to encompass as the term “Beat Generation” was it it’s contributors. Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and WIlliam S. Burroughs are about as different in literary style and objectives as you can get.

The same can be said for 37Signals, Google and Flickr. Yes, they are all from the same ‘generation’ but that’s where the similarities end.

The other important point Glaser brings up is how D7 used (and didn’t use) technology as a vehicle for increasing and improving overall communication and thus, the overall experience and learning.

Glaser writes:

Another problem at D was the uncertain contract between conference organizers and the press and bloggers covering the event. I was told in advance by Swisher that I would not be allowed to do live-blogging in transcript form. Usually, I attend conferences and try to provide a running commentary on what people on stage are saying, largely paraphrasing what they say. It seemed like the D folks were against that idea, and they also didn’t provide WiFi Internet access in the main hall.

I first started thinking about this point after my colleague Victor wrote a post last September on his experience at The Minitek Music and Innovation Festival. Victor was disappointed that there were tons of great technological mashups and combinations available to enhance the experience of the Festival, but they weren’t exploited to their fullest.

Victor laments:

Finding a beautiful evening space (Penn Plaza) and distributing RFID bracelets wired to the concession booths was a great place to start. There was other RFID technology present in the Innovation exhibits, but sadly they weren’t configured on a unified system. This represents the single biggest missed opportunity, a central theme I’ll return to again and again, which was that there was no unifying system/platform to integrate all of the disparate moving parts. And in the wake of that lack of unification, the crowd was neither engaged nor challenged to become part of a shared experience in any meaningful way.

The other great point mentioned in Glaser’s post is the fact that the audiences at these conferences are full of talented people - why are we taking advantage of their presence? This is a great question.

I immediately think about people I work with (and people at other companies) and how great it would be to get their thoughts, impressions and ideas in real-time at events. Dave Meeker, Jeremy Bierly, Pek Pongpaet (and many more) - these are people who speak at events, but even if their sitting in the back of the room, why not let them be part of the conversation? I want to know what they think.

When we get the impulse to hold recurring industry events and create new ones, we really need to think things through and make sure that we crafting experiences that are communicating the messages in the right mediums.

Yes, many of us need to go back 40 years or so and give McCluhan another read.

The Roundarch Labs team has been working on some really impressive projects for mobile development.  Roundarch had previously released the Avis iPhone app which fully integrates directly with the Avis reservations system.  It was the first fully integrated mobile application for a rental car company. Building on this success we developed and helped the band release the Wilco iPhone app.

The project was such an exciting opportunity for Roundarch because so many on the team are Wilco fans.  What better than to be working on a mobile app for one of your favorite Grammy Award winning bands?  We were able to design the app based on the functionality we would love to use ourselves.

The functionality includes:

• Up to the minute news and complete tour listings including pre-sales, maps to venues, requests, ridesharing, etc.
• Ability to listen to your favorite Wilco tracks from their discography, including Ashes to American Flags, as well as the Wilco Podcast.
• Ability to watch videos.
• View photos published live from the road.

The Wilco app was developed using our “Mobile Web Enabler Proxy.”
  This allows the app to work more like a Web application utilizing an Adobe AIR-like framework that utilizes webkit.  This framework contains a Request Translator and Content Transformation layer, and is designed to provide a standards-based mechanism for the delivery of content to a number of webkit based smart phones in the marketplace.

The team at wilcoworld.net has a ton of excellent content so we decided to use the Wilco app to test the web layer out. It works amazingly well and we are all quite happy with the result.  The major milestone of the app was developing a media streaming solution that worked with our web-based front end, which will enable us to migrate to other platforms with relative ease.

I’m extremely happy to say that the Wilco mobile application hit the iTunes App Store last month.  The Roundarch Labs team is excited to help give Wilco fans a chance to have a little bit of the band in their pocket.  Wilco is set to release their seventh studio album Wilco (The Album) on June 30th, 2009.