Can’t attend Flashbelt?
I would highly recommend attending Flashbelt. Networking opportunities, great presentations and lots of fun! OK, if you absolutely can go than check out our presentation below.

Who should attend?
Developers that are currently developing AIR applications or are interested in doing AIR development in the future. Project managers would also benefit from knowing the decisions that go into creating large scale applications. How about designers? This presentation is geared towards the development side of AIR but designers are welcome.

BulkLoader with Binary data format:
link

About the presenters:
Chris Black is a Senior Developer at Sierra Bravo who focuses on ActionScript development with Adobe Flex and AIR, and is interested in integrating social networking APIs into Rich Internet Applications. He covers these topics as well as sharing solutions to the problems he encounters when working with Flex and AIR on his blog, blackcj.com. Chris has a degree in Computer Science from the University of Wisconsin – Eau Claire, and when he’s away from the computer he enjoys rock climbing, backpacking, and tennis.

Minh Vu is a Developer at Sierra Bravo who works on interactive development with ActionScript, JavaScript, and iPhone. He has a strong interest in applying Model Driven Development to Flash or AIR applications. Minh studied at the University of Minnesota Duluth where he got his degree is in Information System & Technology. In his spare time he enjoys disc golfing, snowboarding and ultimate frisbee.

Skimmer. The next Adobe AIR app and the hard work of many individuals over the past 6 months. It has been amazing to see this application turn from design into reality. This is a summary of the technologies used and some of the lessons learned throughout the development of Skimmer:

Skimmer

The first decision was easy. Use an MVC framework, more specifically PureMVC. This application was estimated in the thousands and having a backbone was very important. We spent the extra time upfront developing a solid structure which ended up helping out immensely when it came to bug fix and adding new features. Creating new views became a snap when the data providers that accessed third party API’s were completed.

The second major decision was to use a SQLite database to store content locally. This allowed for fast filtering of data and pre-processing of information. It also greatly improved the load time of the application since we only needed to gather new information.

Thirdly, we decided to use image caching for all of the commonly used images to improve load times. This increased the application start up and allows for fluid transitions between images in slide shows. By extending a bulk loader class Skimmer is able to first check the local cache before making any requests to the internet for images.

One of the major challenge was working with the third party API’s. The API’s for Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, TwitPic, Facebook and Blogger had varying levels of documentation and support. Flickr had the most feature rich API while Facebook had the most difficult API to work with. Many of them had third party AS3 libraries to use for interfacing with the service that we used as a base.

Another challenge was in skinning the flex components. The application was not designed to look like an AIR application, which is a good thing This, however, did create some interesting problems along the way. We used a combination of CSS, class inheritance, overrode drawing methods, and even created some custom flex components.

You can download skimmer here:
http://www.fallon.com/skimmer

A shout out to everyone that made this happen:
AL KELLY, BRENDA FOGG, CHRIS WIGGINS, DAVID SCHWEN. EXTENDED TEAM: ANDY GUGEL, SIERRA BRAVO, ANDREW WATSON, BEN DOLMAR, BLAGVOST DACHEV, CLAYTON SMITH, JON REXEISEN, KARSTEN LUNDQUIST, KONR NESS, KRIS SZAFRANSKI, MARK SEEMANN, MANISH SHRESTHA, MATT TONAK, MICHAEL WOODS, MINH VU, ROBB THOMAS, THOMAS O’NEILL.

Feel free to post any comments or questions you have about Skimmer.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/24/skimmer/

Learn what SQLite is About:
Introduction to the SQLite Database – David Tucker

Getting Started:
Introduction to SQLite in Adobe AIR

Tool for Creating and Modifying SQLite Databases:
SQLite Firefox Extension

By using a SQLite database it will be easy to filter data returned by services based on tags. A demo application that uses SQLite will be coming soon. Feel free to comment with any additional resources or cool demo applications that use SQLite.