FOWD 2008 is now over, the contacts have been contacted and the meetings made (well, planned, but it sounded better my way). I am now sitting back after eight hours of emailing and phoning current clients, potential clients and other freelances. Oh, and I brought a really sweet new mic, but more on that later.

Firstly, I must confess that I was not overly impressed with this particular Carsonified conference. I felt that last year’s Future of Web Applications was much more inspiring and did a better job of tackling the rather slippery ‘future of’ concept.

That being said, the main reason I went to the conference was not because I wanted to learn about the future of web design, but rather to meet other people who did, and from this point of view it actually went very well!

I did make a few notes on my iTouch (or whatever its called) during the conference and I will share these with you now. They are in a fairly raw format and can be described as ‘things I should be aware of’.

• Adobe
  • Adobe Exchange Beta – A market place for Adobe work (still need to check this one out).
  • flex.org – The Adobe Flex community site.
  • iLog elixir – Some very interesting data visualisation components for Adobe Flex.
  • Buzzword – A Flex based word processor.
  • BlazeDS - A server-side push technology for Flex.
• Misc Design
  • Grid Calculator – For creating CSS grids.
  • ctrl + shift + g – For overlaying a grid on your design (handy for checking alignment).
  • Position is Everything – Lots of tips on working around bugs in Internet Explorer.
  • Silverback – Resize the browser window and see what happens. Moral of the story: little Easter eggs get you traffic.
  • Society of Digital Agencies – Something to keep an eye on.
  • Design Meltdown – Lots of examples of different types of web designs.
  • Vitamin – "Nourishment to help the web grow"

Now don’t go and label me as an Adobe fanatic – it is just that I get on well with Flex (plus I got talking to someone on the Flex stand for a good while!)

And now the "other things"

There are a few things going on in my professional development at the moment that I thought I would share them with you.

Most excitingly, I have just brought a really sweet new microphone for some screencasts I am going to be creating. I am creating them as the documentation to a recent project I have done, but I may also have a go at doing some for this blog. (Disclaimer: I know very little about microphones!)

I have also decided that it is time to look into using a more common framework, rather than the self-built one I have been using for the past four years or so. I have had a look around at the assorted offerings available and it is the Zend Framework that has eventually caught my eye. I like the way the modules are all very loosely tied together as it will make transitioning old code that little bit easier. Also, the integration with Zend Studio for Eclipse is a big bonus.

You may have also noticed the occasional (ahem) Adobe Flex reference in this blog post. This is because I have been trying to sink me teeth into Flex for a while now and I finally managed to set aside a little time do so. I have played around with Flash in the past but, because I am a developer at heart, I never quite knew what to do with the timeline. After all, even the simplest web applications are not liner. So when I heard about Adobe ‘Flash-For-Developers’ Flex I was naturally intrigued. Expect more on this in the future.

I think that about covers everything I wanted to update you on. It is quite possible that I will expand each of the previous three paragraphs into entire blog posts in the future.

Oh, and I have finally changed my desktop to an Apple… and it is very pretty.