The Adobe Presentation @ MIT (Return to Manipal - Part 2)

There I was waiting for the presentation to start and sitting among the audience (which were few). There were some MCA (Master of Comp Applications) guys there chatting away that some one from Adobe is giving a lecture today. I chuckled to myself, when I imagined their surprise when I would go up on stage to address them…

Then I saw a familiar face in the crowd. He was the Shekhar, the P.A. system guy, who takes care of the microphones and projectors during all the events. He saw me, forgetting that I was not in the college anymore, he comes and says,

Him: “Hi, I heard there is a Guest Lecture today”
Me : “I heard too” ;)
Him: “Any Idea whose giving it?”
Me : “Yep…”
Him: “Who?”
Me : “Me… (Smiling)”

His face lighted up as he realized that I had come back and then we stared chatting about the college and he said that I should come to college often for such stuff… I said, “I would be delighted, anything to come to Manipal” It was quite an emotional encounter for me.

Then people started pouring in (may be due to the name of Adobe) and we had an eventful presentation which lasted almost 2 hours (phew…). I did a presentation on RIAs and Flex and there was a lot of interest in the audience on this technology that is causing a revolution on the web and how we use it. Questions were shot at me as if from a tennis-ball machine and it was hard to volley them back and parry the tricky ones.

Then there was an exciting application development session where I made an application that gets photos as when clicked on a grid which has details about the different phones. It used the basic features of FLEX like DataGrid, States, Events, Image, panel…etc. I could have shown a live online version of it, getting photos from the Flickr Photo service, but couldn’t as there was no Net connection available.

People were very enthusiastic (there were the occasional sleeping beauties) and were most interested in picking up RIAs in general and Flex & AJAX in particular. They were most curious about the usability issues and connection with Databases and server interactions with traditional Server Pages like JSP, ASP, CF etc

It was a fruitful session and people mailing me day-in and out on when the Flex2.0 public beta release is out… Guys keep a watch for it at Adobe Labs. My first day in the Return to Manipal was over with me basking in the glory of being the Alumnus that came back…

The Stage is Set

Me@Presentation

Q&A Session

Thankyou Preetam Sir, for making it happen !