My friend Aaron West just got interviewed over at dzone by Dan Wilson. The topic was his TwitterAIR application that he wrote back over the summer. Aaron is the leader of the Nashville ColdFusion Group, a dang good programmer, has really nice hair and an overall cool guy.

Last night at the Nashville Flex 3 and AIR launch event Aaron West recorded a bunch of 30onAir videos and I was one of them. Take a look below:

Web Worker Daily posed the question to it’s readers “Do you care about AIR?” Lots of very interesting comments so far and it will be interesting to see how AIR unveils itself in the future. I think that we really have to come up with the killer app to get the penetration that we need. I am starting the course on Flex 3 on Lynda.com today to really start to dive in to all things Flex and see how I can use it in the applications I already develop.

The ability to deploy to the desktop is something all together new to me and will require me to rethink the way I do web applications. Forever it has been if you can do it on the desktop you can do it on the web. Now my thinking needs to be “Could this be better on the desktop as opposed to the web”.

So last night I went to the Flex 3/AIR Prerelease event with Ben Forta here in Nashville. It is always a pleasure to see Mr. Forta talk… as is anyone with a great British accent. He talked about the new features in Flex 3 and some of the plugin stuff for PS/Fw/Ai look really sweet. The ability to easily skin Flex apps is very enticing to me.

I think the AIR stuff is what excites me the most. I have always wanted to be able to create desktop apps but never wanted to learn a “Real” programming language to make this happen. The ability to work in Flex and HTML/CSS and have it become a desktop app is sweeter then sweet.

All in all it was a great turnout for Nashville… about 80-90 people… and it is nice to see the Flex community start to grow. This is the year that I really will start to get into Flex and learn it!

Thanks go out to:

Matthew Wallace with 615Flex for putting on the event and having the foresight to get REAL beer.

Aaron West with Nashville ColdFusion User Group for co-sponsoring and for providing the space through Dealerskins.

The Dealearskins Guys for supplying Shuffles for giveaways (Aaron West, Andy Matthews, Cutter Blades) and Especially for Andy for thinking up of the meeting venue.

Dave Ramsey’s crew for furnishing the pizza and subs and the obligatory Total Money Makeover Books

And of course Adobe for sending Ben and providing giveways and refreshments… oh and wonderful products for us to come around and geek about!

Pictures to come… I forgot my digicam so I have emailed Brett Davis to see if he can email me some of his.

Guess we impressed Adobe with our turn out back in May for the Scorpio Tour with Ben Forta that they have chosen us to host a Flex event. The 615Flex usergroup is sponsoring the event and will be held over at the DealerSkins offices on Jan. 24th, 2008. To get the skinny go here:

http://www.615flex.com/special-events/

FYI You have to register so make sure you signup to get a seat.