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Last night I put aside my (very old) flash prejudice and headed over to Aral's beautiful flat for his presentation to Flash Brighton on SWX. One of my reasons is because when Aral was first working on SWX, when it was still "the tangent" I bumped into Aral quite often and got snapshots of the development process - but that is all I got. I listened in to some of his OSFlash SWX presentation last week, but then got distracted by beer at the Victory and haven't had a change to listen to the rest. The other reason was to see the Nabaztag bunny that Aral gained at Hack Day - you can send the bunny a message from Aral's website.

Aral put on a really good presentation, explaining in words that non-flash developers could understand. His demo's mostly worked ;-) and the whole interface and method of working looked good and seemed to just make sense. Great job Aral!

I spoke to quite a few Flash developers and designers and they didn't seem too upset to have a .NET developer in their midst (although at least one of them needs to get out more as I had a comment that they'd never met a female developer before).

My only experience of flash, other than as a user, was many years ago, 2000 or 2001 and I wasn't impressed - I didn't work with it, I just observed others and the work they produced. It looked pretty but that was about it.

Having seen some flash yesterday and listened to Aral's talk I must admit to having seen flash in a new light. I don't think I'm going to be giving up my back end development preference any time soon, but neither am I going to run away from flash either. To be honest, I think my acceptance of flash has been progressing in the background for a while - Niqui gave a good presentation at the Girl Geek Dinners on accessibility.

So, a great evening, slightly outside of my comfort zone, but big thanks to Flash Brighton for putting on such a good session, and to everyone for being so accepting of a non-flash person.