Update: This conference was awesome! If you live in the US, you really don’t want to miss the US-edition in June. Register using TREMONT to get 10% off now!

Two weeks have passed already since I arrived in Valencia Spain around this time in the evening to attend Europe’s first Titanium conference. Appcelerator’s Titanium is the software I’ve been using to develop native apps for multiple platforms. The platform is known for it’s strong community and it’s this community that was fully responsible for organizing this conference. I’ve enjoyed every bit (byte, so you will) of it, including eating tapas, drinking wine and meeting in person lots of people I’ve only spoken to online so far.

These were my highlights:

• Appcelerator’s CEO Jeff Haynie giving us an insight in the company’s vision and it’s heart for open source.
• The Japanese folks from DENSO showing how linking up smartphones to cars can result in totally useless but just as hilarious stuff like playing pin-ball using the doors to control the flippers.
• Grant Smith showing off his Titanium Studio plug-in that allows you to visually construct views for Alloy, yet again lowering the bar for new developers to start building with Titanium!
• Both Antonio Calanducci and Antonio Calanducci did a great job demonstrating how using Appcelerator’s Cloud Services provides you 80% of what typical clients need in 20% of your time for incredible low costs (5mln push notifications a month, for free!)
• Samuel Mueller proving barcode scanning can be both easy to implement and incredibly good. His module could probably recognize a barcode on a Zebra!
• Even if OpenShift‘s Grant Shipley wouldn’t have been handing out cool USB bottle openers, the power and simplicity of their open source powered cloud services would have won our hearts. Three servers, deployed while you wait… who can beat that?
• The conference wouldn’t have been complete without an introduction of the new MVC framework Alloy. Thanks to Xavier Lacot, backed by Jeff.
• Marcus Ross gave a detailed report before showing off how he managed to get a Titanium-built app to control a drone helicopter.

On sunday at 14:00 an highlight of a whole different category couldn’t easily be ignored. To celebrate spring, a huge firework was set off. You might think you’ve seen fireworks before, but you haven’t heard it until you’ve witnessed this: