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Flashforward day 2

Day 2 begins with the keynote by Kevin Lynch. This is usually the keynote where new products are shown, so everyone is here.

Kevin started by showing the 10th anniversary site and a birthday card by HomeRunner. He then showed the numbers for the Flash player showing how the Flahs player 8 was adopted must faster than the 7 player, and they are projecting the 9 player to be adopted even faster. Then Garrett Nantz got up on stage showing the Flash player 9 on Linux running the Nike Air site. After that demo, Kevin got back on stage to talk about the new Virtual Machine that runs ActionScript 3 in the Flash 9 player. Some of the key points to new Virtual Machine are:

Better performance

W3C DOM Level 4 event model

Regular Expressions

Runtime error checking

Next up was Mark Anders talking about Flex. He mentioned how Flex Builder 2.0 is built on the Eclipse framework. Then he built a small photo app demo with the Flex Builder running on a Mac! He went on to talk about Apollo and how it combines HTML, Flash and PDF. Next he made a small change to the app and ran it as an apollo app, and he even showed an icon of the app to show that was installed on the mac. He also showed a URL for a wiki about Apollo.

Following Mark was Mike Downey and Justin Everett-Church from Adobe showing the Public Alpha of Flash 9 with AS 3.0. They showed a particle system built with AS 2.0 and each step took 100 milliseconds, then they converted it to AS 3.0 and each step was about 6 milliseconds. Then they showed a sneak peak of the Flash 9 IDE (which has a planned launch of next year). The first feature they showed was the ability to import PhotoShop PSD files directly into Flash! And it wasn't a straight import, it actually gave you full control over which layers you want to import and how they are imported (editable text or as vector outlines). You can also convert entire folders to a single movie clip with full registration point control. They even support some of the filters like drop shadow, which are converted to the Flash drop shadow for better file size. You also will have full JPEG settings and quality control right in the import panel. And they are using the next generation of comression found in the next version of PhotoShop. The panel also allows you to import as layers or keyframes. The next feature they showed is an animation converstion tool that converts tweens right to code using Copy motion to ActionScript 3.0. And it can be a single tween, or several tweens linked together. It converts the tween over to XML, which can even be brought over to Flex to be used. The final feature they mentioned is an update to components as they are being built by Grant Skinner and Beau Ambur and so far are under the file size of the current set of components and are meant to be more easily skinable.

The keynote was great, not just for the sneak peaks, but also for the very cool mini bottle of shampagne. I've posted some pictures on Flickr. And here are some more.

After then keynote, the first session I went is the Q and A with the Flash team. They started with a little history of Flash and then opened the floor up to questions. He talked a bit about the fact that there is no compatibility of ActionScript 2.0 with ActionScript 3.0. Mike Downey did mention another new feature we can expect to see in the next version of Flash is Iconic Pallet mode which will allow you to dock all of your panels in a sidebar of icons so you have more realistate for the stage. The toolbar has also seen a facelift as well.

The second session I went to is Prototyping (and Deploying): Visual Brainstorms by Branden Hall. He showed his Application Flow, which is a patch based based programming architecture. Built in ActionScript 3.0 (for speed), it is an XML based system with 3 pieces (well, 2 pieces and a third set of pieces): the editor, the engine and different patches including event, display and prcess patches. When Flow is released in an early alpha version, it should have 20 patches already and the only thing required to create your own patches is the free Flex SDK. You can download the presentation from his new website Automata Studios.

With the next session I went to, I took a break from coding seminars by checking out The Evolution of Flash Animation: Bedrock Revisited by Sandro Corsaro. He started with a brief history of animation and then went on to talk about some techniques he uses in Flash that are very easy to implement including persistence of vision and stretch and squash. He created a couple characters while he was talking and even showed how to do lip syncing with a couple of the characters. One of the main points he mentioned when building animations in Flash is to re-use as often as possible. After the talk he gave out a few of his books to people who guessed the numbers he was thinking of between 1 and 6000.. the largest number was 84, so I over shot it with 4321 (the other numbers were 32 and 12 incase you were wondering).

After that, I managed to get a little time with Adobe's Mike Downey to talk about Flash and where it's headed. The audio is a little soft (especially when it's me asking the questions), but I will be making some adjustments for the next interview. You can download the interview here.