Flash On The Beach 2008 - Day 2

The crowd was up early, despite the party ending at about 3 in the morning at The Old Ship. Aral kicked it off in the the Dome and as always, the program is packed and it's hard to pick what sessions to go to.

Here's our temporary summary of Day 2 sessions. You'll find Day 1 coverage here and our story on the Flash Player for the iPhone here.

Niqui Merret

Accessibility - beyond the basics

The Corn Exchange was full for Niqui Merret's third year at Flash on the beach. As the title suggests, this time she looked beyond the basic workflow and delivered a very useful presentation full of useful AS3 code examples and practical accessibility knowledge.

Much like video, accessibility is one of those aspects of Flash that is full of it's own pitfalls. The talk was peppered with arcane knowledge such as startup times and undocumented events, and using Inspect 32 she showed how you can analyse the data passing between Flash and JAWS 9. To finish she showed that just about anything can be made accessible by showing a fully accessible carousel demo built with Papervision3D.

Joa Ebert

Audiotool's Private Parts

Since I have an audio background, Joa Ebert and Andre Michelle are among some of my favorite Flash coders. Their Hobnox Audio Tool is just so much fun. If you ever played with synthesizers (or wanted to do it), make sure you check it out. Gray cables, did a quick recode on the fly to make the cables visible went into great detail about the layout systems involved building such an advanced tool in Flash.

Timing is critical in a RealTime Audio application such as the Hobnox Audio Tool. If a calculation is just fractions of a millisecond too long, there'll be artifacts in the audio played back.

Joa went over cool tricks such as converting classes to simpler structures that the Flash Player can parse faster, Object Pooling to control garbage collection and tricks when casting objects that can increase the speed significantly. Joa is extremely skilled when it comes to squeezing performance out of the Flash Player and any serious actionscript coder would benefit from checking this session if presented again.

Joa talked a bit about the background for the Audio Tool, their struggles for overcoming limitations in the player, their "Adobe make some noise" campaign and how well Adobe responded to this. He then put up a slide with Flash Engineer Tinic Uro's name inside a heart to great applause from the audience. "We love Tinic!". Joa then finished off showing some sweet Open GL and PixelBender experiments.

Grant Skinner

Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know

Grant's talk this year started off in a similar vein to Branden Hall's with the proviso that there is no one and only solution to a programming problem. Whereas last year he presented inspirational work, this year it was firmly practical advice.

Aimed primarily at beginning or intermediate developers this was a whistle-stop tour of coding standards, application architecture, design patterns and the like. One point I particularly enjoyed was his heartfelt defence of the Flash timeline. Programmers should embrace the timeline and use timeline events to control code inside classes.

Peter Elst

AIR Beyond the Basics - Taming the Desktop

I got in a little late at this one, but it seemed that Peter started off with a run through the core features of AIR, with some solid and easy to understand examples. There was an internet outage while he presented that prevented a couple examples from being shown. At the very end it came back, so Peter raced through those demos at the very end.

It was a solid introduction to AIRs core features, but Peter also did some more special stuff such as using AIR to open AIR apps and playing with the Merapi Java API to open external applications. He even did a quite amusing demo that used AIR with a text to speech engine that iterated over a list that BBC use to filter swear-words. He also used this list as a good example of something that could have been hidden using the AIR encryption features.

Tom baker

Life in cartoons

Fun ride through his career, from the hard lessons learned in his first project, his first full time job up until today. From one man shows to large production, Tom showed a lot of animations in a variety of styles and went through the process of making professional animations using Flash.

From swapping symbols in MovieClips to full frame animations with advanced rotoscoping, this session was a fun look into an animators process and the results. It also gives some perspective as to why animators don't update their portfolio that often when animations may take 6 months or more for only minutes of complete work.

GMUNK (Bradley Grosh)

GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9

The inspirational sessions this year have all been retrospectives and GMUNK was no exception. Bradley is probably best known for his motion work but many designers may remember, but he started off with a few examples of his early static "gnarly" work. We are quickly introduced to his obsessions in a world of monkeys, cables and pipes.

When someone shows you their first ever motion piece and they describe it as "doesn't completely suck" you're expectations aren't high. When you see it and all you want to do is hang up your mouse and retire, you know your in for a ride. He showed a mixture of home grown gonzo work and his professional work at Imaginary Forces, but what I liked most was that he then took you into Maya and walked you through how he built them.

Hoss Gifford

Abstract Narrative + Simplicity (RTFM)

Before getting into his advertised talk (Abstract Narrative) Hoss confided that he had woken on the morning of the con with a great idea for a completely new talk (Simplicity - RTFM). Opening with a series of drawing and multi-user applications he moved onto some anecdotes about recent work for the Edinburgh Festival Fringe called Fringe Magnets. Talk number one over it was half way and time for a costume change. Anyone who caught the session may have strange reactions the next time they hear 'Dancing Queen'.

After some enjoyable Jacob Neilson bashing it was onto the business of the second presentation: Simplicity. Hoss's basic point was N.W.R.T.F.M. or No one reads the f**king manual. After showing examples from Braun supremo Dieter Rams he went on to look at the minimal UI for his latest work. Podium is an impressive AIR application that his team created for marketing apartments at the Chicago spire development. With a little time left he managed to squeeze in a little Spank the monkey. Still a classic.

Inspirational session

What can we say? Watching Robert Hodgin after a great dinner and then some beers is just a pure joy. Beautiful, inspirational visuals zooming across the big screen in the Dome, the lights dimmed down completely - this is one of my favorite parts of FOTB. Just kick back, relax and enjoy! Robert showed both some repeats and new work and it's just as amazing as ever. The underwater scene was simply jawdropping for it's beauty.

If you want to check out some of Robert's work yourself, just open iTunes and try the new Visualizer. Robert could not say this directly as this is now Apple's property, but we've seen it in the news already. He also talked about what was his turning point, when he decided to devote himself to visual arts.

Here's Robert's dream vs reality slides. If you see yourself in the reality slide, you should probably try to make some changes...