Flash on the beach 2009 - Day 2

Despite the official party at Audio and the usual follow up at The Old Ship Hotel, the Brighton Dome was almost full for the first session of Day 2. A brand new session type in the form of 3 minute elevator pitches proved really successful and Joa Ebert had everyone cheering at the Actionscript optimization tools he built while being sick.

3 minute wonders

New this year was the quite extraordinary 3 minute wonders. Twenty presenters each have 3 minutes to speak, making these sessions the presenting equivalent of Twitter. It must have been an organisational nightmare but turned out to be one of the best sessions of the day.

There was a good mix of technology and design, and plenty of variation in subject matter. Open source and personal projects proved more popular than sales pitches, but the time constraint ensured that every speaker was concise. Most of the speakers had little speaking experience, but none of them were boring du to the spped of it all. The whole thing went flawlessly and we couldn't really capture it all. It's kind of one of those "you had to be there" moments, but great fun to watch!

Leaving The Sandbox
Joa Ebert

This was by far the most hardcore tech talk of the conference. After a brief introduction to the low level workings of the Flash compiler Joa showed some simple optimisations that can be made.

It's probably no surprise to those in the room that Joa has a few issues with the performance of the current Flash compiler. This has come from a series of tools he built to explore the compiler. His 'Actionscript 3 Validator' (AS3V), a tool that prompts you for optimizations in your code that maybe even spurred Adobe to build their own?

So what do you do when you get sick? Rest up? Get well? Not Joa: He built 'Apparat' a framework that decompiles and recompiles your SWF and lets you see the code as the Flash Player sees it - as ABC code. This again makes all sorts of manipulation possible. In other words, he wrote a complete compiler/decompiler while being sick! That's just ... sick?

Based on the Apparat framework, Joa next built a series of tools:

• TDSI that allows you to inline __bytecode and use the new Memory API, formerly only available when using Alchemy.
  
• Dump is a tool that analyses the machine code inside a SWF file and exports the contents to a fully navigable UML diagram.
• In an amusing bit of Adobe bating he also built 'Reducer', a little app that optimises the filesize of an embedded PNG in a SWF. This little gem will reduce the file size by more than half.
• TAAS (Three Address Action Script) is a tool that offers a way to totally manipulate ABC code, optimize it by inlining functions, eliminating dead code, replacing recursive calls (in way you just can't do using the Flex/Flash compilers!), using smarter algorithms, partial reduction elimination and more. The tool will then recompile this ABC code as a SWF again, for a fully optimized SWF that can run way faster than the original swf. Some of his tests showed from 10 to 100 times speed increase and the beauty of this is that you just write your AS3 code as usual, run TAAS and you get an optimized SWF back.
  

All these tools are Java command line based so they can easily be fitted into existing build systems. The tools are publicly available on http://code.google.com/p/apparat/ but they're not yet finished. The current version supports a limited set of optimizations, but Joa plans to add many more over time.

Oh yes, and one more thing... a quick hop into Visual Studio and Joa showed a little thing he put together "yesterday at the hotel": A C# program compiled into a SWF. He followed this with (of course) a Java program compiled into a SWF. This is the only time I've ever seen a presenter given a standing ovation at Flash on the beach. Truly truly astounding.

More than Bending Pixels
Paul Burnett

Paul started going over the basics of how you use PixelBender and then went on to show more practical use. From the basics of fading images and adding effects he then moved on to modifying Audio data by adding delays. He also show a neat demo originally put together by Flash Player engineer Tinic Uro - a full audio mixer done in Flash. Very neat demo.

Despite being a quite technical session, Paul told this in such a simple way that anyone could follow. It really was a great introduction to Pixel Bender but the drawback of this, was of course that there were a few that found this too basic. Good thing for me though - the session was initially full, but I got in since others left.

At the end of his session, Paul brought up David Lenaerts (aka DerSchmale) from the Away3D Team. David showed off the new PixelBender shaders available in the Away3D Engine as well as his PB based WaterColor simulator Farbe - really impressive stuff that shows how using Pixel Bender can prevent UI lockups in Flash since PB runs in a separate thread.

Inspire Session: Choose Your Own Adventure
Craig Swann

We've seen Craig present many times before and we have to say this was his best session ever. In former presentations, he's always presented things that were easy to capture (like fun hardware with Flash), but this session was much more personal. He showed now work from Crash!Media, but rather went over his though process and how he's come to make his choices in life. The session featured many things that shaped him and it was really interesting to see the audience reaction.

Craig showed quite remarkable experiments done by others that indicated that there is a closer connection between man and nature than most people know. Why does sound waves produce these facinating patters when played through a medium? Are plants really able to sense things around them? Some audience menbers left the room as this did not resonate with their personal beliefs and this caused just what conference organizer John Davy wanted to happen. People would have to think about things they don't usually do and then discuss this after the session. We heard all kinds of responses from "The water shit was just stupid" and "I hated that session" to people passionately discussing their own experiences and saying that he was absolutely onto something. Both me and John loved it!

About Jens C Brynildsen

Jens has been working with Flash since version 3 came out. Since then, he's been an active member of the Flash community. He's created more than a hundred Flash games (thus the name of his blog) but he also creates web/standalone applications, does workshops and other consulting. He loves playing with new technology and he is convinced that the moment you stop learning you die (creatively speaking). Jens is also the Editor of this website.

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