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FITC Amsterdam Day 1

FITC stands for Flash In The Can(ada) and it was the second conference put on for Flash users only. The FITC conference have been hosted for seven years in Toronto, Canada and the last years it's expanded to include Hollywood, Chicago, Winnipeg and now Amsterdam. This article will update throughout the day with bits and pieces from the conference.

The day started late for many attendees as the party at the Escape club was great fun. Thanks to a great DJ and free drinks sponsored by dutch game develpers Media Monks a late evening was ensured. Though late starters, we did manage to catch most of the keynote before the main sessions started.

Disco Hoss at the Escape, photo by Marc Thiele

Aral Balkan

After the keynote, todays first session for me was Aral Balkans session "Beyond the buttons". Aral is a killer speaker and this session was kind of an avalanche. Instead of talking about tools, the audience was bombarded with ideas on how to leverage assets such as the new social networks and APIs available to create new things. Aral had a lot on his heart and for this presentation the audience could just forget about taking notes. The FITC program is packed so I had to forgo John Grden's presentation on Papervision3D.

Would you let this man sell your children icecream? Look at those scary eyes...

Carlos Ulloa

I really wanted to catch some Papervision, so I sat in for the first half of Carlos Ulloa's presentation where he showcased how he built the "Color like.no.other" site for Sony. Carlos has a very modest presentation style but it works well since this makes the audience focus more on the work than the speaker. He walked the audience through the entire process and gave a lot of good tips and tricks for optimizing such an advanced site. If you've not seen the site, go check it out. The navigation is quite unique and it plays back really well despite the complex nature. Carlos also showed another project, but I wanted to check out Nicolas Lierman's presentation on the Google Analytics client he built using AIR.

Nicolas Lierman

When Nicolas put out his Google Analytics AIR application, I instantly downloaded it as I had some problems with the Dashboard client I was using at the time. This was maybe the first really useful AIR application I had and it was really well executed. Several others also noticed how good this app was and eventually Google themselves heard about it and wanted to help out.

Now that the AIR API is final, Nico has put out new versions so if you are using Google Analytics to track your visitors, we recommend you check this cool app out.

Joa Ebert

Some time ago, Adobe revealed that the next version of the Flash Player will contain something called Hydra. Hydra is a "Pixel Shader language", but what's that then? It's a special language that will let you process image data at speeds that you could only dream of. The reason is that Hydra is capable of using the Graphics Processing Unit (GPU) to do it's calculations. The GPU is what makes modern 3D gaming possible and for graphics, it's way faster than using the CPU. Hydra is now used in After Effects but it will also make it's way into the upcoming Flash Player 10.

How fast? You can't really give exact numbers for this, but more than an hundred times faster than classic get/set pixel operations on Flash bitmapdata should be possible. Joa showed several samples running in the AIF Toolkit and most of them were running at speeds of 1200fps or more. When Hydra makes it into the Flash Player, we can't really expect it to go just as fast, but it will be fast. Much faster than what we have today.

Despite the relative simplicity, this example created by Keith Peters would only run at about 1-2 fps on Joa's modest PC. When done in Hydra and running in the AIF Toolkit it ran at a constant 1100 frames per second on the same PC. In reality this means that anything you can describe and calculate using Hydra can be done in "realtime". Imagine online audio and video editing programs with realtime effects, live video remixing, complex shaded 3D and most anything you can think of that requires a lot of calculations.

Joa is not a native english speaker, but he's charming and extremely skilled. At the end of his session, he mentioned something on a sidenote - he had written a complete Flash assembly compiler with an integrated Eclipse debugger. Nobody in the room reacted much to this, but I totally cracked up. He wrote a bytecode compiler - for fun? Right... Joa will present this one in depth at the FlashForum conference in May.

Click here for Day 2 coverage

Written by Jens C Brynildsen (February 25th 2008)