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Flash on the Beach, Sessions day 1

At any conference, you can only see that much and with three tracks most of the day, you'll have to choose between good and good all the time. This is a writeup of some of the sessions the Flashmag team attended the first day of the conference.

Report by John Dalziel, David Vogeleer and Jens C. Brynildsen Day 2 coverage, can be found here.

Initially, the keynote looked like it would be something like an overview of CS3. This may have turned some people off since Adobe have been talking about Flash 10 for quite some time now. The title was however misleading and a lot of the features shown at the MAX conferences were demoed. The FOTB keynote did not show any major new features, but Aral Balkan has a good writeup where he mentions that they confirmed typed arrays and showed off an Inverse Kinetics bone system. Seeing the Adobe team dressed up in Sherlock Holmes gear was also great fun.

Update: Peter Elst has uploaded a video of the FOTB keynote.

Seb Lee-Delisle

After the keynote, the first session I went to was Seb Lee-Delisle's particle talk. He went through his particle engine (AS3) and how it works. The code itself was very simple to work with and manage, which made the system all that more approachable. He showed how subtle changes to the shape, or even adding in a little animation to the particles themselves could have amazing effects on your system.

After the basics of movement in his system, Seb moved onto how to apply the particle code on the fly to entire sets of objects at once. He did a cool example using several skeletons that when clicked on would break apart and fall of screen using the particle system. He then immediately created a text field, broke it apart and put in a movieclip, tested the file again, and when he clicked on the text, it broke apart just like the skeleton. So the code was very scalable and easy to work with with different objects.

Next up was using the particle system to create smoke. He simply added some alpha transitioning and some blur filters to create very realistic smoke. He then went into garbage collection in AS3, and the work you have to do because of the differences between AS2 and AS3 garbage collection.

Finally, he showed a very cool way to apply particles dynamically at runtime by scanning the stage and looking for white pixels. He simply added some text to the stage that had a white outline, tested the file and particles traced the each letter.

A great first session, and all the source is available here. (Just before last years conference, we also talked to Seb about FOTB and Brighton)

Mike Chambers

After that, I went to back-to-back AIR talks to get as much information on it as I could, since I havenâ€™t really played with since they changed the name from Apollo. The first talk was presented by Mike Chambers, and was a pretty good overview of the new beta 2 build (Available on labs.adobe.com). Some of the new features include:

Embedded DB - sqlLite
Synchronous APIâ€™s
Better Notifications
Windows 2000 Support

He then went on to mention that when Apollo is released in early 2008, it will include the latest Flash 9 player build, which supports the h.264 video format.

Next he moved to an example created by finetunes.com for playing music on your desktop that is streamed from the web. It also integrates nicely with iTunes. The cool part was that the web version of the app noticed that the Apollo app was installed, and asked did he want to use that one instead.

Mike then moved onto building a simple HTML editor with live preview from scratch using Flex. The first thing he mentioned in the example is that all AIR apps require 2 files; the first being the app itself (swf) and the second being an XML file that basically describes the app and all of its properties. The app took him just a couple minutes to build and worked flawlessly, including displaying, in real-time, the marque element.

When he packaged it up, he showed off how the digital signature for AIR apps will work, which will be somewhat comforting for security people. The overall packaging and installing process seemed very smooth, and it works on PC, Mac, Linux and some devices.

Mike also had a few links for more information on AIR:

Dave Williamson

Localising Flash Content and Applications
If you work in the US or only target the US market, this may seem like an odd topic. Anyone living in Europe or Asia is sure to know that getting all the national characters to show up properly can be quite a daunting task that requires a lot of trail and error.

Dave had spent a lot of time finding the best solution and he gave us his surefire way for embedding fonts in Flash:

Add a text field on stage

Click the Embed button in the properties and embed Basic Latin + Latin 1

Create a textformat object (do not use CSS or font settings)

Set the text for the textfield using the .text property (make sure loaded text is UTF8!)

Apply textformat to textfield using setTextFormat

If you follow these steps, you should find that all european languages will work as intended. The above embeds just above 400 characters, but don't apply this technique to asian languages such as chinese. If you do that, your files will become insanely huge since these languages has several thousand characters. For these languages, Dave showed a smart trick where he wrote an array of his preferred fonts, and then compared this to the users installed fonts:

var myFonts:Array = new Array("Helvetica Neue", "Helvetica", "Arial", "_sans");

var installedFonts:String = TextField.getFontList().toString();

By comparing each entry in the myFontsarray against the string with the installed fonts, you can easily select one of many possible device fonts. Dave preferred using the string method indexOf() to check for matches as that proved the simplest and fastest way. I think anyone that attended this session learned some new tricks and it's very nice to have a surefire way to solve these issues.

Keith Peters

Make Flash Games. Retire Early.
Last years talk on AS3 by Keith Peters filled the Corn Exchange, so for this years session, Keith was moved to the main hall. The session started late as Keith had some problems getting his machine running with the projectors, so in the end he transferred the files to Niqui Merret's MacBook and did his presentation from there.

How many Flashers does it take to connect a Mac Book Pro to a projector?â€

Back in July this year, Keith posted on his blog about where he wanted to go next in his "Flash Career". He found that one of the things he really enjoys doing is Flash games and he launched the site Wickedpissahgames with a first game called Gravity Pods. The game made it to the cover of Digg and went on to make about $1000 the first week, $2000 the following week and then it slowly went down from there. This boost really took him by surprise and inspired him to do more games.

The talk was not about Keiths own games, but rather the genre of "Coffe Break Games" such as Line Rider and Desktop Tower Defense and how it is now possible to make games that could even make you a living. It all boils down to four key factors according to Keith:

Idea

2. Coding

3. Promoting

4. Monetization

According to Keith, the visuals are not that important and you must not use too much narrative. People are after all going to play this when they have a vacant moment at work or home. He mentioned several good resources for promoting games once made such as Digg, StumbleUpon, SlashDot and Reddit.

He also mentioned the Mochi Ads system and how Mochi Bots allowed him to track the games in near realtime. We also caught up with Keith for an interview during the conference, so stay tuned for that in the weeks to come.

Lee Brimelow

The next AIR talk was given by Lee Brimelow, and he went over how to build AIR apps in Flash CS3.

He started with some more features of the new AIR beta including:

Full Network Stack

Background Applications

Drag and Drop as well as Clipboard Access

Multi-window support

File Type Registration

He went over the benefits of using Flex for certain things like layout management, but then went over the benefits of Flash including:

Animation

Video

Design Toolset

Potentially faster, depending on what you build

Next, Lee showed how you can control native windows that either contain, or are launched by your AIR app. He added some simple physics for bouncing and spring drag controls. He also showed that you can control the Z-order of the windows on the fly as well.

He then moved onto more about the subtleties of developing AIR apps, and how chromless and transparency usually account for a 10% loss in performance, especially using transparency. Also, unlike web apps, with AIR apps, you donâ€™t have to worry about file size as much.

Then Lee went over the steps necessary to make drag and drop work in AIR, and here are the steps:

Add event listener

Check for correct file types, which can be done during the drag before the release of the mouse.

Retrieve data in the drop event, like the file path.

Pretty east, and he showed several examples, with very funny feedback to the user when they drug the wrong file over top the app.

In his final example, he showed how to launch native windows, tested it in the IDE, and launched well over 2000 windows as he answered questions.

Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow answering questions (all day...)

Hoss Grifford

The next session on the docket for me was Hoss Griffordâ€™s talk entitled The rest of the iceberg. He started it off with a great car crash video and talked about moments like that always occur in projects, and can have amazing results that you donâ€™t see coming.

He showed a very cool video piece he did for a scottish awards show, and then walked through how he made some of the characters in maya. Was pretty interesting, because the characters were so simply built, but had a lot of character in the video.

Hoss next talked about a project he did in New York that had a tight deadline, and how each member of the team added their own creativity to the piece in each step to make a great final product. He went further to discuss the three things that all clients want every project to be; cheap, fast and good. And despite requirements, clients can only truly get 2 out of the 3 perfectly on projects. And since we all want to do good work, the choice is between the work being cheap, or the work be doing fast, and the pros and cons of both of them.

It was a great talk from an industry and insider perspective on dealing with multiple teams in multiple locations.

Carole Guevin

Self Promotion
There is a chronic shortage of experienced Flash talent right now. Top developers can now command the kind of salaries previously reserved for software engineers. Web media pioneer Carole Guevin's timely talk about self promotion was full of useful insights into how stand out from the crowd.

Over the course of the hour Carole distille years of experience into some brilliantly succinct observations. Chew over some of these for a minute. Regarding your portfolio: "Only your mother looks at it all", and on money and contracts: "Everything is negociable but NEVER Free". All good stuff.

John Grden

Papervision3D CS3 Component
We've seen speakers use Flash presentations to accompany their talks before but this was the first time I've seen one where the slides flew around n 3D. Gnarly. John was here to show a packed house how to work with the Papervision3D component for Flash CS3.

Starting off in Flash CS3 he opened up the Papervision3D component panel and within minutes had a fully textured and interactive XWing fighter moving around in Flash. For his next trick he textured the model using a MovieClip from the library. After that it's a breeze to animate the texture.

John then moved over to Flex 2 and more or less repeated the same process in code this time to push an Xwing to the screen. A few more un-comments later and we have a moving star field and planet as well.

For a finale he previewed PV3D v2 which is due out in "a few weeks, maybe". The performance has been increased by a mammoth 23% and the shader demos are amazing. In addition to plain texture mapping you can use Phong shading and bump mapping. And finally a quick thank you from John to everyone who helped out with the new Mac!

John Grden at FOTB07

Joshua Davis

Dynamic Abstraction
Next up was Joshua Davis, a long time favorite and a really nice guy. Josh is one of few in the Flash community that has managed to transition fully from a visual designer to an artist. He plays the media really well and is really good at getting exposure.

The session focused on his latest works for exhibitions and magazines. It's amazing what an amount of cursing you can get away with given enough passion. Josh Davis is really in a league of his own. The talk was highly inspirational as always, but I do get a vague feeling of having seen some of his work already.

Brendan Dawes

If it aint broke - break it!
The next session started at eight in the evening, so after a solid three hour break, the attendees came refreshed and ready for the first of the "Inspired Sessions". We kind of took conference John Davey's suggestion and let us be inspired rather than typing notes, but it was a great session and I've already ordered one of the films that Brendan mentioned in his talk. Brendan also followed up on his talk last year and had a DJ scratching video live on stage as part of his presentation.

Brendan had some technical hiccups that were not resolved until the day after. If you're ever presenting at a conference, keep in mind that the WIFI will be jammed by all the attendees so if you have a cable connection, you should turn off you WIFI and use the cable instead (Mac's will always use the WIFI over cable).

After the session, there was an interactive Fireworks display done using Flash, just outside the Brighton Dome. A projector was set up so it perfectly matched the surface of an old, four pilar building. Audience members could walk past the pillars to trigger a rocket. People soon figured out that it was more fun to trigger 50 rockets rather than just one, so the framerate dropped as there was too much happening at the same time. This in turn sparked discussions on how to overcome this and how one could add more variation to the display.

Interactive Fireworks!