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WebDU 2008 - Day 1

In a foggy Sydney, WebDU kicked off in classic fashion with brand new set of hilarious animations from Nectarine poking fun at the speakers, Adobe, Microsoft and the web community at large. After this, Mike Downey took stage to present the Adobe Keynote where he showed Flash CS4 publicly for the first time.

WebDU is a conference focusing on Austraila and countries in the APAC region. It's been running for six years and is hosted by Geoff Bowers and his company Deamon Internet. Running four paralell sessions, this is not just a small conference. There are tracks for Flash/Flex, RIA/AIR, Web and ColdFusion.The speakers are mostly Adobe and local speakers, but there's a few international ones as well such as Peter Hall and Rob Bateman.

Attendees walking towards the first sessions

The WebDU team always have something fun up their sleeves and this year it's a set of Trading Cards featuring the speakers. Attendees can get the cards from the speakers as well as exhibitors, so it provides a fun way to get in touch. Every card has a value and some rules applied to them, much in the same way as the Magic or Pokemon card games. The idea is to combine cards to get the highest possible value, so on Pert Hall's card it says "Stephanie Sullivan doubles Greg Rewis's value if she is placed next to him". Several attendees take this game very seriously so it's a fun way to get people networking.

Attendees swapping cards and calulating scores

After Geoff Bowers welcome, Adobes Mike Downey held the WebDU Keynote. Mike used an approach geared towards novices, and he started off by talking about Rich Internet Applications (RIAs). Adobe have been talking about RIAs for quite some time and this very basic approach kind of puzzled us. He went on to present the FineTune and EBay applications and then built a simple AIR video player using Flash CS3 to show off some of the core AIR features and advantages. This is all stuff that we've seen several times before, but using iTunes as an example of a RIA was a good idea. Many people use iTunes and using it as an example makes it easier to explain.

For a while I was a little worried that the whole keynote would be like this, but he then started showing the new Flash Player 10 features such as 3D and Pixel Bender. He then went on to do (what we think must be) the first public showing of the new Flash CS4 IDE. There's obviously change in store and animators will love the new animation features but probably feel puzzled by the new timeline. The new timeline is based on the one found in Adobe's After Effects and offers much more fine grained control, but also makes it much easier to move, stretch and adjust your animations.

Mike Downey showing Flash CS4 at WebDU (Click to enlarge) Click here to see more pictures of Flash CS4

After Mike came Adobe evangelist Greg Rewis that showed off the Inverse Kinetics feature in Flash CS4 authoring as well as Fireworks CS4 and Dreamweaver CS4. Dreamweaver is now integrated with the WebKit browser and it has got a Firebug-like functionality that let`s you inspect elements on the fly. Not only that, you can view and pause scripts doing dynamic changes to the code and also see these code changes in real time. Very sweet and a welcome addition to a tool that's been kind of stagnant for the last releases.

The rest of this first day was filled by mostly introductory level sessions - Introduction to Actionscript, skinning Flex and so on... My first non-beginner session was Nokia's Gary Chan. He did what I found to be a poor sales-pitch and he started off with the supposedly funny remark "if you have not heard about Nokia, you deserve to die". This kind of set the tone and there were many in the room commenting this attitude. His talk was mainly about the Nokia developer resources in general as well as distributing and selling your content through the official Nokia channels. Not much meat for Flash developers despite the fact that Nokia is the mobile manufacturer with the most extensive Flash Lite support for now. Strange.

Gary Chan, head of developer relationships and business development for Forum Nokia in Asia Pacific

Matt Voerman did a good presentation of the Adobe Media Player (AMP) and it`s features and possibilities for publishers. He went over the supporting services that Adobe offers such as the Adobe Media Server and the Adobe Media Rights Management Server. The talk could be seen as a sales-pitch or even product demo, but it's very interesting to see how Adobe is now aiming for the consumer nass market and not only developers and designers. Matt indicated that Adobe is looking into taking the basic P2P support in Flash Player 10 even further in future releases - maybe even up to the level of Bittorrent.

My last session of the day was named "The not-so-ancient art of Mobile Flash Video" with Dale Rankine. Dale is a natural speaker and required no script to keep the audience attention. He did make a splash by entering the room wearing a full karate outfit to fit with his session title. Dale knows his stuff and walked us through the possibilities and hurdles of Mobile Flash video and he also showed samples on his Nokia. He also wanted to show the Chumby device, the first Flash Lite 3.0 enabled device. Unfortunately he couldn`t get it to work with the wireless setup at the Darling Harbour convention centre.

Dale Rankine presenting the not-so-ancient art of Mobile Flash video

After the sessions ended, attendees had time to go out for dinner and prepare for the evenings networking event, hosted at the Kingpin just next to the Conference Centre. Here the attendees played bowling, pool and other games while talking, drinking and eating until late, late in the evening.