Day 1: FlashForum Konferenz 2007

The second day of the conference kicked off with a keynote by Martin Buchmann and Michael Mortl from Adobe Germany. We did not expect to see anything new in this keynote since Adobe usually saves up the really good stuff for the american MAX conference and this year is no exception. We did get a brief demo of the Flash Media Player, but that was it.

Day 0 coverage

Not even the FlashForward conference last week got any extra exposure from Adobe talking about new products, so the chance of a smaller conference getting to tell anything about Thermo or other upcoming tech is zero. Fortunately, the conference is full of interesting and inspiring sessions that can make up for this, but it would give them more exposure if Adobe didn't save it all for MAX.

Day 1 Sessions

My first session gave a good overview of how to connect to web services using Flex. Sven Claar showed how to use Ebay, Yahoo, Amazon and the Salesforce.com APIs. Using simple examples, I'm sure the audience felt that this would be a walk in the park. My own experiences are somewhat different as many SOAP services require headers that you will need to create yourself as text strings. This isn't difficult (given that the webservice is well documented), but it's something that could have been better in Flex 2. I have not had a look at this in the Flex 3 Beta, but I assume they've fixed it. The session highlighted some of these hurdles but also covered the amazing possibilities using webservices such as the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2). Using EC2, you can build sites that can handle massive computational loads (like video to FLV conversion) without requiring you to buy a massive server park yourself.

Next up was Andre Michelle, showing more about the Popforge library. After going through the basics of audio (frequencies, sample rates and more) he started showing all the different possibilities in Popforge. From simple oscillators to MOD-file parsing and different methods of synthesis. Once again an impressive demo, but somewhat the same as wowed the crowd at the great workshop yesterday. After a quick lunch, Aral Balkan was next with his "SWX World Tour Stage Show".

SWX

With the winged words "Ich bin ein gummi-hund", Aral kicked off his presentation to a nice applause and the questions What does SWX mean and why do we need it? I've wondered a bit about that myself, but this presentation really cleared it up for me. It's all about simplicity. Since SWX transfers data in a native, compressed format. SWX is kind of like JSON is for Javascript - it just transfers your data really efficiently between servers and clients in it's native format. You don't need to do any cryptic parsing of XML data returned from servers. All you get is the data. It's typed, so you don't need to convert strings to numbers as you need with XML.

Aral is a really entertaining speaker and he kept the crowd laughing while getting his message across - SWX just works. Before the presentation, he had put out "Moo cards" on every chair in the room. On each card was the four lines of code required to pull in the last 100 images from Flickr. To Aral, SWX is all about simplicity and he has put a lot of effort into making tools that will make it easy to test and debug while working with SWX. He also showed how you'd go about writing your own SWF PHP class, so that you could pull in whatever data you want. SWX is now available for Ruby on Rails as well. I'll certainly check out SWX as a new way to transfer data.

FDT

FDT is an alternative Actionscript editor for Flash coders that works as a plugin to Eclipse. I've read about it on several occasions and I was really keen to see what it offers. This session was presented by Nico Simmermann, the lead FDT developer at german PowerFlasher. FDT got started with the Open Source ASDT project, but it's now a commercial project. FDT really has track of your code and really uses the features of Eclipse. FDT also extends Eclipse, but retains more of the "feel" that Java developers will be used to. Adobe has changed Flex quite a bit (rearranged menus and such) and in some cases built their own solutions rather than using the native Eclipse features that developers may be used to. FDT can use several compilers and SDKs, like Flex builder can. The auto-complete in FDT is really clever and speeds up the development process.

If you change a class so this will break functionality in other classes using it, you'll get instant feedback making it easy to see where you'll need to update your project. FDT even inspects compiled SWCs making it easier to use external libraries so it can even alert you of changed libraries. If you're using libraries that change often, you'll be able to easily see if a new version of a library breaks your project. FDT also does optimization at compile-time, so if you have duplicate classes (i.e. in SWC libraries), FDT will optimize these unwanted classes away before compiling. Nico ran short on time, but ended off with showing a couple very sweet features such as a powerful code formatter that could be a huge timesaver if you have developers with varying coding style. Using this, you could quickly standardize a huge project after that famous meeting where developers would fight over how to "properly" format Actionscript code.

Wii

Joa Ebert works as a developer for Jooce, a "Web 2.0" startup working on a next-gen file sharing and collaboration system. On his spare time, he plays around with Flash and one of his experiments have gotten quite a deal of exposure. WiiFlash is a set of tools that enables you to use the great Wii Remote to navigate your Flash files. WiiFlash is developed by Joa and Thibault Imbert (ps: great reference site for bytearray stuff). The API is free, compact, fully documented and offers the full functionality of the Wii Remote. To get this going, Joa built a (nice looking!) server using .NET that handles the Bluetooth communication.

The API looks really simple to use. How easy? As an example, he showed four lines of code that will connect to the controller and start the rumble function. The Remote is capable of sending quite a lot of information, so to really use the data, you'll need to discard some of it using smoothing. He showed a series of samples such as a Papervision3D model of the Wii Remote rotating in realtime to reflect how he was holding it while he was walking around on stage. He also showed a 3D Pacman game, the Papervision3D car driving, a drum-kit where you used the Wii Remote as drumsticks. The precision of the custom server/Remote/Flash is just amazing. All aspects of the controller delivers motion in realtime, also the Nunchuk, so this can definitely be used for games and other projects where tactile feedback is important.

Joa also gave advice for others wanting to write their own public libraries like this. Keep it simple stupid (KISS) was his main advice. The more complex you do things, the less likely that other will use your library. Make good examples that others can learn from, stick to good coding practices and avoid temptations as to over-engineer using Patterns to show off your skills. Offer developer friendliness by adding Metadata tags and document Events. Joa ended his presentation by showing integration against another of his pet projects, Popforge.

My final session was a pure inspirational one - "Jagt Fantomas!" with Ulrich Leschak as speaker. On average, people in Europe now spend 8,36 hours of their day consuming media. The war for your eyeball is everywhere - everyone wants a piece of you. It's all about getting your attention. Ulrich laid out the principles for getting peoples attention and he was a great break from all the Flash related content. This turned out as the perfect end to a day filled with information. No code, just inspiration. He had an amazing set of images that kept the audience laughing while proving his point. Ulrich ended his presentation with a nice quote about attention from Howard Rheingold, "Pay attention to where you pay attention".

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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