November 27th 2000 | Dominic Lamar

Upcoming conferences

FF2K London - Day 3

We're starting the report from Day 3, the day before, as this event made us sleep through the morning of the 3rd day...

29. November 2000, Jens Chr and Dom After having Macromedia offer us one of the greatest blasts at flashforward in NYC, expectations for the London Party were quite high. Directly located in the touristic centre at Leicester Square, the Club
" Home " provided a sophisticated atmosphere on 5 different floors, free booze and an interesting mixture of people from FF2K and the UK Developers Support Network. Perfect Conditions for another unforgettable event, but unfortunately the organizers totally forgot about the fact, that having a good
DJ plays a pretty important part in throwing a good party. A mixture of cheap pop, cheesy dance and other forms of sonic crap - what was happening on the dancefloor was a bit sad. All in all though, it was a cool party and most people attending had a great time.

3rd party tools
We really had a hard time getting up wednesday morning for the presentation of the new Flash 5 tools session. Luckily we had spent the days before the party talking to some of the presenters. They guys at FlashJester showed off their most current version of their main application Jugglor 1.1. This has become quite a neat tool for Standalone Flash projectors. Loads of features like transparent borders (like WinAmp skins), size, position, Icon, MIDI, password protection in addition to an overall speed increase. Juggler still supports all previous plugins for the tool.

Electric Rain showed off their Swift3D tool for doing 3D stuff in Flash. The Mac version got a very warm welcome, and right now, the guys at Electric Rain are working hard at version 2.0. Version 2.0 promisies huge speed increases and there is also a 3D Studio Max-plugin on the horizon...

At the next session, Swedish design team Paregos showed their new project, the Paregos Skyscraper.

After this, Phillip and Chris of Fallon showed us some pretty amazing stuff. First he showed the FlashBank project. A fully working banking application, made entirely in Flash with Generator. This is an extremly nice way of doing such Apps, as this could even make Online banking available to LINUX and Mac users, avoiding all the ordinary problems...

Phillip also showed off his extremely good looking Compaq iPac handheld linking up with his watch (!) for some instant stock quotes. The main idea was that using Generator, you can really target any web-based platform. Not only HTML and Flash, but even handhelds and watches!

After Phillip came Mano1 to the stage. mano showed much of his presentation from New York, on filesize optimisation when doing 3D in Flash. Did you know that using gradients compared to ordinary fills will make next to none difference in file size? Mano explained all the do's and don'ts in Flash and 3D.

Daljit Singh and Mickey Stretton from Digit was up next, showing all the work that went into the making of the highly acclaimed MTV2 site. Quite a few picked up some good tip on how to talk to the customer.

Last up was Joel Baumann from Tomato interactive. He had some really nifty demo's using a sound imput Xtra for Director to manipulate realtime graphics.

That was it for now. Flashforward ended with short speaches from Stewart and Lynda and a raffle with prices from Adobe, Macromedia and many more...