September 29th 2008 | John Dalziel

Upcoming conferences

Flash On The Beach 2008 - Day 1

This years FOTB conference kicked off with a neat intro animation and a surprise from conference host John Davey - in April 2009, Flash On The Beach will go to Miami! The keynote by Richard Galvan was the first session of the event and the first time the final build of Flash CS4 was shown at a conference.

The night before the event, Dave from Pistach.io put on a gathering at Gourmet Kitchen Burgers (GKB), just next to the Komedia club. After that, the crowd spread out between the Iguana and The Horses and Waggon until the late hours (we know some speakers ended the eve eating pizza a the beach at 3am!). Despite the pre-party activities, the turnout for the mornings keynote was really good.

As usual, conference organizer John Davey kicked it off, but before introducing Richard Galvan, he revealed that FOTB will be expanding onto US soil. FOTB Miami will happen April 5th to 8th 2009. Springtime in Miami and autumn in Brighton!

The Keynote

Richard Galvan is the technical product manager for Flash at Adobe Systems. This title is fairly new as last year, he was Product Manager for the Flash Player. In other words, this guy really knows his stuff, but unfortunately there was not much new he could reveal. The keynote started off, like many other Adobe keynotes, with a look at current Flash Player adoption numbers. Flash Player 9 release 3 (the one that added h264 support) is now at 90% but more amazingly - Flash Player 10 (the beta) is already at 60% and it's not even released!

Richard gave a shout out to the crowd, thanking them for keeping creating innovative content that push the adoption of the Flash Player. It's the authors of constantly new content that prevents the chicken and egg problem that other plugins have. With Flash, the envelope is pushed all the time making this a non-issue.

Richard then ran through the Flash Player10 demos that we've been seeing the last 6 months and introduced Serge Jespers to do a demo of AIR. Serge showed a nice offline clothing store with good offline capabilities. He then had some Photoshop fun with Richard and showed off the most popular British AIR app from The Sun - featuring British beauty Keeley Hazell, one of the sexy page 3 girls.

The next bit was about AIR on mobile and the Open Screen initiative by Mike Gordon. Nothing much new there but an auto update feature devices sounded interesting. No detailed info though.

Richard then took stage again and showcased the new CS4 animation model, the motion editor and timeline features. He also showed the new "Search library" feature that makes it super-fast to navigate large and messy FLAs. Another thing I hadn't seen before was the possibility to select and edit multiple symbols at once in the Library. Super-neat for things like setting image compression quickly.

Day 1 sessions

This article will update throughout the day with more impressions and summaries from FOTB. Since David's stuck at The Martin Agency this year, we won't be able to cover it all, but you'll certainly get the headlights from the conference. One thing that have popped up a couple times already is sessions that are fully booked due to the solid attendance.

Dr Woohoo

Drew Trujillo has been doing Flash magic with colors for a long time and this year he's been able to take it even further thanks to some new tools from Adobe. Some time ago Drew made a sweet website that'll take any image, analyze it and return a set of colors that you can then open and reuse in Photoshop, Illustrator and other apps.

Drew has now taken this further using the ExtendScript toolkit, a little known supporting technology that ships with the CS3 and CS4 tools. This is essentially a scripting engine that can automate every aspect of the product suite. At FOTB last year, Drew showcased some of his experiments with this, allowing him to build custom SWF panels that could trigger the scripts. After this, he was approached by Adobe about how they could take this further.

The result of this was Adobe PatchPanel, a new technology that will allow you to script all the CS3/4 applications from Flex. All the things you can in ExtendScript toolkit, you can now do directly from Flex. The Panel will be available from labs.adobe.com within a couple months. Drew showed some code with imports like this:

com.adobe.Switchboard
com.adobe.CS3.Photoshop

He could then trigger the applications native methods:

Photoshop.alert("Hello World");

Drew showed examples of Panels that could generate images from scratch, filing in pixels, adding layers, setting effects from a SWF panels that used the native CS4 windows chrome. There are some limitations, but all in all this is very powerful stuff.

Drew also showed examples of using Flex to automate animation creation in Photoshop by scripting the Photoshop timeline to draw graphics based on audio input. Really sweet stuff!

Dr. Woohoo filled the Corn Exchange easily

Carlos Ulloa

The best way to predict the future is to invent it

Carlos will be familiar to most of the community as the founder of the Papervision3D engine. What he revealed today is that he is will soon be opening a new studio. Going by the name HelloEnjoy this was to be the subject of his session.

The name of his talk "The best way to predict the future is to invent it" is a 1971 quote from computer pioneer Alan Kay. For the last six months he has been researching and prototyping the company's new website, which is to be an update of his current site. Cars are again featuring heavily, this time with a full race track.

It's not often you get to see a website when it is still a work in progress so this was a fascinating insight into the research (buying stock 3D models), dead ends (great looking but slow high poly models) and so on. Some of the insights he shared included how to create Environment maps using glitter balls, how car racing game physics work and working with cameras.

Branden Hall

Brilliant Ideas that I've Blatantly Stolen

Branden Hall has been innovating in Actionscript since the very early days. This talk was a stroll through some of the great ideas he admits to having blatantly stolen over the years. Full of interesting anecdotes he boiled some of the most interesting ideas down to memorable phrases such as "No language exists in a vacuum", "Take what you want and use it" and "Steal from target rich environments".

Despite being an early proponent of design patterns in Actionscript he was keen to point out "Design Patterns don't know everything". Amongst his favourite ideas were Value Objects and recursion, and by looking at other languages (Python and Cocoa) he was able to explain why he thought so and they can made most useful: "Value objects are just a damn good idea. Value objects that can save themselves are better!".

Branden has long espoused the benefits of loose-coupling using the Observer pattern. In the early days of Actionscript he even created a couple of event frameworks "named after bodily fluids": Ack and Flem. To communicate the idea he gave a brilliant example of how Event models work using Paris Hilton, listening idiots and gossip magazines.

The last big idea he looked at was Finite State Machines or FSM for short. He demonstrated FSM using a PastaMachine example so as to properly confuse anyone who thought FSM meant Flying Spaghetti Monster. Branden's talks are always informative and this one was no exception.

Andries Odendaal

Exploitable acts of playfulness

A mixup at Bills meant I was a little late getting to this talk which was a shame as what I saw was very impressive. Andries talk covered (amongst other things) his work as a character designer, including some work on the mascot for the Football World Cup in 2010. Although a lot of the examples he showed were built using Director, he finished up with some recent AS3 work involving infinitely scaled and tiled imagery. The presentation was less polished than usual and he was a little uncertain, but he showed some really great stuff.

Tink

Transitions as Design Elements

Tink gave a memorable talk here previously with his Papervision effects for Flex. This time round he was showing his latest work on Flex Transitions and Effects. Starting with his abstract ContainerEffect class he explained what each effect was doing, how it was achieved and how you can use it to. The new effect classes in the library include MovieClipEffect, BitmapDataEffect, TileEffect, Papervision3DEffect, ViewStackEffect and a Papervision3DViewStackEffect.

Erik Natzke

Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play

Ending your day with an inspirational session is one of those Flash on the beach institutions that makes the whole trip worthwhile. Back again this year was the phenomenal Erik Natzke. Picking up from where he left off last year he went on to show how he had taken his work with ribbons and colour and produced some massive print pieces and a mesmerising video piece for WIRED magazine's NextFest in Chicago.

Inspire session and party

James Paterson is an old favorite of ours and it was a blast to see his stuff again! We actually interviewed him with Joshua Davis back at the FlashForward Conference in London back in 2000. We got to dig up those minidiscs as this was the conference he learned that Amit Pitaru lived just up his street. James went over his history, inspirations and works. Really mind-blowing stuff, all with his really distinct visual style. Unfortunately, he had to cut it shortat the end where he came to more recent stuff. I really hope to catch the rest of this or that he get's it out on his PressTube site.

The evening closed off with an official party at Audio, a seaside bar/disco. Initially it was really crowded but the music was so loud that many complained about not being able to talk. This caused the disco at the ground floor to be empty for most of the party, while the small terrace with no music was over-crowded. After some hours, there was actually 3 parties going on. The one at Audio, one at the speakers hotel (My Hotel) and one at the Old Ship Hotel as in former years. Later in the eve, everybody ended up at The Old Ship since they have a bar that only closes when there's no customers. Good times!

About John Dalziel

John Dalziel is a founding member of FlashMagazine and regularly reports from community events in the UK. He has also written for Macromedia, New Riders, Actionscript.com and Ultrashock.com.

Next article:
FOTB 2008 Conference reports

Previous article:
Heads up - there is a different conference in town