Flash on the Beach, Sessions day 2 & 3

Day two and three at Flash on the beach. We can report with some confidence that the bar at the speakers hotel 'The Ship' was still doing pretty good business at 4.30am. The results of which has left the streets of Brighton full of slightly hungover Flashers all sporting tell-tale red lanyards.

Report by John Dalziel, David Vogeleer and Jens C. Brynildsen Day 1 coverage, can be found here.

The Flashmagazine crew spent part of the second day talking to people in the community, so expect interviews with Carlos Ulloa, John Grden, Keith Peters and others in the weeks to come.

Aral Balkan

Let's talk about SWX Baby!
After a year of speaking at Flash conferences around the world Aral is finally back in his home town of Brighton. For most of this year he's been promoting his SWX data interchange format and today's session covered much of the same ground. Despite being beset with network problems and a scene-stealing bunny he managed to demo the SWX working with Flickr and on FlashLite. If you haven't looked at it yet you can find out more at swxformat.org.

Mario Klingemann

2D or not 2D that is the question
Mario has spoken at conferences all year, but for Flash on The Beach, he had a brand new talk. He started out presenting a slide listing the various bitmap filters and asked the crowd which ones they found useful. He dragged the useful to the left and the less useful to the right. He really surprised the crowd by telling he'd talk about the ones listed as "less useful" and why some of them actually are really good.

Having worked on the Aviary project, Mario explained the code he did for the Magic Wand tool. By using filters alone, he came up with a really smart edge detection and highlighing, but this was only a teaser of what to come.

Taking these ideas further, Mario had come up with a Multi-Toutch class that he could use for controlling graphics on screen. He did not bring a Multi-Touch table, but he instead dressed in black and bought a pair of $5 white gloves that he painted black except for on the finger tips. This produced 5 recognizable shapes that he could track using a standard webcam. The lights dimmed and to the song "We'll meet again" he then performed (or danced) so that ten colored blobs following his fingers on the big screen. Probably one of the best moments during the whole conference!

Marcos Wescamp

Visualizing Time
Although the theme for Marcos' session was visualizing time he actually showed quite a few spatial and relational pieces as well. Starting off with some early temporal experiments he went on to give one of the the con's more memorable demonstrations by illustrating the importance of scale using Craig Swann and a toilet roll. You really had to be there for that one.

The most impressive temporal piece was an interactive timeline for ad agency Wieden & Kennedy. Intended to promote the 25 year history of the company, the piece allowed the user to view any of the projects the company had ever worked on. Other pieces included a very tactile geo-location interface for etsy.com and some recent Tree of Life visualisations he has been working on at his new job at Adobe XD. Marcos rounded out his session with a short discussion on 'edge bundling' and a sneek peek at NewsMap2.

Andre Michelle

Klangfabrik
The first session I went to on wednesday, due in no small part to the previous nights activities, was the 11 o'clock session about audio in Flash given by Andre Michelle.

He started off by telling a little about himself, and mentioning his website. He then went on to show some of his early 3d stuff in Flash, before paper vision. And then he went into the core of the presentation, audio.

The first part talked about the nature of sound including:

• Air - compression / decompression


• Amplitude - volume


• Frequency - pitch


• Speakers - ears


• Listen

Moving onto digital sound, taking analog sound and basically converting it into numbers, he showed a couple of the classes used in Flash that assist in working with sound:

• flash.media.Sound


• flash.media.SoundChannel


• flash.utils.ByteArray


• flash.display.Loader

Then Andre talked about creating samples and playing different ones over and over to create and endless audio stream. And he mentioned you could get a lot of the code he was working with on google code.

Next up was some crazy math that I didn’t understand, followed by the explanation, which almost made me understand it. Then he built an example from scratch showing that in about 20 lines of code, he could create a perfect sound wave sound without working with a single audio file.

He continued with example after example of different synthesizers, each more complex and powerful than the previous. One for the MOD format, then another for the MIDI format.

He finished off with a huge example that produced a lot of techno music with huge bass. The whole room was shaking. It was really cool to see what could be done with audio without working with a single sound file.

Carlo Blatz

FDT
Not many get to go to conferences and present their own tool (unless we're talking about stuff such as Demo.com where you pay for exposure). Carlo is the CEO of german PowerFlasher and an entertaining speaker. FDT was developed as an internal tool initially, but freelancers and others that saw it, convinced the company behind to make it available outside the company. FDT is based on JDT and it seriously enhances the Flash workflow if you are an Actionscript developer.

This was a kind of confusing and jumping talk initially. Carlo showed off the FDT IDE but he also showed small things such as how to adjust the default memory settings for Eclipse. I'm pretty sure that this is important, but it's also not a feature of FDT. Maybe something to leave for the ReadMe-file? Anyway, Carlo took many things for granted, but he still got the message across.

Carlo started his presentation by excusing his poor english. It really isn't too bad, but he had several fun quotes. The mouse on his machine did not work fully on the surface and he asked the audience "Is anybody wearing a mouse-pad here?". That sure caused a few good laughs. Carlo is really fun guy, so his language problems was really just charming. He is definitely the only speaker that asked his crowd if there were anyone looking for a job. He then picked up

Carlo also made his talk a little more interactive by asking the crowd to yell "Groovy" if they saw something they liked. The crowd asked him back what to say if something was not so good. We settled for "Scheisse". There were a lot of "grooving" from the crowd and the only one that ever said Scheisse was actually Carlo himself when he had a problem locating a preference.

One cannot really tell how FDT works in a snap, but we have written about it earlier. The more we see of it, the more we think this IDE is brilliant for Flash coders that work in actionscript only. One thing is absolutely clear - FDT is for professional coders, not the casual hacker. Some keywords could be ANT, unit testing, IVY and extensibility. It really lends itself to bigger projects with many developers working on code in a repository. There are so many small features that make the tool really powerful. Let's say you are making a class that inherits from an interface. FDT has an "Implement all unimplemented members" command that will add all the missing methods and vice versa, "Make interface from class". FDT also has a sweet TODO-list that grabs any TODO items in your source and presents it in a separate panel. "Goovy!"

Jared Tarbell

Algorithms to Fill Space
The final session on the last day of the convention was Jared Tarbell. Jared's work, like that of Joshua Davis and Eric Natzke on Monday and Tuesday, has been an inspiration to the whole community. This unusual idea of breaking for dinner then having the attendees return for a beer and an inspirational session was total genius. Every one of those sessions was mind blowing, and got the whole audience talking.

After a huge round of applause Jared began by thanking the Brits for Alan Turing and the The Beatles. Although he is most famous for his generative artwork, for the last few years Jared has been putting his time and energies into a new company. etsy.com is an online retail site that only sells hand-made goods. He very quickly showed some of the beautiful interface work for the etsy.com site before launching into a masterclass on computational art.

Starting with simple particles then moving onto more thematic pieces he showed how each one was produced; clearly explaining the processes at work and the equations he used. Some of the most astounding results were possible from the simplest of systems. A great talk and the perfect way to round out another great conference.



After this, John Davey said goodbye and people started their trip home. Some of us stayed behind for yet another day, another party, bowling and some proper Flashing on the Beach as well...

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.

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