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FlashForward NYC 2002

Well, after a 4-hour flight that was suppose to take 58 minutes I finally made it to NYC. A long shuttle ride later, I made it to the New Yorker Hotel, checked in, grabbed some food and passed out.

Day One:

The first day was great, Friends of Ed and New Riders were handing out free books and New Riders had some semi-done copies of Branden Hall, and Samuel Wan's new book Object Oriented Programming with ActionScript as well as Joshua Davis new book Interactive Sketchbook (coming out in August) for viewing.

Then 9 o'clock hit and it was time for the first workshop. They are running two workshop forums, one includes Branden Hall speaking on building applications in Flash MX and Danny Mavromatis and Mike Davidson talking about video in Flash MX (this is the forum that I'm attending). And the other forum focuses on Flash MX Fundamentals and I heard that forum was very good as well.

The first half of the day was Branden's sessions, and they were very enlightening to say the least. He covered everything you could think of when building applications from components to remoting including taking apart his book catalog application step by step in his final session. He also mentioned a two day class his company Fig Leaf will be offering on how to build robust applications and one of the sample applications will be the book catalog.

After some lunch, the second half started, and I decided to go to the sessions covering video in Flash MX which was presented by Mavromatis and Mike Davidson from ESPN.

The first part covered different types of formats and the pro's and con's of each of those including Flash MX. They showed a couple of real time examples they have developed for ESPN then did a brief Q&A (Which actually started the second section).

After the first Q&A, it was time for the video format showdown, showing the quality differences, the differences in file size and the issue of on the fly scaling of the video file itself in either RealPlayer, Quicktime, Windows Media or Flash MX .swf file. Flash MX contended very well if not as well as the major video players on the market. They also showed a nice video app displaying a lot of Sienfeld clips. And they ended the second section with another Q&A section.

The third session, they broke apart the major aspects of their video interface for Flash MX and showed you how it worked. They also showcased a really cool app that made it seem like you could pivot the camera's angle by using multiple video clips taken at different angles and a scroll bar.

Day 2

Day 2 started out with the keynote given by Kevin Lynch, he began talking about how the MX strategy is what everyone had been waiting for and moved on to show some of the advances in Flash usages as well as some books on usability. And he showed a pretty cool implementation of video in Flash MX on Mike's hard lemonade site.

Then, Mike Chambers joined Kevin on stage to build an app with ColdFusion right there in front of everyone. He used a new component that I haven't seen yet that called the DataGrid component. (It should be available soon on Macromedia's website)

After that, Kevin showed a great video of Doug Engelbart, a pioneer in computer innovation, doing a video conference in real time on his computer.

After that, Kevin opened up Macromedia's newly developed version of their own video conferencing application using their new Flash Communication Server. And who should he call? Doug Engelbart appeared in the screen right next to Kevin and the croud went nuts.

They both talked a while about technology and why Doug did what he did in 1968.

After Doug said goodbye, Kevin invited Chris Hock onto the stage to help build another app for the audience. This one connected 3 computers with video and audio specifically for the Q&A session.

Absolutely the highlight so far of the conference was the keynote, but lets see what the Flash Film Festival turns up this evening.

Flash Film Festival

After everyone had had an hour to drink as much beer as they could, it was time for the festival to begin. People packed in to the main conference room like sardines, their were baloons everywhere.

All the trailers for the finalists were incredible, and the peoples choice award went to www.gmaxskateboarding.com who also took the games category.

Then a little dinner, and off to spa's this killer club in New York for the Flash Forward party.

Day 3

Started a little late for me, I didn't get started until about 10:30 or so.

I did manage to catch Erik Natzke's presentation, and I'm glad I did, he spoke a little about his background (including when he was pre-med) and how he began to get into flash like most of us with just basic animation and design. His coding style was very unique in that he didnt really plan out allot of his experiments, they just sort of happened.

Then lunch (which I skipped to do some other work I need to catch up on) and then Phillip Torrone began his presentation which was really cool, he had allot of gadgets with him, and he talked about some more he couldnt bring including his shock vest, and shoes with and led on them that displayes a message. He spoke mostly on the Flash Player being used in devices such as the ipaq and nokia 9200, but also on other platforms including wearable technologies.

After that, I was going to go to Fred Sharples Flash on Play Station 2 presentation, but I liked Phillip's so much I went to his Q&A session where he gave away some cool stuff like his book Flash Enabled and a watch that was also a cell phone, but I wasn't up on my Star Trek trivia, so I didn't win the watch.

Sadly I had to leave the conference early to catch an early flight (which was delayed almost 3 hours, so I left early for nothing), but I heard the conference ended great, and all the feedback I've seen makes me believe that this was the best Flash Forward Conference yet.

And this being my first one, I can't wait until the next one.

Written by David Vogeleer (July 15th 2002)