something in the way

Now that Flash on the Beach is over for another year, I thought I would write a quick recap since there were a lot of interesting things revealed at this year’s event. As I sit writing this I am in the Adobe France office recovering from the flu which hit me half way through the conference. Below are some of the highlights from FOTB in no particular order.

People love bytes
On Sunday, I gave a full-day workshop on using the ByteArray class in Flash. Half-way through I started to lose my voice and got a sore throat. Luckily I had Thibault there to help me throughout the day. The workshop was a little rocky in the beginning because I think there were some who didn’t need to do a recap on things like binary and hexadecimal numbers. But this was necessary just so everyone understood the basics. The class quickly got very excited when we started to build some real world examples like creating an FTP client and parsing and displaying a Photoshop PSD file. I think most people left the workshop with a ton of enthusiasm about low-level programming in Flash. Based on the great feedback, I will also be doing a similar workshop at FITC Amsterdam and FITC Toronto.

AIR 2.0 native extensibility
Although I didn’t get a chance to see Mike’s session, I was happy that we finally were able to announce some of the great new features in AIR 2.0. The biggest addition is the ability to call native processes directly from your AIR application. Mike showed an example where he created a screenshot application by communicating with a native process. As part of that application he also showcased another new feature in AIR 2.0 which is the ability to launch the default application for a particular filetype on the user’s system. Another demo Mike showed was the new volume monitoring feature where you receive events when a new device is plugged into the system. In this case it was an HD Flip camera. Go on over and check out the slides to get all the details.

gOptimizations
One of the sessions I was most looking forward to was Grant Skinner’s talk on optimizing ActionScript 3 code and it did not disappoint. Grant is one of the few speakers who can talk about really complex topics in a way that is understandable to us mortals. The talk was filled with great tips on making your code run faster and it was all backed up by actual numbers. I could run through some of the tips here, but it will be much better for you to just check out his presentation slides for yourself.

Ralph leaves Papervision3D
Unfortunately we were en route to Paris while Ralph Hauwert was giving his session but I have heard nothing but great things about from people who were there. One big piece of news is that Ralph has decided to leave the Papervision3D team to pursue other things. Now this should not be taken as a sign that Papervision3D is going away or that it is having trouble. The PV3D team is still going strong and we should still expect to see PapervisionX hit the streets at some point. As for what Ralph is going to do next, we’ll all just have to wait and see.

Flash CS5 gets a real editor
During the keynote, Richard showed a couple of sneaks from the next version of Flash. This was great especially since MAX is less than two weeks away. One of things that I was really happy to see was the addition of full custom class introspection in the Actions panel. This will make it much more enjoyable to write code in Flash for smaller projects and creating demos. I told you all that feedback you gave would make a difference . In addition to that, Richard also showed the new integration with Flash Builder as well. When you create a new class in Flash, it asks you whether or now you want to edit it in Flash or Flash Builder. If you choose Flash Builder, a project is created for you with the current FLA included. Also if you are in Flash Builder, you can create a new Flash Professional project directly and easily jump back and forth between Flash and Flash Builder.

Joa is on another level
Without question, the session that everyone was talking about was Joa Ebert’s session. He talked about some amazing tools he is writing to optimize SWF files. He basically called out Adobe for having a subpar compiler, and after watching his talk, I couldn’t help but agree with him. A lot of what he talked about kind of went over my head but it was amazing to see some of the optimizations he was able to make. All of us at the conference from Adobe left with the feeling that we need to work more closely with Joa in the future to try and get our compiler more up to date. One thing he said kind of hit home for me. ActionScript developers shouldn’t have to worry about doing all of these little code optimization hacks in order to get more performant applications.

Already looking forward to next year!
Lee

The OFFF Festival, held last week in Lisbon, Portugal, has to be one of the most visually stimulating places I’ve ever been. Herds of bright-faced, young, handsome European artist boys and girls pack by the thousands into an old steel mill. In a cavernous, resonant concrete bunker, the echo of excited chatter never really stops. Instead, to be noticed, presenters have to create visual flash – visual demos here are everything. It almost seems like it shouldn’t work. I notice a few bloggers complained about sometimes-disorganized presentations, the difficulty in hearing (tough for me, and the presentations were in my native language), and the general mayhem. But somehow, it’s the experience of the thing, the fact that presenters have to singe their ideas on optic nerves, that brings it all together.

Lisbon itself is stunning, too – perhaps not the flashiest of European towns, but in its blend of layers of North African, Moorish, Catholic, Latin, it blends into something special that seems to transcend everything around you. It’s never a cliché.

Given all this optical richness and the assembled lenses of some of the best designers in the world, it’s no surprise that Flickr was just overloaded with spectacular images of faces, scenery, and creations from the conference. The conference catalog seems itself like it came from another age: Flickr is the real catalog now. (See the OFFF tag above. If you find some particular gems, please call out your favorite OFFF photographers in comments.)

Oh, yeah … uh … I also took some kinda lo-fi snapshots.(Nope, not a photographer.)

Let’s draw more: a new rallying cry?

But one of my favorite moments of the whole weekend was watching a who’s-who of digital designers pick up Sharpies and sign the back of OFFF chief curator Hector Ayuso’s laptop. This is great on a number of levels. For one, getting to deface Apple’s pure minimalist design is deeply satisfying. And there’s something terrific about overlaying a digital design object with that old standby of creation, the Sharpie marker. But mostly, it was seeing these folks draw. I hope onstage doodling could be mandatory for next year’s conference.

More photos, which as I look back at them do oddly seem to represent my own memory of what I was looking at, whether or not they’re interesting to anyone else.

Seriously, anyone who comes across especially fantastic photos or video, send them our way! I haven’t had time to dig through Vimeo and Flickr since returning, and already what I saw was, I thought, oddly beautiful even if you weren’t there. (I think some people are good enough photographers that they live in a more beautiful version of reality.)

Lastly, a montage that has been circulating on Vimeo (I know nothing about the person who created it, but it’s quite nice).

OFFF 2009 oeiras from Bart Kiggen on Vimeo.