There is now video evidence of my brief appearance at Flash On The Beach earlier this year, currently residing on the front page of the FOTB site. I hate seeing myself on film, but fortunately the majority of the video consists of the artwork I showed (from my “Abandoned Art” Generative Art project), which is perhaps the only reason why, three months later, I can now safely watch this without cringing.
Well, when I say “speaking”, I mean I’ve got three minutes! Which should be just enough time to get on stage, get my laptop hooked up to the projector, make sure it’s got sound, introduce myself, apologise for having no time left and get off.
I’ve been selected to present one of the Flash On The BeachElevator Pitches, twenty micro-sessions showcasing “hot new talent”. On first hearing of the idea I thought it would be impossible to fit anything meaningful into so short a time – when I spoke at Flash Brighton earlier in the year it ran to more like three hours. But, as Seb reminded me, this is more of a teaser trailer rather than a full feature, so I’ve now got something in mind (something new and previously unseen) which I hope will do the trick. I don’t think there’ll be time for questions though.
To get an idea of what you might expect, see my recent postings over at zenbullets.com. And if you’re at the conference please come and see me. You will be allowed 3.5 seconds in which to applaud.
Currently Flex Developers are a rare commodity, hard to pin down for freelance work. This may be about to change, in Brighton anyway, after Flash Brighton’s Big Day Out event, where Adobe were generous enough to give out a free copy of Flex Builder 2 to everyone who attended.
The Flash Devs of Brighton have been really spoilt this month, with Flash On The Beach, The Big Day Out, and the rest of the Digital Festival. I’ve been to so many events over the last few weeks that my collection of freebie promotional geek t-shirts is now spilling out of the drawer.
Major respec’ to the Flash Brighton crew for the organisation behind the Big Day Out, it was a really good day. Two highlights – 1. Seb and Dom’s 15 minute masterclasses. 2. Andrew Shorten’s preview of Thermo (which is a long way away, but is already getting everyone excited).
I’ve been getting very into the work of Jared Tarbell after seeing him at FOTB week before last. There were no shortage of generative artists working in Flash at that conference, wowing us with animations, but Jared goes one better than most of his contemporaries by open-sourcing all of his stuff. His throwaway Flash experiments can become a launching platform for another coders exploration.
It would have been so easy to go for yet another generative artist for the pick of FOTB07 Day 3, but good though Jared Tarbell was, today the thing that blew me away was the first session to go so far over my head it made me feel like a junior again (which was a nice feeling).
Flash is absolutely crap at playing with sound. All you can do is shift the pan and the volume of imported sounds really. Unless you get in and start hacking around with the byte code that is, then you can actually start generating sound. This is what Andre Michelle has been doing recently. Once you have tricked Flash into generating sound, if you know what you’re doing, you can start playing with the wave and, next thing you know, you’ve got a synthesiser.
My Pick of FOTB07 Day 2 – Robert Hodgin. His message was simple: forget Flash, try processing (a great message for a Flash conference, cheers). Processing is an open source animation API built on Java, which, as Robert demonstrated, can produce stuff like this:
My clear highlight of Flash On The Beach 2007 Day One was seeing the work of Joshua Davies. His abstracts are incredible, but they get even more interesting when you delve into the process behind their creation.
In the past I’ve had a hard job convincing colleagues and contemporaries of the value of Flex 2 (and the recently beta’d Flex 3). Firstly, it is not immediately obvious who Flex is aimed at; the Web Developers or the Flash Developers, (the answer is neither. Or perhaps both), so no-one is sure if it is their department. Secondly, because it is so new it is difficult to point to something on the web to say “there, that’s what Flex can do”, and blow people away with a cool demo.
But now Adobe have provided a useful resource to solve the second problem. Their new Flex Showcase, launched on Wednesday, is a directory of some of the pioneering Flex apps out there, with new apps being added every day. It is also a rather slick Flex application in itself, so instantly gives you a feel for the product.
I am convinced that Flex, and it’s sister app AIR, will dominate eLearning within the next five years, just as Flash is king today. Which is why the Futuremedia dev team are very interested in this technology. Even if many of our clients (without Flash 9) will not be able to use a Flex built course yet, we are developing in-house tools using Flex2 in preparation.
There will doubtless be lots of Flex evangelism at this year’s Flash on The Beach conference, and Flash Brighton are organising a Flex event to follow, both of which we are looking forward to. But for now, if you want further information and opinion you can also read my recent review of the book Programming Flex 2, or to get a feel of the product in action, go explore the showcase.
Subscribe in a reader