FotB '07 roundup

Posted on , November 18, 2007 @ 18:43 CET

So Flash on the Beach '07. It was last week and its taken me about this long to process everything. In a word, wow. In two, holy shit. Seriously.

Last year I didn't get to go due to too much work, which just plain sucked. All I heard from friends and colleagues who went was that I had missed out on something special so this year I was raring to go. Picked up the super duper early bird special, and booked some vacation time just in case. Luckily I didn't have to use it, but it would have been worth it.

I got to Brighton Saturday evening at the Pool Valley bus station, more of a bus stop really, a block away from the pier. I only knew the city from Google Maps and wasn't sure how far my hotel was and my EDGE settings weren't working on my phone. So I started walking in the general direction until I found a taxi that drove me 50 meters further up the street for 3 pounds. Turns out things were pretty close to each other.

My hotel's front entrance was locked, but there was an envelope with my name on it. Inside was a number to call, turns out this was the owner and she told me about another envelope behind the outside door with a key to my room. I was in room number X, that's right no room number for me. The door didn't even have a handle and felt kinda like a remodeled closet, but it was still a great place and only a 15 min walk away from the Dome where the conference was held. Sadly no WiFi, and my private bathroom was outside my room.

The weekend was spent checking out the city with Jensa, his wife and David from FlashMagazine.

Monday started off with a bang - Richard Galvan (the product manager for Flash player at Adobe) showing off some of the stuff announced at MAX. Next up for me was Seb Lee-Delisle who blew my mind (poof!) with particle effects (source code) and how simply he could add them to any movieclip by checking pixel colour values. Simple and brilliant. He also showed off his particle fireworks which were on display later for the pyrotechnics for the people, it being Guy Fawkes night after all. He had rectangular "targets" on the stage, placed on top of video coming in from the webcam. Whenever the colour values within these targets changed, fireworks were triggered. In other words, a user controlled firework system (at least that's how I think it worked).

Next was Chris Orwig, who showed off his photography and explained some design concepts and methods which opened up my eyes. After lunch, Keith Peters overcame some technical difficulties and spoke about developing games with tips and tricks. After all he is the man behind Gravity pods that has been responsible for several hours of time wasting fun. Next was John Grden's session on Papervision 3D and the new panel for Flash but sadly that had been booked for the Pavilion (the smallest of the venues), so instead I went to see Niqui Merret's session on accessibility which was really interesting since I knew zero about the accessibility options available in Flash. Its just one of those things that is never discussed here, and that's probably not a good thing - though not illegal, yet (I think).

Last up was Joshua Davis. Holy. Shit. I'd been following Josh's work since back in the praystation.com days and love his generative artwork. He showed off some of his stuff, and talked about how he went about creating his art by throwing stuff together and was hilarious, informative, inspirational - just plain awesome. And not in the American sense of the word, literally awesome. Mind blowing even. Poof.

Next was the fireworks display where I met Nicolas Cannasse, shook his hand and thanked him for all the time I've saved the past 2 years thanks to mtasc. So we leave for and my mind was just buzzing. Just seeing Seb and then Josh more than made up for the ticket price. Seriously, after hearing Seb I just wanted to go back to my hotel room and code - try out some of the stuff he talked about. And after Josh's session my fingertips were twitching and itching. Luckily I stayed because the inspirational session with Brendan Dawes was very cool. He showed off some cool ass shite and the man is just plain funny.

Next was the party, though the whole week was pretty much a party, at the Old Ship - the speakers hotel. Met up with the norwegian delegation which included the whole of Visual Funk, the boys from Netron, Expology and Øystein from FUGN. Also met John Dalziel who also writes for FlashMag and Marc Thiele from FlashForum.de. Very cool people. Its something else to be in a setting filled with Flash geeks - felt like home :)

The one thing that really strikes me about the Flash community in particular is how open everybody is. I never met a single person who wasn't friendly which was refreshing. The speakers I spoke with were all very, very humble and approachable. I guess following their blogs and the like throughout the years builds people up in your mind so when you meet them in person and they're so down to earth its really bizarre.

Case in point, we're sitting at a table at the Old Ship having a few beers and this guy comes up, sits down introduces himself as Jared and we start chatting about sessions we're gonna see and what not and he says he's speaking on Wednesday. Because he's Jared freaking Tarbell - in the flesh, sitting next to me. The man is a Flash god. Or I'm a groupie. Either way very fucking cool.

Anyways, Tuesday. First up web video tips with Robert Reinhardt. Picked up some great tips and a link to his bitrate calculator. Basically from my notes, inclue audio track (even if its blank) to avoid skipping frames, deinterlace video (if NTSC) before converting to FLV, demux MPEG too and use CBR for streaming video and VBR for progressive download.

Next up was the next holy shit session where Craig Swann showed off some great mash-ups of Flash with different hardware including a Casio DG-20 which has a MIDI interface (and is featured on Flight of the Conchords). Mind blowing again. For those of you taking score, that's 3 times in 2 days. At this point I felt like I needed to take 6 months off work and just go play with Flash.

Next was Aral Balkan's session on SWX which I'd seen before online but Aral's a great speaker so it was fun to sit in and watch the technical difficulties along with the intruding bunny - he did manage to pull it off. Aral's posts on the bunny made me go out and buy one a couple months back, but until SWX I never really delved into the Nabaztag API. I used to be a Perl monkey in a former life, but I'd rather just plug in to something that just works. SWX made that integration really easy, so while watching an episode of Journeyman with my roommate I managed to crank out a Flash app that allows you to control the ears and send messages to my Nabaztag bunny, and its built for the Wii since they're both sitting next to the TV in the living room. So a gaming console talks to a plastic bunny, all using Flash - but the simplicity of it all is the communication, which is done natively thanks to SWX. Ok, end commercial :) Seriosuly, its cool though. Play with it for a minute.

After lunch I wanted to see Carlos Ulloa speak about Papervision, but of course he was "sold out" though in the Corn Exchange (the middle venue). Instead I headed in to see GMUNK present some of the cool stuff he'd done in motion graphics. He was also one of the few presenters who was not on a Mac. It was like 95% Mac folk, with maybe 5% iPhones. Lots of Apple gear.

After that Tink spoke on Flashing Flex, and using Papervision with Flex components. Very cool stuff. Next up was another mind blowing session, Robert Hodgin showing off some of the stuff he'd made using Processsing. At one point when he was showing this one experiment the entire Dome went completely quiet. You could've heard a pin drop. The only sound, apart from the music of the piece, was that of jaws hitting floors. So now apart from just playing with Flash and particles I need to check out Processing. Thanks.

After dinner was Erik Natzke for another, you guessed it, mind blowing inspirational session. This is why it took so long to write this - after so many mental pops it takes a while for things to get back in order.

The party involved some gambling but the idiots at the casino were taking retina scans, DNA samples and background checks (or so it seemed) so it took about 10 minutes for a single person to go in, and there were a few hundred ready to go in. So after a 30 min wait it was a flashing of the bird and off to the Old Ship.

Wednesday started off with an interesting match up of either the Adobe Town Hall meeting or a session on Building Red5 applications. "You're either with us or against us?" After a long breakfast I checked out Andre Michelle's excellent session on his music making prototypes (I heart you ByteArray) followed by Branden Hall's insighful on the nooks and crannies of ActionScript 3. After a quick twitter-off between Peter Elst and Chris we both came away with a bunch of tips and tricks I didn't even know existed. Array.every(), filter() and loop labels? getObjectsUnderPoint? Wicked.

Next up was a mash-up session. 20 minutes Mario Klingemann (which was great because I missed his session), 20 SWX-filled minutes of Aral and 20 mins of more Brendan Dawes. Mario showed off some his art detection and creation app which was very cool. Yet again something very cool, who would've guessed. Brendan showed off and explained the process behind some of his latest projects.

After that it was time for the aforementioned Jared Tarbell to blow minds, which he did quite easily. I once again started suffering from itchy-finger-must-code-now syndrome because his stuff is simply incredible. Then the conference held its closing ceremonies, I managed to win the Friends of Ed Flex 2 book and the conference was over. We headed to Bill's for some dinner. Seeing as we'd been there pretty much every day for either lunch or dinner we got 3 bottles of wine for the table which was great.

After dinner there was there was bowling a bunch of people from dinner including Aral and Mario. Turns out Jensa kicks my ass at both pool and bowling. Oh, had it only been on a Wii...

Once my humiliation was complete we headed back to the Old Ship where we had a great chat with Richard Galvan about everything from Flash to Silverlight to soccer - poor guy had to fly back to San Francisco the next day. Also met Peter Elst along with the Belgian contingent and commented on the lack of "Peter Elst loves me" t-shirts. Also among the crowd was Dave Schroeder who puts on FlashBelt.

In the AM a small crowd of people started heading out of the bar towards the beach. Turns out Hoss Gifford was going to repeat his (now annual) dip in the English Channel. Last time he supposedly lost feeling in one of his toes, but that didn't stop him. This time however, he had a wingman. And his name is Chris. And the pics are here. Wow...

Anyways, after this great conference I came away with a few key points:

• I need to spend more time just playing with Flash. Just throwing stuff together, then breaking it and just have more fun with it. Something that I remember and love from the early days, but somehow got lost
• Processing. Must look at Processing.
• Like an instrument, just practice. Try to see things differently, from other angles. And I know I sound like a hippy

Aswell as some tips for next year:

1. Ryan Air sucks. You're not saving yourself any money
2. Stansted is really far away from Brighton. 5 hours by coach. Don't do it
3. Gatwick is the way to go!
4. Not all taxis take cards (i.e. Visa) and ATMs are hard to find
5. Taxis have speakers inside, if it sounds like the radio is talking to you - its the driver. Do not ignore
6. Seriously, Ryan Air sucks serious bollocks. Stay away

I got back last Friday and have been wrestling with nasty cold I picked up on the plane since. But it was worth it. I had a great fucking time.

Anyways, my pics are up on Flickr, everybody else's are here, and there is some video on Vimeo. FlashMag also has a more in-depth round up.

I believe tickets to this year's event were sold out a few weeks before - next year I see that happening months in advance. So the minute they go on sale I'll be picking up mine and so should you :)

Finally to John Davey, thank you. Be seeing you in Brighton in September '08.

- paulo

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