Conferences
Sorry for the two month hiatus on posting. I was on a sabbatical and vacation from work for the last 6 weeks of 2009, and have spent the first couple of weeks of 2010 busy working on code, and preparing some events for the spring (more on that in another post).
Some of the stuff I have continued to spend a lot of time working on, has been building iPhone content using the Flash CS5 private beta.
We have just posted information about FlashCamp San Francisco, a free developer event that we will be holding in the Adobe San Francisco Office on Friday night, May 29th. This will be similar to the ApolloCamp event that we held for the Apollo Beta launch a couple of years ago, although this event will be focused on the next generation of Flex, including Flex 4, Flash Catalyst, and Flex Builder 4.
Just a quick fyi, but the MAX 2007 early bird registration ends on Friday. If you have been thinking about attending, now is the time to do so, in order to get the best rate.
I haven’t had a chance to blog to much (i.e. any) about MAX this year (because of the bus tour), but I think this is going to (hands down) the best MAX ever. Ted Patrick has been put in charge of the conference, and I have been really impressed with the change in focus on the conference.
Well, Max is over and it was a blast as usual. I didn’t get to blog as much as I wanted, although I did blog the keynote live.
The highlight of the conference for me was the sneaks session, which I organized and MC’ed. I was blown away by some of the stuff we showed (Captivate made my jaw drop!). I was also blown away by about 800 saxophone whistles that we passed out (note to self, high-pitched noise makers, and 800 excited designer / developers are not a good mix).
Note : Here are my raw notes from the keynote. They have not been edited or spell checked. I wanted to get them online as soon as possible. I will update them in the next hours and polish them a little better.
Max 2004 Keynote
Updated : We have posted a summary of the general session with pictures on the DevNet Center. You can view it here.
Unfortunately, wireless is not working in the conference hall so i wasn’t able to blog it live.
I am sitting in the LA airport waiting to get on my flight to New Orleans so I thought I would make a quick post.
I am posting this from my phone so I am going to keep it short. I am not doing any sessions this year as I really want to have a chance to hang out with everyone. However, I am in charge of the sneaks session on Wednesday.
I have been in Paris all week for the Macromedia France MAX conference. The conference was great and I got to meet a ton of super talented Flash designers and developers. I sent a couple of pictures from my SideKick over to the vision site.
I will be speaking at the Belgium User group meeting tomorrow (Saturday night) in Mechelem (just north of Brussels). Aral Balkan will also be speaking, so it should be a pretty good meeting.
I am in Dusseldorf now for the FlashForum Konferenze 2004. I am really impressed by the conference, and all of the cool stuff I have seen thus far (both in the conference, and from talking to developers).
Anyways, I gave a talk this morning on Architecting Flash Applications, and promised that I would post the links to some of the resources and URLs mentioned during my session. So, here they are:
Sean Corfield is organizing an MXDU blogger’s dinner for Wednesday evening. I just found out about it and will definitely be there.
We are meeting Wednesday night at 7:15 in the hotel lobby. We will leave at 7:30 for the restaurant.
So, are there any other Flash blogger’s planning to attend? if so, let me know.
Well, after some weekend help from Val Liberty at Macromedia (thanks for saving me again!), I finally got my dial up access working. Woohoo!. So, I will have email access throughout the week.
I got a chance to see some of the area yesterday, taking a jog around Darling harbor. Unfortunately, I ended up crashing pretty early last night, as the jet lag was finally catching up with me.
Today I am working on my session for tomorrow, and for a short stint in the keynote.
Well, after a 14 hour flight, I have finally made it to Sydney. I am currently hanging out at the hotel with Sean Corfield, waiting to be able to check into my room (it is 9am here, can’t check in until at least 12).
I am really excited about the mxdu conference this week. I have always been impressed by the strength of the Australian developer community, and it will be cool to finally get to meet a lot of them in person.
I am going to be heading down to Sydney in a couple of weeks for the MXDU conference. It is shaping up to be an awesome conference with some of the top developers in the world.
I will be doing a session and a birds of a feather on Central, maybe helping out with one of the keynotes, and most importantly, hanging around with other developers.
Anyways, if you are going to be in the southern hemisphere in a couple of weeks, you can’t afford to miss the conference.
Kevin Hoyt has a great summary of Kevin Lynch’s and Josh Ulm Central session titled “Best Practices for Central Application Interface Design”.
You can read the entire overview here.
The Central Team is hosting a developer get together tonight at the Marriott hotel (across from the conference center). There will be pizza, beer, video games (ps2 and xbox), Internet, programming, chatting and general hanging out. Members of the Central team will be there, as well as members of the Flash engineering team, and some of the engineers from AOL.
The session is Wednesday night (tonight) from 7:30 pm to 1am in the Deer Valley room of the Marriott (across from the conference center).
Juts a quick FYI, my session title at MAX has changed to:
Developing with the AOL Presence API in Macromedia Central
And now, Ray Ryan, the AOL engineer who is building the SDK, is also presenting, showing a bunch of demos and codes / examples.
Here are the remaining Session Times:
Thursday, 4:00 pm – 5:00 pm Friday, 11:30 am – 12:30 pm Btw, we will be giving out copies of the Central Developer Reference Poster at all of the Central sessions, so stop by if you would like one.
I am finally in Salt Lake city for the Max conference. Unfortunately, I have a ton of work to do, so I have been holed up in my room all night.
Danny Dura and Christian Cantrell are also hanging around and we are working on some pretty cool stuff. More info soon.
I’ll be posting pictures on the Vision website that Christian made (hmm… that sure would make a good Central app… ;) ).
I have uploaded some pictures from the Max 2003 conference in Salt Lake City to the vision site.
You can view them here.
Christian Cantrell has set up a site dedicated to aggregating all of the posts about the Macromedia MAX conference. There is already a ton of content, and it looks like this will be the place to keep up with everything going on the at the conference.
You can view the site at:
http://www.maxbloggers.com/
We have released a new Central application for the MAX conference. The app includes resources about the conference, including session information and descriptions, an interactive map of the venue, news and award info. You can also set it up to notify you when your sessions are about to begin.
Here is a screen shot of the application:
You can install the application from here.
We will be giving out the cool Macromedia rune buttons at the MAX conference. We will have buttons for almost all of our product runes.
I know that buttons seem like a pretty small thing to point out in a countdown to the conference. Does it mean that there is not much going on? Nope. Maybe it means that there is a ton of stuff going on that I just can’t post about yet… ;)
We will be giving out some Central posters at the MAX conference. The posters are developer reference guides, and really look nice.
You can see a (small) sneak peak here:
You can download a PDF of the poster here .
We won’t have tubes for them, so if you are interested, make sure to bring one for the poster (or pick one up in Salt Lake City).
One of the things that I am setting up for Macromedia MAX Conference next week is something that we are calling the “Central Developer’s Playground”. This is a chance for developers to get together, hang around, play video games (XBOX and PS2), listen to music, eat pizza, drink beer / coke, work on Central applications, ask questions and meet the Central team.
It will be pretty informal, so even if you are not planning on doing Central development anytime soon, you should still stop by to hang around and chat.
Intel is giving away a Centrino powered table PC at the the Macromedia Max conference. The contest requires that developers answer questions about the Central related sessions at MAX (i.e. you will need to attend the Central sessions to get the answer to the questions).
You can sign up for the contest at the Intel booth at the conference. Here is the info from Intel:
Visit the Intel booth at the Macromedia MAX event and enter a contest to win a tablet PC featuring Intel Centrino(tm) mobile technology.
The Macromedia Max conference starts in a little over a week. We are planning a ton of stuff around Central, so I decided to do a week of “Countdown to Max posts”. Everyday, I will post information about something related to Central at the Max conference.
The first item is of course all of the Central Related sessions:
Macromedia Central: A New Frontier for Internet Applications (Lea Hickman) Multi-User and Messaging Applications in Central (Mike Chambers and a special guest) Creating your First Macromedia Central Application (Phillip Kerman) Deconstructing a Macromedia Central Application (Danny Dura) Central Application Architecture (Mike Williams and Ethan Malasky) Best Practices for Central App Interface Design (Kevin Lynch / Josh Ulm) Of course, there are a ton of other sessions on Flash, Client / server development and Halo that also apply to creating Central applications.
We have recently updated some of the sessions about Macromedia Central for the Macromedia MAX Conference. Here is a list of all of the Central related sessions:
Deconstructing a Central Application (Daniel Dura) Macromedia Central: A New Frontier for Internet Applications (Macromedia) Creating your first Macromedia Central Application (Phillip Kerman) Macromedia Central Application Architecture (Mike Williams / Ehtan Malasky) Best Practices for Central Application Interface Design (Kevin Lynch) Multi-User and Messaging Applications in Macromedia Central (Mike Chambers (and a special guest?
Well, FlashForward 2003 NYC is over, and as usual it was a great conference. I had a blast hanging out with and getting to know everyone. It was particularly cool to get to hang out with Josh and Daniel Dura, and Greg Burch, all of whom I chat with daily (and who were killing me at Mario Kart).
My session on Friday went well. I talked about architecting applications in Flash.
Well, I have finally been able to catch my breath from the keynote (and from the lack of sleep over the past couple of days). Normally, I would give a blow by blow account of the Keynote, but after checking MXNA, I noticed that there are quite a few people blogging the keynote live, including:
Josh Dura Greg Burch RewindLife Oscar Trelles Christian Cantrell The best way to keep up with everything is to check out the Flash section of MXNA.
FlashForward is in full swing, and even though I have had to spend time working on some projects, things have been a blast as usual. Last night I hung out at a reception for speakers and film festival judges, and got to chat with a bunch of people (Branden Hall, Sam Wan, Grant Skinner, Claus Wahlers, Greg Burch, Josh Dura, Danny Dura, etc…).
I haven’t had a chance to spend much time in any sessions today (although I did peak into Robert Reinhardt’s session on Flash Communication server).
I just arrived in NYC for FlashForward 2003. I am really looking forwarding to hanging around with everyone, and have already run into Greg Burch and Branden Hall.
I will be doing a small section during the keynote and then have an entire session where I am going to de-construct the Google Search Application.
As in the past, I am going to try and blog the conference, so check back here for update (I will post all of the entries in the Conferences category).
Raymond Camden was the first to notice that the Macromedia MAX conference website has been updated with the list of sessions and their descriptions.
You can view the complete list here.
You can find more information about the Macromedia MAX conference here.
[via MXNA via Raymond Camden]
Shawn Pucknell has started a thread at Flash in TO with a list of presentations and notes from the Flash In The Can conference which have been posted online.
Notes posted thus far include those from Robert Penner, Colin Moock, Grant Skinner, Josh David and Kevin Towes.
You can view the post here.
[via FlashCoders]
Dave Yang has posted a ton of photos from the Flash in the Can conference.
Of particular interest are two photos from Josh Davis’s presentation outline some useful tips for doing some cool stuff with Flash.
Ripping large amounts of shapes and colors for use in ActionScript
Capturing ActionScript Programs for Print
You can view all of the pictures here.
Btw, I had a great time at the conference this week.
FlashInTheCan has set up live streaming video from their conference. You can view it from the link on their main page.
If you are fast enough, you can catch Josh Davis’s session which is going on as I post this..
The FlashInTheCan festival in Toronto is well into day 1 and has gotten off to a great start.
Kevin Lynch kicked off the festival with the keynote this morning. He talked about the new Flash Communication Server 1.5, noting that there is now a free developer’s edition which does not time out. Colin Moock came up next and showed off some of the FireFly components from CyberSage. After that, I came up and talked about DevNet Pro subscriptions.
I just arrived in Toronto for the Flash in the Can conference this week. It is really shaping up to be an awesome conference, and I am looking forward to hanging out with everyone.
I will be helping out with the keynote, and then have a session on Flash Remoting.
In my session I plan to talk about using object oriented client server interfaces with Flash Remoting to create reusable client / server APIs.
I am sorry for the lack of updates recently. I have been traveling a lot for work, and busy wrapping up the next DevNet Resource Kit.
Anyways, I am going to be heading up to Toronto next week for FlashInTheCan. It is really looking likes it is going to be a great conference. If you are there, make sure to stop me and say hi.
I will be making some posts from the conference.
Christian Cantrell has posted his slides for his FlashForward presentation on Flash, Flash Remoting and ColdFusion MX integration (which some discussion of RSS thrown in).
You can view the slides here.
Bruce Epstein has posted some summaries of each day of last months FlashForward conference in San Francisco. Of particular interest was his summary of Tim O’Reilly’s session titled “Watching Alpha Geeks”.
Day 1 Coverage Day 2 Coverage Day 3 Coverage You can view additional coverage in my FlashForward section.
I have uploaded some pictures from last weeks FlashForward. They include a few new images of Macromedia Central, as well as a sneak of one of the apps included on DRK 3.
PriceGrabber Application Running within Macromedia Central
Outside the Herbst Theater
Inside the Herbst Theater
Inside the main hall of the Herbst Theater
Backstage during keynote
Backstage during keynote
Kevin Talking about the new Macromedia website
RSSIfy Sample Application included on DRK 3
It is the beginning of the third day at FlashForward. The FilmFestival last night was fun as usual. They limited the finalist to 4 this year, so it flowed much quicker.
I am giving a session on Flash Remoting this morning (discussing Object Oriented Client / Service Interfaces) and then a QA session. After that I plan to catch Phillip Torrone’s session, and then Erik Natzke’s
I’ll try and post updates through the day.
Well, every FlashForward, I always find new Flash stuff that I didn’t know about. This FlashForward, everyone seems to be watching Strong Bad. I’m not sure how to describe this, but it is hilarious!
You can check it out here.
I am currently sitting in on Phillip Torrone’s session on devices. Phillip’s sessions are always a treat, and he is not disappointing today. I think he has already shown about 15 devices.
I had my session and QA this morning and they went well. Before the session, I got to meet Sean Voisen, which was really cool. Last night I met and chatted with Josh Dura and Daniel Dura. We ended up talking about video games most of the time.
The FlashForward Film Festival is about to start. I am going to post the winners as they are announced, so keep hitting the refresh button.
Update : WOW!!!!! James Burchfield, audio poet just gave an amzing freestyle vocal human beat box sessions. Simply amazing!
Motion Graphics : elevation Application : GModeler (Grant Skinner) Educational : BrainPop 3D : Tokyo Plastic Story : Life of PI Art : The Beauty if Details Typography : WDDG Navigation : Perfect Fools Cartoon : KunstBar Commerce : Nike Basketball Original Sound : Defenders of the Universe Technical Merit : gskinner (Grant Skinner) Game : Battle for the Sudan Experimental : Repurcussion Video : Eagle F1 People Choice : MediaramaS Thats it for the show.
There was an error in my Logged In Article on the FlashForward keynote. I stated that the Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC did not have support for video. That is incorrect, it does have support for Flash 6 Video.
Sorry for the hassle…
Well, I missed almost the entire first day of FlashForward. I was busy getting ready for the keynote. However, I did get to hang around a little at the end of the day, and ended up running into a bunch of FlashEnabled authors (Phillip Torrone, Christian Cantrell, Glenn Thomas, Billy Perry and Fred Sharples).
Sean Voisen has been blogging a couple of sessions from the conference, including:
Wrapup on Deconstructing the Flash MX Video Player Part 1 Wrapup on Deconstructing the Flash MX Video Player Live from FlashForward Ill be helping out with the keynote in the morning.
Probably the biggest announcement from this morning’s keynote, was Macromedia Central. Macromedia Central is a desktop environment for running rich, occasionally-connected applications.
Kevin showed how simple it was to install Central through the Flash Player (completely seamless to the user), and then install and run applications within it. It took a total of about 5 seconds to install Central, install an application and then have that application running within Central.
During the keynote this morning, Kevin Lynch announced that a new version of the Macromedia Flash Communication Server is available. Version 1.5 adds a number of new features and bug fixes including:
HTTP Tunneling (to get around firewall issues) Support for Linux MP3 Support We have also released a free developers edition of the server which does not timeout.
Kevin then showed part of a 15 minute video which was streaming live from the Flash Communication Server and running full screen.
At the end of the FlashForward Keynote this morning, Kevin ran a video from one of the Macromedia engineers who is working on some new technology (code named Royale) that we are working on. He showed a Flash based input form with multiple sections. He then showed the code used to build it, which was written entirely in XML. Not only was the entire Flash application created from the XML file, but so was all of the databinding (SOAP Based), ActionScript and StyleSheets (yes, Cascading Style Sheets).
Just a quick reminder that Macromedia is running a developer’s lab during FlashForward. If you have any questions, suggestions or just want to meet some of the people from Macromedia and the Flash team, come down to the lab either today or tomorrow. It is located in the internet lab.
I will be there today from 4 to 5 pm. So if you get a chance, stop by and say hi.
I gave a sneak peak of DevNet Resource Kit Volume 3, which we are just wrapping up. It is really shaping up to be the strongest DRK yet, with:
Full ColdFusion Content 8 New Components including a new Flash UI Component Set ActionScript DataValidation Library A number of sample application with full source code. Dreamweaver content and extensions. I showed one of the sample applications included on DRK 3, RSSify. This application creates, edits and managers RSS / XML Feeds, and Macromedia actually uses it internally to publish our new DevNet RSS XML feed.
Well, today is the first day of FlashForward. I haven’t had a chance to get out to the conference yet (I am busy working on some surprises), but I have talked to a few people who are there, and I hear that it is packed, and that people are really excited.
I will be heading out there in a couple of hours, so if you see me, make sure to say hi.
I will be heading out to San Francisco next week for FlashForward. As usual, it is shaping up to be a great conference, and from what I hear it is already or just about sold out.
I can’t give any specifics (or hints), but the keynote should be very cool. Ill also be doing a session on Flash Remoting, and helping out in the Macromedia Developers Lab.
Of course, as I have in the past, I will also be blogging the conference as much as possible.
Geoff Bowers has posted a recap of Branden Hall’s presentation at the recent MXDU. Branden basically showed the history of Flash from Future Splash to Flash MX.
You can view the recap here.
Question of the day, would you be interested in seeing screen shots of every version of Flash?
Jesse Warden is blogging the MXDU conference.
You can read his posts here.
Thus far he has some posts on the day 1 keynote, and sessions by Scott Mebberson and Ian Chia.
The FlashForward Film Festival Finalists (How is that for alliteration?) have been announced. As usual, there are some really cool and cutting edge submissions.
You can view the finalists, as well as vote for the people’s choice award here.
You can find more information on FlashForward 2003 in San Francisco here.
The Day 1 and Day 2 Keynotes from Macromedia DevCon 2002 in Orlando, Florida are now online. You can view them here.
The video is done using Flash and the Flash Communication Server.
Apparently, this has been available for a little while, but I just noticed it.
[via FlaZoom]
The next FlashForward has been announced. It is March 26-28 in San Francisco. It looks like it is starting to shape up to be an exciting conference (as usual). I will be doing a session, and we (Macromedia) are also planning a couple of other surprises.
You can find more info on FlashForward here.
Sorry for the lack of posts and updates the past couple of days. I had planned to blog the first day of DevCon Japan, but I ended up getting a pretty bad case of food poisoning and was stuck in bed for the past two days…
Anyways, I am feeling better and have a couple of sessions today. I will try to get some reports up from the conference.
Just a quick update. I am sorry I haven’t been able to update much this week, but I have been swamped with some stuff here at Macromedia (details to follow shortly).
I am off to Tokyo tomorrow for DevCon Japan. I should have internet access and will try to do some reports from DevCon. However, it might take me a little longer to get back to you if you send me an email.
Well, it took me a couple of days longer than I expected to recover from DevCon, so here are my belated DevCon thoughts. My overall impression was that this was a very successful conference. Just having that many developers together (2300 - 2500 from different products) meant that I could not only find out what other people were talking about a were excited about, but it also gave me a chance to get a different viewpoint on some of our products and development issues.
Day 3 at DevCon has begun, and it looks like i will finally be able to check out some sessions. Thus far though, I have had a blast just meeting with everyone and talking to them about what they are excited about. Two themes that I have picked up on:
People are really excited about the Flash Communication Server. That in itself is not surprising, but was has surprised me is the number of ColdFusion developers i have spoken with who are really excited about it.
Sam Wan busts a move
mesh meet george
FYI : I am going to be broadcasting live from DevCon for the next 15 minutes or so. I will actually walk around with my laptop so you can see some of the layout.
You can view the broadcast here.
Update : I am no longer broadcasting. I might schedule a time tomorrow to do it again.
Today is the second day of DevCon. I have two sessions today so i have been swamped getting ready and haven’t had a chance to post much. Here are some links to DevCon posts from today:
John Dowdell (lot of info on conversations he is having with developers). Video Blog : Morning Update / First Session List of all video blogs from the conference Security and the Macromedia Flash Player Btw, I still haven’t posted the secret code word that you can use to get a copy of the DRK.
i enjoy soup
What is that all about? Info here.
I have 8 copies of the DRK ready for a new home.
Here are some links from my session on the Flash Player and Security:
External Data Not Accessible outside of a Flash movie’s Domain Macromedia Security Zone Macromedia Security Developer Center Macromedia Flash MX Security Whitepaper I’ll post some more info / updates after my session.
Video files no longer available.
Files from video:
before.as #include "NetServices.as" var result = new Object(); result.onResult = function(data) { trace(data); } result.onStatus = function(info) { trace(info.description); } var server = NetServices.createGatewayURL("http://127.0.0.1/flashservices/gateway"); var service = server.getService("com.domain.test", result); service.createName("homer", "simpson"); after.as #include "NetServices.as" #include "Foo.as" var f = new Foo(); f.setFirstName("Mike"); f.setLastName("Chambers"); f.onName = function(name) { trace(name); } f.createName(); Foo.as Foo = function() { if(_global.NetServices == undefined) { trace("NetServices.as is required and must be included before Foo.
DevCon got into full swing this morning. I will be blogging all of the sessions I attend, as well as doing some “Video Blogs”. Below is a list of entries from today:
Day 1 Keynote (Includes Video Blog). I also noticed that a couple of sites are blogging the conference, including waxpraxis (Branden Hall) and FlashVoodoo.
Just wanted to give a heads up that I will be blogging the keynote in real-time. My plan is to publish my notes live during the keynote, and then afterwords go back and clean them up. So if you couldn’t make DevCon, you can find out what we are talking about right away. If i have a chance, I’ll try to do a video blog (vlog?) of part of the keynote.
Well, I have been running around all day and haven’t had a chance to sit through any sessions. I have posted a couple of video weblogs.
You can view a list of video blogs here.
Waldo Smeets actually put together a Flash app that uses a web service (RSS feed, courtesy Tim Appnel) created by Jeremy Allaire to list all of the video blogs. You can view it here.
So whats up for tomorrow, DevCon Day 2?
Robb Burgess, Macromedia CEO. What is Macromedia really about? It is about enabling a better user experience. We have always focused on this. Initially with CD-Roms (Director), the first generation of the internet, and not the second generation which includes PCs and devices.
The internet has developed into a critical tool for business, so the user experience plays an even greater role in development.
During the book of the past couple of years, developers created a ton of content, some of it really impressive.
Problems? Questions? Comments? Put them in the comments section.
Update : The audio in the clip is hard to hear. That is because I did not speak loud enough. I will be redoing this one when i get a chance. sorry for my lack of on camera skills.
I have a small part in Monday’s keynote at DevCon, so I haven’t had a chance to meet up with many people yet. I have been able to talk to some other Macromedia people as well as see some of the stuff that we will be showing during the keynote.
I think the general feeling is that developers understand MX and its advantages. Now we are at the point where we get to start to see some of the first true MX applications.
Just a quick FYI. I am heading down to Orlando tonight for DevCon 2002. I plan on blogging the entire conference, similar to what I did for FlashForward. I have created a new section on the weblog specifically for DevCon which you can find here.
In addition to blogging sessions, we also plan to do some pretty cool things with the Flash Communication Server and the weblog. Stay tuned for more details.
We have created a Flash based Pocket PC event guide for Macromedia DevCon. This has probably been online for a while, but I just noticed it.
It is pretty nice, and really shows some of the power of Flash on devices.
You can find more info, as well as download the guide here.
Just a quick FYI, if you are considering attending DevCon in two weeks in Orlando, then you might want to make your reservations very soon. The conference has just about sold out (as of Monday, we only had about 100 spaces left).
You can find more info on this here.
I meant to post this the other day, but got caught up in the DesDev release (sorry for the delay).
We have put up demo versions of some of the Flash Applications used for the Macromedia DevCon 2002 registration.
DevCon 2002 Flash Registration Demo Personal Agenda Builder Demo Now you can check them out without registering first. They are pretty good example of some of the advantages of using Flash for this type of form based application.
Also, don’t forget that early bird registration for DevCon end son August 27th. If you register before then, you can save $155.
Registration for Macromedia DEVCON 2002 is now open. It is October 27 - 30 in Orlando Florida, and includes tons of sessions and other events. I will be there doing some sessions on advanced Flash Remoting and Security within Flash.
Notice that you can register using HTML, or a Flash Application. There is also a Flash based Agenda Builder that you can use to help you plan your agenda for the conference.
A couple of people have posted pictures from FlashForward:
Phillip Torrone Eric Dolecki Robert Hall Pete Barr-Watson BJ Mace If you post some pictures, let me know, and I will list them here.
I just got home from Flash Forward. I was pretty busy at this one and didn’t get to hang around with everyone as much i would have liked though. Branden Hall, Christian Cantrell and I all rode the train back from new York to DC. We had a contest to see who could make the coolest thing with the drawing API on the train ride back. Branden won (surprise). Actually, he won first, second and third place.
Here are all of the FlashForward slides that I have found posted online:
Flash Remoting with Flash MX and ColdFusion MX : Christian Cantrell Using Components : Sam Wan If you know of some more slides online, post them in the comments.
A couple of FlashForward items from around the web.
Flashmagazine has a report from FlashForward InfoWorld has an article on the Macromedia Keynote from FlashForward I expect we will see a lot more FlashForward info online, as more people get home from the conference.
Christian Cantrell has posted his slides from his FlashForward session titled Flash Remoting with Flash MX and ColdFusion MX. If you are interested in getting started with Flash Remoting with ColdFusion or ServerSide ActionScript, this is a great resource, complete with both ActionScript and server side code samples.
You can view the slides here.
You can view a growing list of online FlashForward slide here.
Josh Dura has posted the winner’s of the FlashForward Film Festival.
You can view them here.
[via jdb]
This was my session on Flash Remoting (sorry, i couldn’t blog it in real time). It was an advanced session, and i spent a lot of time talking about architeting Flash Remoting Applications.
I discussed Object Oriented Client / Server interfaces, which is a design patter where you encapsulte all of your client / server code within ActionScript objects. This makes the code more reusable, but also creates a simplified ActionScript API for the service.
I came in a little late.
orangedesign created the menus for lucasart’s starfighter games (2) for ps2. All of the menus were created within macromedia flash, and played back within a Flash player included with the game.
Have to conisder localization. They do the German version first since the german words tend to be the longest.
Memory considerations, only 32 megs of ram on ps2. compressed sizes of images doesn’t matter, it is the uncompressed size.
Last day of Flash Forward, and it looks like it will be as busy as the previous couple of days. I am going to go to the Flash Remoting QA for Christian Cantrell’s session, I then have my session titled Rich Application Development with Flash Remoting. After that I have my QA session (I am going to miss Eric Natzke’s session ; (). In the afternoon, i am going to phillip torrone’s sessions, Fred Sharples (Star Wars in Flash: Developing for the Playstation 2), (i am not sure what session I will go to at the end.
Christian Cantrell.
Christian started by covering some of his slides that he was not able to get to yesterday. He also showed some of his code for the Flash mp3 player that hooks up to his iPod, and finally he show a simple app that uses Flash Remoting to create a Flash console for OSX (allows him to run a pseudo console from a Flash app).
I just realized thay my session is at 10:15 and not 11:00, so I am going to have to cut these notes short.
Phillip started with an overview of the Pocket PC platform, and show some accessories for the Pocket PC (keyboards, cameras, storage, etc)…
Can you make money with Flash on the Pocket PC? Yes.
Microsoft Enterprise Platform : Phillip show a really nice application they did for Microsoft, that deomnstrated and gave information on their enterprise platform. They initially made it for the web, and then took the same assets, and a little tweaking and created it for the Pocket PC platform.
I noticed a couple of people taping the Macromedia Keynote on Thursday. Does anyone plan on posting video online? If so, let me know.
Day two of FlashForward has begun and I will be putting up notes whenever i get the chance. I have some meetings in the morning, so updates may be slow, but I have put up notes on the keynote (the best macromedia keynote i have ever seen).
Macromedia Keynote Dynamic Drawing with Flash MX : Robert Penner Flash Remoting with Flash MX and ColdFusion MX : Christian Cantrell
The keynote was awesome. To quote Lynda Weinman, “This was the best keynote ever”.
It started off with Kevin Lynch talking about the Macromedia MX launch, the most significant and aggressive launch in the history of Macromedia.
Kevin then spent some time discussing usability in Flash, pointing out some of the books that have been written on the topic (skip intro, flash 99% good), and some of the people who have been pushing usability in Flash, such as Chris MacGregor of Flazoom.
Everyone is waiting for the Flash Film Festival to start (drinking free beers). I was planning to blog the film festival winners during the session, but my battery is super low so i might not be able to.
Check back later for updates.
Christian Cantrell : qantrell@yahoo.com : note all code examples, and slides (very nice) will be included online.
Flash Remoting is a server-side technology which allows for the integration of Flash applications with existing application server logic.
Exposes remote services through a simple ActionScript API.
Uses AMF (Action Messaging Format) to communicate with player / server. Very efficient binary format made specifically for ActionScript.
Getting started : need
Flash MX Flash Remoting Components (avaliable from macromedia.
The slides for this presentation are online.
Robert started off by showing off some of the Flash drawing experiments that have been done by the flash community (all to the tune of “Christmas on acid”).
(btw, the room is packed).
Shape Drawing API
Every shape that you draw will be within a movie clip.
MovieClip.lineTo() : draws a line. initially it is invisble, so you need to use lineStyle to give it a color.
I was planning on putting up notes on this session, but Pete is showing so much cool stuff that i forgot to take notes.
Basically, he is building video (quicktime, tv, etc) using Flash. Realy cool stuff.
Components
Self encapsultated widgets at the core, they are just movie clips usually drag and drop (i.e scrollbar) Full API UI Component Set 2 From Macromedia. Avaliable from Flash Exchange.
Most components support handlers, which is the name of the function that you want to be called when an event happens. By default the function is on the same timeline as the components. You can set them via the API to use functions on any object.
Just a quick reminder that I will be updating my weblog live from Flash Forward. You can view the posts in the FlashForward section.
Remember that I am typing in the dark, and not spell / grammar checking, so there will be a lot of typos.
Branden Hall : Session 1 of 3 Branden Hall : Session 2 of 3 Branden Hall : Session 3 of 3 Video with Flash MX : A Users Guide : Session 1 of 3 Video with Flash MX : A users Guide : Session 2 of 3
EricD has posted some pictures from Flash Forward.
You can view them here.
Just saw this on were-here.com, created by sykes. This should come in handy this week.
Dropped by this session really quickly. Lots of questions about replacements for generator (Flash Remoting, Flash Communication server for runtime dynamic content, JGenerator for offline batched content).
The first day of Flash Forward involves a number of half day sessions / classes. I am sitting in Branden Hall’s first session of three. The first session is on Object Oriented Programming in Flash (something that Branden and Sam Wan just wrote a book on).
Branden is discussing some of the basics of Object oriented programming in Flash, including objects vs instances, and how to create custom classes.
Importance of encapsulation
Short QA session.
They are showing comparisons of the same video in different players (austin powers trailer):
Real Player 225k low badwidth. pretty good quality. (watch scene changes and transitions.) streaming. Windows Media Player : pretty good quality. streaming. Quicktime : good quality. alittle choppy, good encoding. Flash MX : Good quality. low badwidth. comparable to other formats. In higher end encoding, the differences between the players become more obvious, with dedicate video players having better quality.
Video in Flash MX.
Danny Mavromatis and Mike Davidson, ESPN.com
Danny and Mike work for ESPN.com which is a very popular site. They do have some power to force users to change browsers.
Video in Flash
Image Sequences
Most primitive version of video in flash is a sequence of images. They are showing some Seinfeld clips that use the technique. Basically, take a video clip, export it as a sequence of images, and then import them into flash (flash will recognize that it is a sequence of images).
Branden is going to dissect his bibliofile application.
The app helps him keep trakc of all of his books.
Based on MVP View is on main timline (different frames represent different application states). Presenter is very simplistic. Uses Tab component, TreeView Component, push button component.
Application gets information from a remote web service via Flash Remoting. (branden uses a cue cat to scan in the books isbn into flash. flash then sends the isbn via flash remoting to a remote web service which returns information about the book.
Branden Hall and Christian Cantrell are on the same DC - NYC train that I am. Branden showed me some useful Flash Remoting stuff he figured out.
You can pass a responder object for a remote method as the first argument to the method call. This allows you to pass a separate instance of an object when you are calling the same remote method multiple times. The only caveat is that the responder function must have an onResult method.
I am off for NYC and FlashForward. I will be posting FlashForward related information in the FlashForward section.
I will be away from email for a couple of hours this afternoon.
I just got back from the Macromedia Flash Communication Server party. Lots of people showed up to see information and demos of the Flash Communication Server. The sound was messed up, but people seemed to be excited about the demos.
We showed the Jeremy Allaire Macromedia MX presentation, authoring Flash Communication Apps with the Flash Communication components (not yet available) (imagine building full fledge text and video chat room in about 2 minutes), and a collaborative whiteboard application.
Flash Forward is this week in New York City. I am heading up there tomorrow, and thus may not post much for a day or so.
I am planning on blogging the conference and report on sessions, premieres, announcements (except some big ones), and anything else going on at the conference. I have created a new section, FlashForward, where I will be posting everything from the conference.
If there is anything in particular that you want to hear about or from, post your requests in the comments section, and i will see what i can do.
I just noticed that the sessions for the 2002 Macromedia Developers Conference have been posted.
You can view the sessions here.
Some interesting topics / tracks. I will be doing two sessions, one on Flash and Security, and one on Flash Remoting.
