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.) Anyways, I am going to try to post my notes and comments. You can view them and all of my other FlashForward notes in my FlashForward section.
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.
Phillip brought out a pocket pc phone edition (very nice and sleek).
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).
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.com, and more recently Jacob Nielsen.
We have put up a page with some information on the availability of the Flash Communication Server Components:
During the week of July 15, 2002, seven of the Communication Components for Macromedia Flash Communication Server MX will be available for download to all users, including trial users. In early August, additional components will be made available to registered users.
Note that these are not necessary to author content for the Flash Communication Server (they just make some things easier).
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 Remoting ActionScript objects:
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. starts at 0,0 coordinate of movie clip that it is contained within.
