So much to write about! It’s been a busy few days just for a change at the moment! I’ll get back to the weekend, but I want to write down my thoughts on Flash on the Beach (Brighton 08) before I lose them. The final geek event of September in Brighton is well underway!
I’m going to start with day 1. Unlike d’construct, there are three different talks through most of the day at Flash on the Beach, so you have to decide which talks sound most interesting. I had Friday off, so I completely neglected to work out what time I was supposed to be there, or print out the email confirmation I needed to register or anything. I checked the programme at 8.00 Monday morning, to discover that the keynote started at 9. Ouch! What’s that all about? Conferences aren’t supposed to start that early!
A bit of a rush later, I made it to the Dome for about 9.10. Not bad, really. And then I had a bit of luck bumping into a colleague who had the full print out of confirmation for our entire department, so that was ok. The keynote looked a little dull anyway, if I’m honest. So we had a leisurely coffee and picked our next talk.
First up I chose Stefan Richter’s talk, ‘Building Collaborative Applications’. It was a good look at some nice, simple applications of Flash Media Server that enabled collaboration and communication for multiple users in realtime. Apparently there is a free developer version of FMS3 available, limited to 10 connections but good enough to play with. He made some good points about collaboration needing demonstrate that someone is connected and indicate their presence to the other users.
He also recommended using a Firefox plugin called Thunderbolt AS3, which apparently works with Firebug to display traces in the actionscript code in the browser window – I’ll have to have a play with that I think! My notes are on where we could apply this in our little games at work. It definitely has potential.
Next we went for Dr Woohoo’s ‘Transforming Ideas To Pixels To Atoms’. Lot’s of loud music and flashing stuff. Oh, and way too long spent switching between applications on a laptop that was clearly struggling to run through the projector. (Don’t do it! Record them!) He’s been playing with colour stuff, and how to break down a photo into its palette, then import this into Illustrator. His stuff looked really clever, and it sounds like Adobe are making some of his tools ‘official’.
Andries Odendaal was a mistake. ‘Exploitable acts of playfulness’. Was pretty much a selection of videos from the last (guessing) 10 years, then a couple from what he’s doing at the moment. Not really any sort of linking talk, and I’m not really sure what the point was. And he finished early. All in all he seemed thoroughly unprepared and just a bit random. I’m not denying that his stuff was really good, but a speaker needs to speak. I gave up taking notes and just knitted.
It was particularly irritating when there were two really interesting talks on that clashed straight afterwards. How to choose between Chris Orwig (who I saw last year and was inspired by) and Richard Lord talking about Flint Particles (who I missed presenting at Flash Brighton a few weeks back)? In the end i got into the particles early, which was good because the Pavillion theatre was stuffed for it, and people were being turned away. I’ve got a lot of quite technical notes. It really helped my understanding of the system, which I’ve already been playing with and hadn’t quite got to grips with.
(I’ve heard lots of reports that Chris Orwig was also brilliant. <sigh>)
The final session of the day was Erik Natzke ‘Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play’. Again, no notes, I just went with the knitting. This time though it was because I was just absorbed and watching in amazement. Seriously. The guy has sort of taken some of the colour stuff a couple of the others were talking about, and used drawing ribbons in the most amazing ways. I love it when someone shows that a really simple concept combined with some clever processing and a good eye can produce something fabulous and amazing.
I didn’t go to the Inspired session or the party in the evening. I have this thing that after absorbing all that information and spending half the day with my jaw dropped I mostly want to go home and collapse. GG cycled into town at about the right time, so we cycled home together along the undercliff walk. We don’t get to do that very often, and it’s nice (although we have very different approaches to the hills…).
Lots more notes for tomorrow about today, and by then I should have notes for the third and final day too!
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