A couple of weeks ago I attended my third, and it turns out, my final Flash On The Beach (FOTB) conference. Now I have come back to reality and caught up on the work I should have been doing, rather than eating Falafel in Brighton , it’s time to summarise my highlights.
Day One
Keynote
The usual corporate stuff from Adobe, but interesting points were
- Lee Brimelow talking about the new (at the time un-named) Starling Framework. A simple framework for using the Stage3D (prev Molehill) to render 2D animation directly to the GPU. Ideal for game development and super fast graphics rendering. You’ll need the Flash Player 11 Beta to play with this from Adobe Labs.
- Mark Anders demonstrating the Adobe Edge Preview 2, the new HTML5, timeline based, motion graphics designer.
I know you are going to say that Edge sucks, and the code it creates is terrible.. that may still be the case (we’ll see), but it’s new timeline animation tools and functionality looked genuinely easy to use, and super productive. I just wish they put as much thought into the Flash Professional timeline tools… maybe something to look out for in Flash CS6??
Greg Rewis – From Zero to App in 60 Seconds
This was a pretty intreresting talk covering how you handle your HTML5/CSS3/JS web app development in Dreamweaver.. yes Dreamweaver (despite Greg’s objections 
.
This post over at Ubelly.com is pretty good summary: http://ubelly.com/2011/09/offline-web-apps-appcaching-and-html5/
Stray – Robotlegs 2 and your brain: a great toolchain
Well… unfortunately this was a talk that really should have been on the bigger stage, as it was over-subscribed (a common occurrence this year) and so I didn’t get to see it. However, Stray’s notes are here: http://www.xxcoder.net/my-fotb-presentation-on-robotlegs-2-and-your-brain
Eugene Zatepyakin – Natural Features tracking and image detection / recognition
Once agian another talk that I couldn’t get into as the Pavilion was packed out, however Eugene, does some great work, and you can find out more over here.
The silver lining here though, was that I did get to see Jessica Hische’s talk instead…
Jessica Hische – Lettering is not Fonts
If you have never seen Jessica’s graphic design & lettering / typography work you are in for a treat… beautiful, funny, and full of fresh ideas… much like her talk! Brilliant!
Day Two
Tomek Augustyn – Riding the HiSlope
I hadn’t heard of Tomek or his HiSlope framework before, but this for me was the surprise highlight of the conference. He was also nice enough to spend a bit of time after his talk to answer a few of my questions.
Tomek’s HiSlope framework is a great video processing framework, that makes it super easy & intuitive to add filters to video. You can import or create you own filters, tweak the parameters in edit mode, chain the filters together and the export the fx chain for use in live projects.
Once the fx chain is in your project you can also interrogate the variables from your outer project so can hook it into other functions.
One really interesting feature also talked about, was blob detection (getting the computer to recognise multiple independent shapes on screen). Tomek had used a brilliantly simple technique that I think was first developed my Mario Klingemann.
Here is Tomek’s post: http://play.blog2t.net/fast-blob-detection
Tomek’s more detailed post about his FOTB session and a good place to find out more about his HiSlope framework is here: http://play.blog2t.net/flash-on-the-beach-2011/
Joa Ebert - The Tale of a Travelling Salesman and his four Colours
This was a really nice presentation by Joa basically about Graph Theory, what it is, how it is used to solve mathematical problems and how he uses it in his own software, like http://www.audiotool.com/
Mike Chambers – Deconstructing theexpressiveweb.com
Mike Chambers’ talk was about how Adobe put together their ‘HTML5′ tech demo site theexpressiveweb.com, the problems / solutions they found and then Mike’s judgement about if CSS3 & HTML5 were really ready for production use.
The conclusion was basically, that despite the hype, HTML5 is not yet a production ready technology. The key reasons for this were:
- HTML5 support across browsers currently sits between 5 & 60% for various features.
- The amount of work involoved in ‘progressive enhancement’ increased build time, cost & testing.
- Constant maintenance after site launch, due to changing implementations of standards by browsers.
However, while HTML5 may not be production ready for the average desktop browser, mobile browsers (IOS, Android, Blackberry) are actually a lot better equiped and so, HTML5 mobile web applications are certainly viable.
Theexpressiveweb.com, is a neat summary of HTML5 features and also has a great list of essential tools to help here: http://beta.theexpressiveweb.com/resources/
Cyriak Harris – Destroying my laptop with After Effects
You will know Cyriak’s animations from E4 and various music videos and virals.
Basically he is genius / nutter that clearly spends a little too much time in front of After Effects… imagine if Aphex Twin knew how to use After Effects.. that!
A funny talk that was sometimes genius & sometimes tedious, but really highlighted that with unlimited imagination you really can create something out of nothing.
See Cyriak’s work here: http://www.cyriak.co.uk/
Day Three
The Elevator Pitch
The elevator pitch is John Davey’s greatest invention, where 20 developers / creatives get 3 minutes each to show us their stuff. I took a lot of notes in this session about tech to investigate when I got home. Here’s a brief summary list:
- Phidgets - USB sensors & controllers for your interactive fun
- Grapefrukt – Tool for exporting animation spritesheets for other tech (CSS etc)
- Fungrid – A useful looking open source game engine (animation, controls, physics etc)
- Gestalt Principles in Design – Graham Odds slides on cleaner, better design
- Beyond Reality Face Tracking – Interesting but maybe over priced for commercial projects.
- Acapela Text to Speech – Voice as a service for your Flash app.
Keith Peters – Making Tools
A really nice presentation about making your own tools (developing your own applications) to help you get your job done quicker & better.
Tools of interest that Keith developed / mentioned:
- SWFSheet – Create spritesheets from SWF animations
- Embed It Bitch (Link to Air App) – Bitch who codes, helps you embed assets
- ASExpander - A great JSFL tool, to drop snippets into your code.
- Regexr – Grant Skinners tool to help write & test RegEx
Jeremy Thorpe – New York, New York
A great presentation from the always inspiring Jeremy Thorp, data artist for the New York Times.
Really interesting to see how art & science collide (usually in Processing) in Jer’s job to create both beautiful, clever & unique software solutions to design / data visualisation problems & challenges, like:
- 9/11 Memorial – Name Placement Algorithm
- OpenPaths – A project to take your GPS data and put it to good use
- Project Cascade – NY Times social conversation visualisation
Jer also mentioned a gave us a sneak peak of Processing 2.0, scheduled for release soon. This may well feature heavily in my toolbox for 2011 / 2012, now with it’s output to JS & mobile.