Jeff Winkworth’s IMM Blog

This took a little longer to post (write) than I originally expected, but nontheless it is here!

Lee Brimelow’s ByteArrays for Beginners began the morning, and was one of the highlights of the day for me. I had been looking forward to this presentation; during some of my classes at Seneca I was exposed to basic bit-shifting concepts but never really understood what the power of them were, beyond advanced manipulations on video cards and such. In addition to walking us through the concepts and techniques, he illustrated many examples of things created in Flash using byte arrays. One such thing was WiiFlash, something I was planning on looking into before I went to FITC. I have since began quickly experimenting with it, and hope to show off some things I come up with.

I then wandered the floor for an hour, stopping in at every panel to see what was going on. I was initially interested in seeing Brian Lesser’s talk on RTMFP, but I got in late and had to sit at the back where I could not see any of the slides very well. I ended up in R. Blank’s AS2-AS3 Migration session, which had a larger audience than I anticipated – I guess I had figured that more people had made the jump to AS3 already. I’m glad I stopped in, as I picked up a few things.

Ryan Wolman gave a great talk on the business of Web 2.0 (probably one of my favourites of the show), and discussed things such as taking a step back when someone says “we should make a widget” or “we should use Twitter” and figure out what they are trying to do and why. In addition, Ryan talked about the concept of “going viral” and how when you plan to do it, it typically doesn’t work- but to be sure you have a plan to follow it up with in case you are successful.

Another aspect was knowing the audience you wish to reach, and knowing that there is a difference between demographics and behaviors. “Plan, then pick the right channels.” Ryan broke it down to 6 groups:
Creators vs Critics
Collectors vs Joiners
Spectators vs Inactives

Finally, he discussed risk assessment – figuring out all the possible things that could go wrong with a social media campaign, such as allowing people to post comments on your website, and taking into account that people may write negative things about your brand or product. This is something I got a lot out of, as it directly ties in to some things that I am currently working on.

Koen De Weggheleire gave a great lesson in Play with Pixels: Bitmap Manipulation in Flash (a pretty self-explanatory title). This is something that I’ve always wanted to spend more time learning, and Koen gave a great talk on the subject, discussing matrix transformations for color, shape, size, etc. It was a great introduction on the subject, and having only briefly touched some of this stuff in school during my game programming classes, it was a nice refresher on the subject.

Cool Japanese Flash Side B was presented by Timohiko Koyama (Saqoosha) and Yoshihiro Shindo (BeInteractive!). I had not attended Side A, but heard good things about it so I thought I would check it out. Saqoosha showed off some sites using FLAR toolkit, which while impressive, was nothing I hadn’t seen on YouTube weeks before. Shindo showed us a lot of different things he had been up to. Most interesting was Frocessing (an advanced Drawing library) and BetweenAS3 (a new Tween library).

At the end of the day, Jared Ficklin presented Seeing Sound, some of his exploits around audio visualization and sound manipulation. One high point was when Jared played a live Neil Diamond song (sounding like it was recorded during a club session with cheering and clapping), only to click a button and reveal that it was actually a studio track! The “crowed” was created dynamically based on the signal strength and sound information.

Another great part of his presentation was when he decided to give a rundown of Sound Wave mathematics in a nutshell. Realizing that not everyone in the crowd may be interested in such a thing, He placed a picture of Sienna Miller on one side of his slides, and Daniel Craig on the other, “so everyone has something to look at.” When he was finished explaining his mathematic concepts, he pointed out that no one had noticed that the pictures had actually swapped position halfway through, because “we’re all nerds!”

This being my first Flash In The Can, I didn’t know to expect. I thoroughly enjoyed myself and can’t wait till next year. I was quite inspired by pretty much everything I encountered at the show. There are many things that I have been exicted to take a look at and explore.

Sure, this post is a little late to the party, but I wanted to jot down my thoughts on the show anyways.

This was my first time at FITC; last year I only attended the Get a Job Event. I attended all three days (day three’s post will come later), and had a great time. I will do my best to attend next year.

I didn’t know what to expect going in to this, part of me expected it a bit to be more like a trade show with booths, but as Sunil pointed out, “what kind of things would actually be in booths?” Not to worry, as there was always something to do.

Day 1

My first session was Dr. Woohoo’s Glue69: Connecting the Dots Between the Toolkits. He was prototyping some interesting ideas using OpenFrameworks to have SWFs communicate to desktop applications such as Illustrator, Photoshop & Maya. This is a concept I have always been fascinated by – coming up with ways to link two applications together, even if its just by something basic like batch scripts. Experiments in using Webcams as alternate inputs to audio visualization in Maya was demonstrated. As he put it “the possibilities are endless.” The strong selling point was that OpenFrameworks can sit on a cloud machine, and allow someone to use flash to create something on another computer’s version of Photoshop. This session was covered in the fitc blog, here.

Mario Klingemann’s The Tinkerer’s Box was next – a session I was very excited to see. I really enjoyed how he walked through the initial building blocks of what he was using – triangles and circles, and how he went about creating some custom Class representations, and then jumped from basic examples to the end result:

Some crazy illustrations! These were created as Photoshop-style filters, where an underlying image is analized and a new layer is placed on top. It really was successful at inspiring me – his whole talk (and many of technical talks of the weekend) had the attitude of “here’s how I did it, let’s see what you can come up with!”

While wandering the floor during day 3 of Flash in the Can (an article about the rest of the conference coming soon), I ended up sitting in on the end of R. Blank’s Get off your ass and start using AS3 already!. While I figured the core subject matter would be things I already know (my only experience with Flash is in AS3), I was surprised to learn a few new tricks. Some are new features to Flash Player 10, and others are just things  I never picked up before:

• You can change the frame rate at runtime via Stage.frameRate
• Event.ENTER_FRAME is dispatched as the frame rendering begins, and Event.EXIT_FRAME (new to Flash 10) is upon completion.
• You can enable Color Correction via Stage.colorCorrection = ColorCorrection.ON
• flash.utils.describeType() will return an XML formatted string of advanced information of any object type – much easier to decipher than [object object]
• MouseEvent.MOUSE_LEAVE will determine when the mouse moves off the stage / the swf leaves focus

Nothing too fancy, but they are tidbits that I will definitely use during my day-to-day coding. I’m glad I poked my head in during some down time.