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February 28, 2005
CMX hits 1000
A bit of publishing history was made today- Community MX released their 1000th article. Kudos! That's a lot of ASCII.... :)
Posted by sfegette at 08:56 PM | Comments (0)
February 18, 2005
MXDU - Day Two rewind
Well, another MXDU ended with a bang last night- what a great conference. My kudos and sincere thanks for Geoff Bowers and ALL the Daemonites for putting on one of the best-run conferences I've ever had the pleasure to attend! Seriously. Now back to the coverage...
After yesterday's keynote (i.e. my prior posting), I dove into sessions again:
- Grant Skinner's 'Object-Oriented Procrastination' session- an AWESOME exploration into Grant's own personal explorations into object-oriented paradigms, interaction models and some just-plain-cool 'generative art' applications. I heard many besides myself talking this session up, hats off to Grant for a fun and very informative preso.
- Chafic Kazoun's v2 Component Architecture session- a dense and confusing subject to most that Chafic cut right through, building a status icon component from scratch while pointing out obvious and not-so-obvious snafus and pitfalls around v2 (and v1) component development, and the component architecture itself. Check out his component development tutorials @ Ultrashock, as well- component development can be nerve-wracking and Chafic has got it down COLD. Great presentation. Just don't go up against him in Halo 2 without a shotgun firmly in hand ... ;-)
The afternoon closed out the conference with a 'round-table' Q&A session with the Macromedia presenters, fielding some great questions in a very lively session. And alas, once that closed out, the conference was officially at an end. I can honestly say this has been my favorite con in years.
I'll 'blog a post-conference summary of my thoughts and impressions of the MANY hallway conversations and 'street buzzes' I picked up while here in Sydney early next week (it'll take nearly that long to wade through all my notes), the relaxed and organized atmosphere of the conference was a great setting for a lot of informal discussions. Hot topics included:
- CFMX7 and it's new features (event gateways got lots of talk and interest- as did the cfdocument and cfform updates)
- Flash Lite, and mobile development in general (particularly interesting discussions around the differences in both the environment, user experience and API level support)
- Enterprise architecture/frameworks (Sean Corfield gave a great preso on this, too)
- 8-Ball and Maelstrom - the next versions of Flash and the Flash Player (the latter demoed several times during the con)
- Lots of thoughts and opinions about migrating to mobile delivery with existing applications
- and much more...
For now- I'm off to meet some of the MM user group managers for brunch and see a little bit more of Sydney than the Star City conference center- my next post should be from San Francisco.
And if you have the opportunity to attend MXDU next year- I highly recommend you start planning it now!
Until then...
Posted by sfegette at 03:20 PM | Comments (0)
February 17, 2005
MXDU Day 2 - Keynote update
The day 2 keynote just wrapped up, Mike Downey was first up (following another BRILLIANT animated intro), giving a wide overview of the Flash ecosystem as it exists today. Flash Video got a lot of play, covering CNet.com and Amazon.com's usage of FLV video on their respective homepages (among others). The cornerstone for me- Red Bull's innovative usage of video-driven interaction for their Air Race Copilot site. Make sure to check it out- I've honestly never seen such an integrated use of Flash video to fully document the experience of sitting inside (or outside) of a 300+ horsepower propeller-powered rocket during a real air race. Multi-angle shots, interactive maps- beautiful job.
Mike Chambers took the stage next, highlighting more innovative uses of Flash. First up- Disney's powering of 'The Incredibles' movie site with integrated video and interactive elements. Next up, the Nike Labs site, showing a truckload of interactive navigation, interactive games, quite an impressive site indeed.
After an impressive run through other Flash applications and sites, Mike Downey retook the stage and discussed Flash on mobile devices, and highlighted the winners of the recent Flash Lite contest (good stuff- make sure to check out the Flash Lite Exchange to download and try them yourself!). At the moment, there are 29 million Flash Lite-enabled handsets worldwide, particularly within the Japan, Europe and Asia-Pacific regions, as well as the US (and it's still early, particularly for the US). Samsung and Nokia have both entered partnerships with Macromedia- showing strong hardware support for Flash content- both 'standalone' as well as embedded into next-gen phone systems to enable dynamic desktops/screensavers/etc.
Mike then dove right into Flash Lite as well as FlashCast.
DR Interactive's MXDU Mobile conference guide was demoed in Flash Lite- as well as several other games, a very rich museum 'tour guide' for the Baltic (location based applications will be very sweet in the mobile arena), and the winning entry for the Flash Lite contest- a beautiful real-time FL application allowing you to navigate up-to-the-minute camera grabs of traffic at various Manhattan intersections (make sure to download this from the Mobile Exchange- an amazing usage of FL, in my opinion). A must-have for Manhattan-based handsets.
FlashCast was briefly demoed- a framework for creating 'channels' of Flash-based content to be pushed to handsets (carriers licensing the framework, developers providing the content/channels). Offline storage in FlashCast allows partially-connected browsing of FC-delivered content. VERY cool environment, can't wait to see this become adopted in my local markets/carriers.
Mike Chambers then hopped back up and talked about the future of Flash- examples created within the next versions of both Flash and the Flash Player. Alongside impressive increases performance, the next release of Flash authoring will highlight expressive, creative content, along with improved handling of text, bitmaps and video. Some examples:
- Player 8's 'cache as bitmap' feature- allowing much faster animation of complex vector content (great new example courtesy of Guy Watson/FlashGuru)
- Advanced graphic effects such as bevels, drop-shadows, blurs, convolution kernel ops, displacement mapping, etc. (very fast, I might add)
- Showing the above applied to running video clips (sweet) in realtime.
- Some great examples of (what I can only refer to as) 'pseudo-particle effects' such as cigarette smoke, liquid textures, etc.
- Dynamic access to video alphas, allowing dynamic masking and layering within the player
- a new video codec, providing increased quality and reduced bandwidth requirements
Net takeaway- traditional raster/video artists have a LOT to look forward to.
To rewind briefly- the MXDU banquet last night was quite the event. Beginning with a 'treasure hunt' across the harbor (each 'team' was given a Polaroid camera, a map, and 5 semi-vague 'objectives' to shoot before returning), everyone returned and made collages of their 'hunt' while dinner was served. (editor note: my team did NOT win.)
Alongside a good jazz combo, the banquet had one of the best entertainment ideas I've seen in a while- a comedian was 'planted' among the service staff, and it took most of the tables darn near the entire dinner to realize that he'd been pulling our collective legs by insulting guests, throwing ice, cursing and stomping- classic! He did a full comedy set afterwards (apparently he's also attending the conference and a Dreamweaver user at heart), great touch! Afterwards everyone migrated to either the casino, the harbor or the XBox lounge (myself the latter).
And now- off to the sessions...
Posted by sfegette at 04:19 PM | Comments (2)
February 16, 2005
MXDU - Day One rewind
I'm currently in James Talbot's 'Flex for Flash Developers' session, sucking up information and nursing wounds from being fragged repeatedly by Mike Chambers in the XBox lounge during afternoon tea (ouch). An earlier session on 'Dynamic Flash' ended up being more of a roundtable session (and a quite good one), with well-known Flashers such as Chafic Kazoun, Aral Balkan, Jesse Warden, Peter Hall, and many others entertaining questions from the audience.
Other great sessions today included Jesse Warden's Flash/Flashcom/AMFPHP session, as well as Guy Watson's 'Flash Navigation' preso, ripping apart good and bad Flash navigation paradigms (have you checked out the cool zoom-in/zoom-out Relevare site navigation?). I had to miss the session on MX TV- Flash development for broadcast - due to conflicts. Alas, I was unable to pull a Hermione Granger-style timeshift to catch both that and Jesse's session today.
Today's hallway conversations ranged all the way from ColdFusion/Java integration, the new CFMX7 event gateway (a favorite topic from what I can tell), home-grown DVRs (thanks to Rocketboots' Andrew Muller for some great tips there), mobile development and Flash Lite, and more. I'm actually pretty pleased to see the number of Flash Lite-capable phones around the conference- although there's been some minor grumbling about the Flash 4-era scripting model available in Flash Lite, generally there's been quite a buzz about handset Flash development that I for one will be really interested in tracking (and participating). In fact, the fellow two seats down from me is currently transferring some test movies from his laptop to his Nokia 6600 via Bluetooth as I type this. I've been trying to get a pulse on Flash/CF developers and their related interest levels towards mobile development, and apparently it didn't take much digging to find plenty of people fitting the profile. ;-)
The MXDU banquet tonight should be a blast- looking over the program it appears the first part is some form of treasure hunt, followed by much food and merriment, and given the casino setting the conference is housed within I'd expect the post-partying to continue well into tomorrow morning. Myself, however- I may duck before too late and get up early tomorrow to take a run along Sydney harbor before the sessions kick in, so expect another update shortly after tomorrow's Flash keynote (delivered by Mike Downey and the aforementioned agent of XBox death, Mike Chambers). Until then...
Posted by sfegette at 11:06 PM | Comments (1)
MXDU - Day 1 Keynote
The MXDU day-one keynote just wrapped, and was a great one. After another brilliant animated introcourtesy of Flash animation superheros Nectarine and introduction from MXDU conference ringleader Geoff Bowers (of Daemon/Fullasagoog.com), the body of the keynote kicked off with zeal.
(hit the 'MORE' link for details...)
First up, Clinton Ennis from Infomedia walked us through his current redesign project- a highly complex parts ordering system for Toyota dealers/repair shops. Originally written in DHTML (~6 months development), the time savings in Flex were considerable- multilingual support added within hours, and the skeleton of the application was brought up in less than a day. The Flex front end talks seamlessly with a backend .NET web service, a dealer/repair shop can quickly enter a VIN or license number and get all the pertinent parts for their specific automobile. Clinton took a license number from the audience and sure enough- it got it right, even down to the paint color. Awesome application.
Next, Barry from Flight Center LTD previewed an in-development travel planning system for Australian customers. Originally implemented an HTML/ASP application, the change to Flex allowed Barry to considerably reduce the clicks/screen refreshes required to pull in pertinent information on available flights (and add considerable new features)- with no modification of their existing business logic required. A variety of features that had previously been implemented as pop-up windows were easily converted as well, saving customers with pop-up blockers from missing key information.
Next up- Tim Buntel talked the crowd through the current ColdFusion release- ColdFusion MX 7 (a.k.a. Blackstone). Accompanied by a fantastic 60's era soundtrack and slides, his preso was like the best merging of mime, hands-on engineering and live demos into the real-time construction of a very complex Flash-based personal profile management system (for a possibly fictional house party) using the amazing new Flash form features in CFMX 7. CFDOCUMENT features (allowing easy output to FlashPaper and PDF) were then covered before moving through a ultra-fast expose of the new ColdFusion Report Builder to rapidly implement a reporting system complete with graphs/summaries/etc. for his freshly-implemented 'party attendee management system'. Great demo!
(Tim then followed up with the more expected slide preso for CFMX 7, but I give him serious kudos for what was possibly the most innovative no-talking preso I've seen in some time.)
Obviously that's just a quick peek at features in CFMX 7, so I would refer any further feature curiosity (and man, there's a LOT in this version) to the online 'What's New in ColdFusion 7 presentation, which gives an excellent summary of the new capabilities available to developers.
Now off to hallway conversations at morning tea before the sessions begin- first up for me being the advanced Dynamic Flash session. Keep posted, more to come as the day progresses!
Posted by sfegette at 02:48 PM | Comments (0)
Silk Mobile and Flash Lite
Great news coming from the 3GSM conference in Cannes- Silk Mobile Ltd. has developed both connection management and local file access applications for Flash Lite developers. Their partnership with Macromedia will also include Flash design services and further development to 'enhance and support' Flash applications in the mobile arena. This looks like some great news for Flash Lite developers (discovered by way of the Flashlite mailing list, FYI)!
Posted by sfegette at 12:46 PM | Comments (3)
February 15, 2005
Wheels down for MXDU!
Just got to Australia a few hours ago, and am currently camped out in Sean Corfield's hotel room shoulder-tapping his broadband as my room just down the hall gets 'prepared'. Expect more regular updates once I settle in and MXDU kicks off, and actually have a room of my own... ;)
Posted by sfegette at 06:23 PM | Comments (4)
February 14, 2005
Out for MXDU
Touching back in SF for a couple hours today to repack the bags and charge batteries before heading back off for Sydney Australia and the MXDU conference. Hope to meet a lot of you down under!
Posted by sfegette at 08:50 AM | Comments (0)
February 11, 2005
Nokia and Flash
Nice! Hot off the presses, Nokia signs a licensing agreement with Macromedia to integrate Macromedia Flash technology into it's Series 60 platform phones and other software platforms. With 1.8 million registered developers in Nokia's 'Forum Nokia' program, that's a lot of potential Flash developers. Collaboration in development tools, support and technical documentation is also planned- all very positive signs for current and future mobile developers looking to leverage the platform.
Given this news, I'm feeling pretty justified in switching to a Flash Lite-ready Nokia 6600 last week... :)
Posted by sfegette at 07:22 AM | Comments (0)
February 02, 2005
Javascript Triggers (ALA)
A great article on the basics of JavaScript Triggers hit A List Apart, worth checking out if you're obsessed - as I've been recently - with absolute separation of content (XHTML), presentation (CSS) and behaviors (Javascript) in your site designs. Great read.
Posted by sfegette at 10:00 AM | Comments (0)