Following our tradition of getting the makers of the most used 3D engines out there we landed an interview with Alex Karpovich, from Alternativa3D.
Flash on the beach is over! It's always a mix of joy and sadness. This year's been terrific, with great talks, great parties and amazing people!
So here's my final day's reviews:
Rob on Away3D: It started with a little background on the platform and some early demos that described the problems that Away3D had to solve, and why they started it in the first place, with stuff like Triangle Caching allowing some of the demos to have over 100 000 polygons on screen and still maintain quite acceptable frame rates! The he showed us a few amazing demos of current usage of Away3D including a RPG called Dragon Wars that was mind-blowing, overall very cool presentation.
Nicolas Lierman on AIR Analytics: This presentation focused on showing all that data that we collect from our sites and applications in meaningful ways and gave us a little technical and personal background on the AIR Analytics application.
André Michelle Make some noise: As always with André the presentation was energetic and ended with a rave, but this year he gave us a big technical insight on how the achieves his results.
Koen de Weggheleire - This was one of the coolest sessions in FOTB, Koen talked about Matrices and how they work, and i finally got it!
Mario Klingemann: What can I really say about Mario's session, it was impressive to say the least, this time he focused heavily on the concept part of manipulating pixels, and by not going into code he managed to provide us with the how he does it.
Jonathan Harris: I had seen Jonathan before at a TED talk, online that is, and was blown away when I found that he'd be at FOTB '08. He went through his life experience explaining each endeavor and showing us amazing examples, that you just can't help but to fall in love with.
To close his session he delivered a speech to the community about how he feels us, an eye opener!
And to finalize I won a FOTB 08 Jacket and that's just cool!
It was amazing as always, living up to the Hype and there's a lot of it! And I hope to you guys here next year!
FOTB 08 Day #2
Ok so here we are at day #2 of FOTB '08 and today was inspiring to say the least, I chose to go a bit more on the inspiring side and less on the technical part and it paid off brilliantly. This is clearly one of the areas I feel myself lacking and I feel like I've learned quite alot!
Mike Downey on AIR - Mike's session about how to pitch and sell AIR applications was an eye opener and consolidated a lot of concepts I already had.
He told us about the Lighthouse project that is meant to give out a hand to developers, and companies, in pitching AIR applications and they might even help you prototype it! Also he spoke about the AIR marketplace and how it can boost your app, good stuff!
Adobe Townhall Meeting - So every year the Adobe teams comes together and answers our questions. There were plenty of questions this year but I'll leave you with the most exciting answers: Flash is coming to the iPhone!!! And AIR is coming to mobile!
Jam Session - This was one of the coolest sessions in the conference, with André Michelle, Carlos Ulloa, Ralph Hauwert, Mario Klingemann, Joa Ebert where they showed off amazing stuff they've been working on, I'll try and refer you to a better post as soon as find one!
GSkinner - This year Grant went more on the how to handle your workflow and solve programming problems, and eye opener.
Hoss - Hoss was amazing, with an energetic presentation of his work and telling us to focus on the user eXperience instead of everything else, because in the end that's all that matter, plus nudity!
So that was it for day two, I attended a few more sessions but i didn't see them as relevant as they were more for inspiration.
So we're at the end of day #1 over at FOTB '08, and as expect it was full of amazing and enticing talks.
Here's a small overview of what I attended:
Keynote with Richard Galvan: We were shown the new functionalities on CS4, nothing really new but it was still nice to see them there live, then the presentation shifted focus to the mobile and cross platforms. So all and all nothing really new or that we weren't expecting. And oh we've learned about FOTBm (flash on the beach in Miami!!).
Dr Woohoo: This was a first time for me since I didn't make it last year, and boy was I impressed, did you know that you can hook up flex/flash to panels and control all the cs3/cs4 applications through it? Amazing!
Carlos Ulloa: As always Carlos delivers! This time he started us off by talking about methodologies and team workflow and then proceeded to show us off his latest project in the making, a 3d racing sim game in PV3d! And boy was I blown away!
Geoff Stearns: The developer for the Youtube Video Player, gave us a simple, yet tight, overview of the problems he encountered and how he overcame them, interesting session that validated my assumptions and decisions on a recent project i finished.
TInk: As always with Tink he's a great speaker with a very pragmatic approach to his stuff and he demo'ed a cool animation framework for Flex that looked very very sexy. Ps: Expect an interview over at daily with him 
.
And that was it off to the inspiring session!
One more year, one more FOTB, as always the hype is up for the best flash event of the year, and I'll be there. And since plenty of people are doing it I thought I'd share my schedule plan:
Monday
Richard Galvan - Keynote
Carlos Ulloa - The best way to predict the future is to invent it
Here I'm a bit undecided between Branden Hall and Mike Jones
Geoff Stearns - Youtube Lessons Learned
Richard Lord - Creating particle effects with Flint
Eric Natzke - Beyond the knowledge: The Art of Play
James Paterson - Modulating a Lot
Tuesday
Aral Balkan or Mike Downey still to decide
Adobe - Town Hall Meeting
Grant Skinner - Things every actionscript developer should know
GMUNK
Lee Brimelow - Platform Jiu-Jitsu
Nando Costa - Motion Graphics, one frame at a time
Robert Hodgin - The best 8 to 12 hours of my life.
Wednesday
Rob Bateman - Finding Away3d
Nicolas Lierman or Seb Lee-Delisle
André Michelle or Doug McCune (this is going to be a though choice)
Mario Klingemann - Here be Pixels
Jonathan Harris - The art of surveillance and self-exposure.
So that's it for me, although i do foresee some changes here and there depending on how much I feel like going for the inspiration rather than the technical part.
Hope to see you guys there and remember look for the guy in the daily papervision3d t-shirt
We're proud to announce that Dreaming has published a few tutorials over at The Tech Labs, these tutorials are exclusive and can be accessed at: http://www.thetechlabs.com/
They include an air contact manager, and two sound equalizer how-tos with one of them showing how to get those cool pv3d equalizers.
Enjoy!
Dreaming in Flash interviewed Rob Bateman, The Chief architect and co-founder of the Away3D engine, on his views about the upcoming release of Flash Player 10 and how it will affect Away3D.
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Flash and Flex frameworks.
Lately I've working on three big projects that would require the usage of a framework, and not wanting to extend my own framework, that consists mostly of accumulated libraries over time, I decided to give the most prominent ones a go.
So I started by checking out what was on the market, I found as-hive, pureMVC, Cairngorm and Mate ( there are a few more but somehow I didn't feel they were mature enough to be used.
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Adobe just released the beta version 10 of Flash Player, codename Astro!
You can get it over at the labs, and check out it's cool demos!
The biggest thing they also released as a beta was Pixel Blender, formerly Hydra, the new language that will enable us to write filters using the GPU.
Also they introduced a new parameter that enables us to take advantage of the GPU capabilities of the the user, this is truly a great day!
I can't wait to start playing with both Pixel Blender and the new native 3d features!!!
Links:
Demo - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html
Labs page - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/
Pixel Blender - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Pixel_Bender_Toolkit
Just read on Aral's blog that flash is going open source, this is great news!Â
As Adobe will be opening up the AMF and the porting APIs for the flash  player. This means that we'll see flash in even more platforms and flavors, and will give projects like haXe a great boost!
Some reference links:
http://flashmobileblog.com/?p=91
http://aralbalkan.com/1332