FOTB 08 #3

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

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.

FOTB 08 Day 1

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!