Having fully recovered from the event I thought I would make a few notes. Firstly the conference was great, fantastically organised, great venue, good speakers and amusing parties.
Day 1
I missed the first session as my train was late, but I heard it wasn’t that great. I got straight into Craig Swann’s session and enjoyed his creative approach to combining hardware devices (cameras, switches, buttons) with Flash. He showed some great examples of using the Camera object as an interactive device - all in all really cool.
Next up after lunch was Branden Hall with Explorations with Actionscript 3. He seemed kinda nervous but it was interesting to hear what things have been changed in the new version of AS. He was very passionate about the subject but the crowd seemed a bit tough.
The next session was Aral Balkan. Aral is a great speaker and gave an excellent overview of XP(Extreme programming) and agile development. Hopefully a lot more people will consider using these ideas, however as he said it is really only the CEO’s that can make a change overall. Very good stuff! During this session I met up with Iain Lobb from Bloc Media. He is a great guy and as we were both on our lonesome (no colleagues or mates at the conf) we decided to hang out for the event.
The final talk was given by Erik Natzke. His work is fantastic, really inspiring and powerful. I was amazed how he manages to work on such creative projects for very large companies. He explaining a lot of the processes that he goes through on a project and showed a lot of examples of recent work. Definitely caught my attention.
After milling about and grabbing a pizza with Iain, we headed down to the Koo Club for the mini-party. Good to catch up with Chris Mills from Friends of Ed quickly and have a few chats with speakers etc. Quite a few drinks later I headed back to the hotel to try and get some sleep. In the end I did only get about 2 hours :(
Day 2
First up was Brendan Dawes. Brendan’s work has always interested me so I made sure that I was up and ready for this one - even though it was pouring with rain and I felt a little bit ropey ;)
Brendan is an excellent speaker, he is natural, very amusing and has some great points. His idea of Mariah Carey Syndrome (Flash developers using every trick in the book just because) really says a lot of certain companies even now. I was nearly in tears with laughter when he showed us some work from a few years back!! Great sense of humour to rip into his old stuff!!!
I then went to see Marcus Weskamp’s session on information visualisation which was great. Amazing to think that he speaks Spanish, Japanese and English yet he was apologising for struggling with certain words. Much better than my Spanish!!! The session focused on an overview of visualisation and then showed two of his projects. I enjoyed it a lot.
The next session entitled “Vecmaps and Bitters” covered the BitmapData object, caching and various tips and tricks in using these. Although I have used BitmapData before I haven’t really used the caching so this was an interesting area. It was kinda basic in places, but it must be tricky to pitch a lot of the sessions to different skill ranges.
The it was Actionscript 3.0 for Animation with Keith Peters. having been an ardent Bit-101 fan I made sure to get to this one. It seemed like the entire Corn Exchange was packed out so i wasn’t alone in respect for Keith. His session was great, a much better intro to AS3 than some of the other sessions and he came up with some interesting ideas and tips.
I then saw Hillman Curtis‘ talk on video. I had seen Hillman a few years ago and thought he was great as a speaker. He was good this time, but I am not a massive fan of his work these days and I think I should have gone to see Richard Leggett’s Mobile Development talk instead. Oh well!!
That rounded off another great day and after a meal in Wagamamas it was time for the Adobe sponsored party. The deal was that in celebration of the 10th birthday of Flash drinks would be the price they were 10 years ago. So most things were £1!! A recipe for disaster!! After having a brief chat with Brendan Dawes, Aral Balkan, Richard Leggett and Keith Peters further more drinks were consumed.
We all ended up dancing like crazy until the club shut!! Surely someone has footage of this on their mobile? If so post it up somewhere and comment me :) Most amusing anyway!!! We then headed back to the conference hotel for further chat and drinks.
Day 3
Needless to say I missed the first session, but the second session was Jobe Makar’s Multiplayer Flash Games which was great. Interesting to see how easy using Electro Server is, since I have been back I have played around with it quite a lot so it was good to hear from the guy that created it. He showed a few projects that had used it which also gave me ideas for future work.
After lunch it was Hoss Gifford’s turn. He was absolutely brilliant!! Really energetic, funny, quick witted and creative. I hadn’t seen a lot of his work before but it is all good stuff. He made me laugh as much as Brendan’s talk which was great.
Then it was Todd Purgason from Juxt Interactive, by his own proclaimation he was still jet lagged and tired, but his session was still really good. I like Juxt’s work as it has a sense of humour and I think it differs from a lot of the more corporate work that gets produced in the US. He showed a few applications and projects that generated a lot of ideas in my head which is always a good thing for a speaker to do.
Finally Neville Brody was up. It had been a bit of a coup for John Davey to get Neville to come along as he is a very busy man and a big name in the design community. I am glad that he did as it was interesting to hear about his process, ideas and work. I think it is very beneficial to get inspiration from people outside of the Flash community and Neville is an ideal candidate.
All in all it was a great event and I do hope they are able to put on another FOTB next year.
