Adrian Parr's Blog

I have just found about the Eyeo Festival, and WOW, what an amazing line-up of speakers there is!!

Here are just a few names from the speaker list …

• Zach Lieberman
• Theo Watson
• Robert Hodgin
• Casey Reas
• Aaron Koblin
• Ben Fry
• Jer Thorp

The event is lasts for three days, is on from June 27th to 29th 2011 and is being held in Minneapolis, Minnesota, US.

The venue is the McNamara Alumni Center, and looks like a pretty amazing building. Check the images of it here.

Visit the official website to find out more information.

Just thought I’d put together a list of all the Adobe Flash, Flex and AIR conferences I know of that are going on around the world this year (plus a couple of others that are related, ie. SXSW and MIX). If you know of any other ones that I have missed then let me know and I’ll add it to the list.

January 2008

none

February 2008

TOCA ME
February 23rd, 2008
Munich, German

FITC Amsterdam 2008
February 25th – 26th, 2008
Amsterdam, Netherlands

360|Flex Atlanta
February 25th – 27th, 2008
Atlanta, US

March 2008

MIX08
March 5th-7th, 2008
Las Vegas, US

South by Southwest (SXSW)
March 7th – 11th, 2008
Austin, US

Adobe Developer Week 2008
March 27th – 28th, 2008
Online

April 2008

360|Flex Europe
April 7th – 9th, 2008
Milan, Italy

Scotch on AIR
April 11th, 2008
Dublin, Ireland

NAB Show 2008
April 11th – 17th, 2008
Las Vegas, US

FITC Toronto 2008
April 20th – 22nd, 2008
Toronto, Canada

May 2008

10th flashconference 2008
May 8th, 2008
Stuttgart, Germany

OFFF
May 8th – 10th, 2008
Lisbon, Portugal

WebManiacs 2008
May 19th – 23rd, 2008
Washington DC, US

Flashforum Konferenz 2008
May 21st – 24th, 2008
Cologne, Germany

Multi-Mania
May 23rd, 2008
Kortrijk, Belgium

Web Flash Festival
May 23rd – 25th, 2008
Paris, France

June 2008

Scotch on the Rocks ’08
June 4th – 6th, 2008
Edinburgh, Scotland

flashbelt
June 10th – 13th, 2008
Minneapolis, US

webDU 2008
June 12th – 13th, 2008
Sydney, Australia

FITC Chicago 2008
June 22nd – 23rd, 2008
Chicago, US

July 2008

none

August 2008

Flashforward 2008
August 20th – 22nd, 2008
San Francisco, US

FlexCamp
August 28th, 2008
London, UK

September 2008

Flash on the Beach 2008
September 28th – October 1st, 2008
Brighton, UK

October 2008

Flash on Tap
October 7th – 9th, 2008
Rescheduled: May 28th – 30th, 2009
Boston, US

Flashpitt 2008
October 10th, 2008
Pittsburgh, US

The Actionscript Conference
October 19th, 2008
Singapore

Singularity 08
October 24th – 26th, 2008
Online

November 2008

Adobe MAX 2008 North America
November 16th – 19th, 2008
San Francisco, US

December 2008

Adobe MAX 2008 Europe
December 1st – 4th, 2008
Milan, Italy

January 2009

Adobe MAX 2008 Japan
January 29th – 30th, 2009
Tokyo, Japan

Don’t forget that the Adobe on AIR Tour is coming to Europe this spring. Starting off in Madrid, Spain on March 31st, and then running through to June 13th in Milan, Italy. Check the website to see if it is coming to a European city near you (it is in London on April 9th at The Brewery).

One other Flash conference that has happened in the past, but it doesn’t look like it is happening any more is Spark Europe.

This Thursday (31st January) there is a London Flash Platform User Group meeting. The speakers lined up are Paddy Keane talking about PureMVC and Rob Bateman talking about 3D in Flash (Away3D, Papervision3D and Sandy). It should be very interesting.

As always, a big ‘thank you’ to Tink for organising the event.

Time: 19:00 – 23:00 (doors open at 18:30)
Venue: CosmoBar, 50-54 Clerkenwell Road, EC1M 5PS (click for map)

The Adobe on AIR Bus Tour is coming to Europe (minus the bus) this summer. At the time of writing the details (locations and dates) are still being finalised. Keep up-to-date by checking the Bus Tour Weblog and the on AIR Weblog. You can also follow the tour via video, Twitter and Flickr.

Hooray! I managed to get a ticket to the Colin Moock ActionScript 3.0 training day being ran by Adobe. I’ll be attending the London event on Monday 3rd March 2008. The event is being held at Vinopolis, the famous wine tasting venue (map here). I hope we get some free wine to help us get our heads around the nitty-gritty of AS3. See you there, if you are going as well.

On Thursday 24th January I went along to the Flex London User Group meeting at Shoreditch Town Hall. This month’s meeting coincided with an official Adobe event, and therefore there was a huge turnout. Normally we get around 30 people turning up, this month there was approx. 250 people (requiring a change of venue). The speakers were Serge Jespers and James Ward.

Here is a summary of what they covered …

Serge Jespers

• Flash Player update to “Moviestar”
• H.264 codec
• Adobe services such as Scene7, Share, Pacifica (VOIP), Cocomo (collaberation app)
• Thermo (PSD > MXML)
• Flash Player 9 installation stats
  • 3.4 billion installs worldwide
  • 94.3% of European users have FP9
• Flex job trends (www.indeed.com)
• Examples of Flex Apps (Buzzword, SlideRocket, Picnik)
• Flex.org showcase
• Desktop RIA’s using Adobe AIR
• AIR example Digimix
• Flex Builder 3 Overview
  • Skinning a button using Photoshop and slicing
    • Name the slices (Button_upSkin, Button_overSkin, Button_downSkin)
    • Save out as PNGs
    • Import Artwork in to Flex
    • Flex will then create a CSS file
• Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3
  • Select MovieClip
  • Commands >> Convert symbol to Flex Component
  • Creates a component (SWC)
  • Add it to Flex build path
  • It then becomes part of your framework. It even has code hinting.
• Create MXML Module.
  • Can be used as an external asset like LoadMovie
• bin-debug <– only for testing
• bin-release <– put this online
• Reduce Flex app filesize by using Runtime Shared Library
  • Framework will then try and load from cached version on client’s computer.

James Ward

• Flex 3 Charting Components – ILOG Elixir
• Flex 3 SDK is Open Source (stlab.adobe.com)
• Open Source BlazeDS
  • Remoting and HTTP-based messaging technology
  • Opened up the AMF format (Action Message Format – AMF3)
  • Demo of BlazeBench
    • Comparison between AMF, Dojo, SOAP, JSON (JavaScript Object Notation)
    • AMF is quicker
    • Parsing of data is very, very quick
    • AMF has compression built in to the protocol (no need to use GZip)
  • BlazeDS comes from Adobe LiveCycle
    • LiveCcycle Data Services ES uses RTMP to stream data to the client (this is not available in BlazeDS).
    • Check out Flex MXML Producer and Consumer
• Flex-AJAX Bridge

Back in November 2007 I went down to Brighton for the Flash On The Beach conference. It was a fantastic event (as it was in 2006) and John Davey did a great job of organising the event and getting a wish list of speakers from around the world. Here is a list of the speakers that I managed to catch across the three auditoriums.

Monday 5th November

• Keynote – Richard Galvan – Overview of Flash CS3 Professional
• Grant Skinner – 50 Reasons AS3 Kicks Ass
• Mike Chambers – Understanding Adobe AIR
• Keith Peters – Make Flash Games. Retire Early.
• John Grden – Papervision3D CS3 Component – get er’ done!
• Joshua Davies
• Brendan Dawes – If it aint broke – break it!

Tuesday 6th November

• Ted Patrick – Flex and ActionScript 3 Worst Practices
• Craig Swann – Perceptive Interactions + Alternative Interfaces
• Aral Balkan – Let’s talk about SWX, baby!
• GMUNK (Bradley Grosh) – GMUKNICKDOWN 07
• Alex Jenkins – Pulling the emotional trigger.

Wednesday 7th November

• Andy Polaine – Playful Revolutions
• Joey Lott – Stylizing Flex Applications
• Andre Michelle – Klangfabrick
• Branden Hall – The Nooks and Crannies of ActionScript 3
• Jared Tarbell – Algorithms to Fill Space
• Closing ceremonies & raffle

All of these presenters are doing some amazing work and I came away from Brighton really inspired and eager to learn more. Here’s looking forward to Flash On The Beach 2008!