Flash On The Beach 2010

Last month the Preloaded development team got a lucky three days away from the office and were dispatched to Brighton to attend Flash On The Beach 2010. I’ve attended every year so far and I was very keen to see if the event would live up to the standard I’ve seen in previous years. In the build up to the event, it seemed that some of the conference regulars were dipping out this year, as they didn’t think it could offer them anything new. This enabled a lot of fresh blood to attend which was nice to see and as ever, the event was completely sold out!

(photo © All rights reserved by Marc Thiele)

Day 1 got off to a great start with the Adobe keynote session (we shall FINALLY get code hinting in Flash Builder) and for the first year so far, I remembered to take my glasses (always helps).

Lee Brimelow - My Head Hurts

The first speaker to really delve into the Apple Vs Adobe saga was Lee Brimelow, a platform evangelist at Adobe. It was really refreshing to hear the true thoughts of an Adobe employee, rather than relying on speculation. And yes, it was great to hear him admit he was a bit pissed with Steve Jobs (especially when Apple blocked third parties compiling to iSO just as Adobe finished building their Flash to iPhone compiler)! Lee really set the record straight on their disagreements, in a factual manor, rather than a bitchy one (a line that would have been very easy to take). He said, it was probably fair that iPhones don’t support in browser Flash and this is likely to never change. Lee cleared up a lot of confusion around HTML 5, educating us about its capabilities, potential and limitations. He explained that it was a very common client request for something to be made in HTML 5 opposed to Flash. There have been some amazing HTML 5 projects released in recent months. Combining this with Steve Job’s statement Thoughts On Flash, many companies are seeing a common client request to use HTML 5 in favor of Flash. Lee explained how we should educate our clients about when is and is not the right time to use HTML 5.

Seb Lee-Delisle - What the Flux

Seb’s talk covered some similar issues to Lee’s and he addressed the most talked about issue of the moment, “is Flash dead?” As always, he delivered a fun, interactive session, hoisting people onto stage to partake in his own version of weemote controlled family fortunes.

(photo © All rights reserved by Marc Thiele)

 Rather than dwelling on the fact that Flash “may” be dying, Seb encouraged us to be proactive and explore new interactive technologies and coding languages, rather than limiting our skill set to Flash and Actionscript. In my opinion this is sound advice and I certainly intend to delve into mobile development, Unity and HTML 5 in the near future. I do think Seb’s opinion of the future of Flash is more pessimistic than mine. We can’t ignore the fact that at Preloaded we currently have a massive amount of Flash gaming work coming in to the studio and therefore, is anything but dead…. for now at least!

Iain Lobb - Zero to game designer in 60 minutes

Iain is a Flash games developer who I’ve been following on Twitter for a while and his was one the sessions I’d circled to attend this year. Despite being relatively new to the speaking world, his session was packed out and I couldn’t even get in the room to see him! Perhaps this was partly due to him being one of the few speakers talking about coding games (something that it seems many people at the conference either already do, or want to get in to).

It sounded like his session was excellent, detailing common platform gaming techniques. One thing I did hear was that he claims his games don’t require any optimization! I’d be interested to know if this is simply due to his games not being very processor intensive, or if it’s actually a result of intelligent coding (considering optimisation techniques in every line of code he writes, meaning his games don’t require any further tweaking.)

Joshua Hirsch - Summer Fridays

Joshua leads the development team at New York based interactive studio, Big Spaceship. It was fascinating seeing some of the exciting work they have produced and also hearing about their somewhat controversial business approaches, in particular “Internal Project Fridays.” I.P Fridays is an initiative that Big Spaceship has tried, tested and will soon scrap. It allowed their staff to spend Friday afternoons working on clientless projects derived from their own ideas and with their own direction. I was really hoping to hear Joshua say how well the scheme had worked, but although it was successful, the flaws slightly outweighed the benefits. None the less, it was really interesting to see some of their great projects (Pretty Loaded and The Most Awesomest Thing Ever) and I admire him for trying something new that allowed his employees the freedom to create.

Robert Hodgkin & Jared Tarball

For me personally, the most inspiring sessions were those from Robert Hodgkin and Jared Tarball. Robert, co-founder of the Barbarian Group, invited us into his world of magnetism. He literally seems obsessed with magnetic repulsions, gravitational forces, particles and the artistic behavior of their combination. So much so, his apartment is covered in amazing creative forms built from thousands of little magnetic spheres. Although he claims not to be, Robert is clearly a Maths god and he has created some simply beautiful artworks applying theories of magnetism to processing.

Jared, co-founder of Etsy, is such an interesting person before you even get on to his great work. He lives and works in a desert in New Mexico (not completely alone, with his wife, but still – pretty isolated). He embraces this environment, seeking inspiration from the natural surroundings, which he injects into his work. Through processing algorithms he creates some positively beautiful pieces.

(photo © All rights reserved by Marc Thiele)

He went on to show us how he then started experimenting with physical objects. He recently bought a 3D printer - freakin awesome (which I now think should be an essential purchase for every office). At the end of his session he even gave away some amazing home made wooden space invader cubes that he’d made especially for FOTB - gutted I didn’t get one :(

When we leave conferences like this, we’re bursting with ideas and plans, of which we probably follow through on few. If I leave this year with just one thing on my to do list, this is it; prioritise experimentation with algorithms and processing - forget that it may not benefit my professional development as much as other things and do something about the immense admiration (and a little jealousy) I have for these guys.

Other great stuff

Conrad Winchester (one of last years elevator pitch winners) spoke about the open source framework Robot Legs and Robert Penner’s latest coding masterpiece, Signals. Brendan Dawes was as good as usual – he never bores. Rich Shupe introduced us to LoaderMax, which seems a much more advanced version of the AS3 library BulkLoader (something I’m really excited about trying out). Branden Hall spoke about Hype, the AS3 framework he created with Joshua Davis - the framework for creative play. It looks pretty easy to use (especially for those newer to coding) and aims to “make Flash fun again”. The elevator pitches were amazing, so many talented people showing off their work in just 3 minutes each. Congrats to the winners, Thomas Vian, Andreas Rønning and Tomek Augustyn. Joa Ebert's session was mind blowing. What can I say... why do you not work for Adobe!? Ralph Hauwert, the self confessed sphere lover talked about his development process from experiemnting with PixelBender to Cinder and showed us some beautiful results (and made my head hurt a bit).

All in all…

When you’ve been a Flash developer for years, it can be difficult to find sessions that are going to give you a wealth of new tricks, tips and techniques that you’ll use in your everyday work (something that when I was newer to the game, I certainly used to come away with). What it does provide to those who are possibly older hat, is a few ideas from every session and a massive amount of motivation, guidance and inspiration. It forces you to think about what you’re really passionate about and why you got into this industry in the first place, about how this may differ from your Monday to Friday work and why you must make time for personal projects, play and experimentation. Above all, you come away with a real desire to invest time in continued learning and personal development.

Lessons learnt

• Sit near the front – you can’t get the free stuff if you sit too far back (John Davey can’t throw that far)!
• Don’t limit your skills to Flash (who knows what’s going to happen to it).
• Make some regular time for work related play.
• If you’re a girl and are always gutted to find a boy sized t-shirt in your bag, you can usually get lady t-shirt at one of the kiosks (they are nicer and also free).

Thanks for a great FOTB 2010 - time definitely well spent. Every beach should have one!

P.S. Please don’t give me another bag!