The FlashInTheCan festival in Toronto is well into day 1 and has gotten off to a great start.
Kevin Lynch kicked off the festival with the keynote this morning. He talked about the new Flash Communication Server 1.5, noting that there is now a free developer’s edition which does not time out. Colin Moock came up next and showed off some of the FireFly components from CyberSage. After that, I came up and talked about DevNet Pro subscriptions. I then gave a sneak peak of DevNet Resource Kit Volume 3 which will be available to DevNet Pro and Essentials subscribers next week. Kevin then came back up and showed off Macromedia Central, and the Flash Player 6 for Pocket PC.
I gave a session on FlashRemoting, talking about encapsulating client / server Flash Remoting code within custom ActionScript classes, in order to create modular and reusable Flash Remoting libraries. At the end, I showed how to use this with ASBroadcaster in order to create an event driven client / server architecture. I am going to try and post some of the examples from my session later today.
I also got a chance to watch Andries Odendaal session titled “Design Intelligence”. Andries showed some amazing projects utilizing 3d in Flash. One of the cool things he showed was a tool he built in Flash to create 3d isometric landscapes. The tool exported the landscape to a text file (via the server). He could then import the text file into a 3d tool (I think he was using Maya), and recreate the landscape within the 3D tool. He would use that to create a texture map for the landscape, and reimport the texture map as an image into Flash. Finally, he would place the texture map beneath the landscape and make the make the isometric platform invisible. So he now could manipulate objects in this 3d world within Flash with a rich textured background. I’ll see if he has an example on-line.
Right now, I am sitting in on Erik Natzke’s session, and as usual, he is showing some of the coolest, most amazing Flash stuff I have ever seen. Right now he is dissecting in great detail how he put together the tage turning effect that he did for HP.
Of course, the best part about attending these conferences is that I get to meet so many people in the Flash community that I have either never met, or haven’t seen in a long time. THus far I have chatted with Colin Moock, Dave Yang, Branden Hall, Beau Amber and Grant Skinner. There is a book signing party tonight so I will probably get to meet a lot more people from the Flash Community.
More updates later…
