Category Archives: Flash

The Beach: Reporting from Flash on the Beach

Update: I’ve now written up my thoughts on Day Two and Day Three.

Now in its fourth year, Flash on the Beach has quickly grown in to one of the most popular Web conferences in Europe. This week hundreds of developers, designers, gamers and animators (you name it) have arrived in Brighton to see and hear the latest news and innovations in the Flash world. I’m here and until Wednesday, trying to get to the best of the packed schedule.

Flash on the Beach 2009

Keynote

Richard Galvan and Mark Anders

The conference opened with a keynote from Adobe’s Richard Galvan (product manager for Flash Professional) and Marc Anders (Senior Principal Scientist).

They started with the usual kind of Flash Player boasting, statistics, looking at the penetration and speedy uptake of the past versions for the last view years and looked over some of the feature successes of 2009 before outlining what we can expect in the near future.

Of those success stories they particularly highlighted the prevalence of 3D, the perspective API in particular and the new drawing API. With both, celebrating the growing power of the Flash platform in their ability to handle these developments as they’ve promised years previously.

They talked about the forthcoming release of Adobe AIR 2.0, demonstrating some of the popular applications that have surfaced this year in TweetDeck and Fanbase.

Elsewhere on the Flash player, the new text rendering engine looks impressive. The forthcoming update easily renders ‘print quality’ text in any reading direction – not only bi-directional right to left, but supporting languages such as Thai, Hebrew, Arabic and Asian languages horizontally and vertically.

We had a sneak preview of what else is to come in the CS4 update. Inclusive of the above text advances; authors will have a far greater amount of control over editable properties, more toward the likes you would find in Photoshop (kerning, ligatures, etc) as well as the TLF (Text Layout Framework) improvements which can link multiple text fields like columns, as to what we’re more familiar with in Adobe Illustrator.

There’s a keen initiative to make life easier for newcomers to Flash – and designers ;) .

For example, there are now a number of code snippets bundled with the Flash IDE which, whilst not being anything brand new at all for most workflows, has been lacking in Flash for some time. These will beparticularly beneficial for those experiencing migrations problems from Actionscript 2.0.

Alongside those, the code IDE also has both auto-completion and code introspection for custom classes.

As has always been Adobe’s intention, there’s a continuation of tightening the integration of programs across the Creative Suite.

Flash Professional and Flash Builder (the renamed Flex Builder) have a partnered workflow between coding and design environments. Documents can be created within the Flash IDE and a document class be generated and automatically be launched within Flash Builder. Flash Builder in turn has compile and debug shortcuts via the toolbar to switch back and forth with Flash thereafter.

The keynote concluded with Mark Doherty joining Richard and Mark on stage to demonstrate some of their developments with mobile devices. Showing Flash running (almost) natively on a few mobile devices and even promised their first television platform support – though poor cabling let down the demonstration.

Advanced Desktop Development with Adobe AIR

Mike Chambers

The first talk proper I attended was with Mike Chambers exploring some advanced techniques with Adobe AIR. Since it’s release 18-odd months ago, there’s been plenty of entry-level talks and tutorials at conferences I’ve attended, so I was looking forward to a more advanced demonstration.

Mike went through some of his contributions to the AS3corelib, a must-have library of tools that came around last year.

The first was the FileMonitor, straightforward enough, is a handler class for monitoring changes to a file on the system marked for observation. The class dispatches events on modification and movement (or if it is deleted) by polling the file regularly and, basically, looking for changes to the last modified date. Mike noted that this class and the VolumeMonitor, which he demonstrated next, essentially facilitate what AIR natively ‘cannot’ really do. They’re not particularly hacks, but workarounds until the runtime supports these functions natively.

Mike also talked about the AIR 2.0 release, that as well as having the performance improvements you’d expect, checks off a few of the most popular feature requests, which was one of Adobe’s highest priorities.

He demonstrated the StorageVolume API, which monitors for USB mounted hard drives. He recorded a video with a flip camera and handled the file transfer within an AIR application which detected it’s mounting and read the file contents.

This really made AIR look like it could eventually be a very powerful desktop runtime (and already it’s pretty damn good as it is). But with it’s seamless connection with the hardware devices and by seeing it confidently carry out the kind of tasks you’d expect more traditional proprietary software to perform was really something.

Likewise, Mike showed some examples of storing persistent data for applications by creating custom file types. He also utilised the application cache, by way of the ResouceCache class, to optimise processing. This of course also allows you to access these kinds of assets whilst offline, which after all is half the deal with AIR. It too really made AIR look like a far more serious, or at least a more mature platform than it’s young age may otherwise suggest.

Finally he talked about forthcoming changes to running native processes and applications – and this is a huge deal.

I’m sure this is would have been the most requested feature by far – that AIR should be able to launch files in their native apps and run other applications or processes securely from within it’s own runtime.

Mike was the developer of the CommandProxy, a proof-of-concept bridge between AIR and the OS by way of a secondary application (running in the background), but this development now makes that obsolete. This would be able to talk to other applications the correct way, whether that application is something like Photoshop or a command line process.

Apparently though, if you do use this functionality, you can no longer distribute your applications as an .AIR file. Although your app will still be completely cross-platform (this is important to Adobe, he says) you’ll have to export as the platform-specific executable – so a DMG or EXE file, for example – though handy as it is, the compiler will produce these for you :) .

Mike has now uploaded his notes to his blog here.

HelloEnjoy

Carlos Ulloa

Next up was Carlos Ulloa who discussed a selection of his latest work for his studio HelloEnjoy. Founder of Papervision3D, Carlos (as ever) didn’t fail to impress.

The first project was ‘Flowers’, a very intricate visualiser and editor for forms of artistic models of abstract 3D flowers. Whilst offering a very simple interface to manipulate the characteristics of the flower – shape, size, colours, in real-time – it hid some extremely complex mathematics and transformations behind-the-scenes.

Carlos took us through how the project was conceptualised and ultimately built, referring to some of the libraries he used along the way – Flint particles being one of them, as well as the excellent GouraudMaterials for shading.

Secondly he demonstrated EnergyLab – a relatively straightforward game mechanic, but executed to the highest levels of workmanship and attention to detail that I’ve probably ever seen in such an application.

Having visited the site before and being impressed enough simply by the experience it offered (it deservedly won a FWA, too), I hadn’t truely realised how much work had gone into the development of the project – particularly the 3D work more in the combination of Papervision and Maya, than the video production which is arguably more striking.

Carlos went through an extremely complex and lengthy process to achieve the desired visual results requested by the client, who pretty much came to them with a video full of CGI and asked “Can you do that?”. It’s exemplary of the powerful effects that can be created in Flash as boasted in the keynote.

Working in parallel with Papervision and Maya, for weeks scrutinising every detail of the project it would seem, it’s as much also a remarkable achievement of workflow and process. I don’t think that playing the game really represents this.

Finally we saw walkthroughs of HelloRacer, an iPhone application developed with Unity 3D in just a week (the online version of which can be seen on Carlos’ blog), and the popular HelloEnjoy website – newly improved with extra models and sound. By this point most people were already pretty blown away, Carlos made this look relatively simple - he sets a high bar.

Adobe Town Hall

Adobe Flash Platform team

This session was a face-to-face Q&A between the leaders of the Flash platform and the community at large, an open-mic style meeting allowing anybody to fire any questions they had.

The team was Richard Galvan, Mark Anders, Paul Burnett, Andrew Shorten, Mark Doherty and Lee Brimelow.

Most questions related generally to workflow, feature requests or concerns over software bugs, with the odd teething problem with CS4 thrown in. However a few points are worth nothing outrigh.

For one, the panel were asked about threading and whether there are any plans to support some kind of threading in the Flash Player (ever, at all). I thought this would produce an outright “no”, but it seems it is something that they’re considering. No doubt due to the high amount of requests. They said, whilst threading is very hard to achieve and in no-way present in any form natively for the player right now, they’ve looked at other methods of running concurrent tasks seen elsewhere with the likes of HTML5 or Grand Central Dispatch, to facilitate something similar. So although there is a definite interest, what we might eventually see may not necessarily be ‘threading’, per se.

Another (perhaps inevitable) question asked for any update on the status of Flash for the iPhone – both for support in the Safari browser as well as potential to run applications natively on the platform. Disappointingly, there is none. This was an outright blank – although of course, it’s still a target. Adobe will demonstrate Flash Player 10 to the best of its ability at Adobe MAX 2009, but other that that, there’s no new plans. It was actually at FOTB last year that the first announcements were made.

Thirdly Flash Media Server got a mention, FMS is something I have a bit of a soft spot for. The question was asked as to whether it will ever support AS3 – currently it’s a cheap version of AS1, which is basically Javascript. Though unfortunately here too, they had no news to offer – more to do with the fact that none of these guys work on the platform personally, so they couldn’t offer anything. But it was said that the platform is still being developed though, and it’s probably just ‘a matter of time’.

Finally there was a quick conversation about the ‘headless’ Flash player, a distribution for search engines to allow indexing of Flash-based content (SWF files). I wrote about this when it was announced, but it sounds as if it might now be released again but for developers to play with – for the same reasons and SEO purposes so we can see how it works inside-out, but also as a tool that could be used for the likes of automated testing, or anything else that we might be able to come up with.

Another note taken from the session actually, it seems that Flash on the Beach is unfortunately ‘too close to MAX’, as I heard on multiple occasions. Adobe are obviously holding back from secrets for MAX, fair enough, but it was disappointing to hear this said a few times to the crowd of eager community members who’ve paid their hundreds of pounds for their tickets.

Cybernetic Art Revisited

Dr. Woohoo!

Flash on the Beach has been noted for a being a conference that despite it’s name isn’t solely concentrated on Flash. Although you’d expect the whole platform to be covered (Flex, AIR, etc), which it is, FOTB also hold sessions on technologies only loosely associated with Flash, other Adobe products and pure Web technologies too. They’ve held talks on the likes of Processing for example, and there are talks about technology in general. This was the first of those kind for me.

Dr. Woohoo! talked about his time working with cybernetics and digital art and his paradigm of Art + Science = Serious Fun. He talked about about the people and places that have influenced his work and shaped his career to date.

He spoke about his time at the Santa Fe complex, showed some great recordings of the Art && Code symposium and other exhibitions he’s attended, spoke about the current state of affairs with reference to projects like Computer Vision and more recently Project Natal.

He then demonstrated his latest work with a ZCam and openFrameworks to drive mini-bots around his podium on stage.

There was a lot of name dropping and references thrown in to books and other institutions, recommended reading and quotes from luminaries of the field (far too many for me to write here). His blog is regularly updated, so hopefully his slides will eventually surface there.

Telling Stories

Hillman Curtis

Telling stories was another such session.

Hillman Curtis was the Art Director at Macromedia when Flash was first born in 1998. In his talk he spoke about his journey from then until now, his work with photography, film and Web design and his influences and muses found along the way.

We saw work from his portfolio and part of his latest film; a feature length documentary on David Byrne.

Despite being another code-free talk, it was attended by all event-goers and met with a compelled atmosphere no less.

I actually though this was very well placed at the end of the day, it seemed to encapsulate everything about why we do the things we do, even if not talking directly about our software product itself.

Epiphany

Joel Gethin Lewis

That was the end of the daytime sessions. After a break we returned for the first of the ‘Inspired’ evening sessions of the week. These talks aimed to be free of code too, if not development entirely, hosted purely for inspiration and the feel-good factor.

Joel Gethin Lewis is an interaction designer and artist who previously worked with United Visual Artists.

We saw some of his work there including the brilliant Regent Street Christmas lights of 2007. The huge light installation claimed to be the first ever ‘interactive’ Christmas lights created, the formations and lights changed based upon the density of shoppers below and other factors such as surrounding weather conditions, captured by cameras and climate sensors hidden around the street.

Since then he has founded two new companies, Hellicar&Lewis and YesYesNo.

From the latter we saw their project Lights On (also currently on the YYN homepage at the time of this writing), a massive audio visual performance created for the opening of the new Ars Electronica museum. With YesYesNo, he spoke about his work with openFrameworks and Computer Vision also.

He also worked on another great project called Contact, a floor-based artwork commissioned by the British Council that tracked the motion of those walking over it and generated physics-simulated shapes and objects below them on a giant LCD surface.

The thing is, this project was developed in about two weeks and made possible only by leveraging open source software. It’s with this possibility and ultimate realisation upon Contact’s success that that Joel reached his ‘epiphany’; that in his opinion, all software not only need not be paid for but should be free and open source.

Enthused, he found a whole host of open sourced software and similar successful projects and became set on being a champion of the open source school of thought. There’s a great article from Creative Review earlier this year in which he and partner Pete Hellicar talk about their experience.

All in all, a great first day from Flash on the Beach – all boxes ticked and more, exceeding expectations already.

I do apologise for the lengthy post, worry not – I’m sure I can’t keep this up. :)

Changes: Why should I be creating iPhone apps? I'm a Flash developer.

For a change, this month’s LFPUG didn’t actually feature any Flash. Instead, we were presented with an introduction to iPhone application development with two single-hour talks delving into developing with Objective-C and the Cocoa Touch environment, but all specifically tailored to take an approach designed for a Web developer’s perspective.

I really don’t know how I feel about iPhone development, as a Flash developer, anyway. There’s been a lot of ‘iPhone for Flash developers’ or ‘Actionscript for the iPhone’ or similarly titled tutorials spring up around the Web lately, which I guess have come about on the back of the over night success stories from applications booming in popularity and the ease with which the App Store lets a small dev team get equal distribution and visibility of their application. But why Actionscript?

The profitability is understandable, I just think it’s strange that specifically Flash developers assume that iPhone development is something they can or should be laying claim to, that it’s something within their domain or their right to be creating these apps? It’s gotten to the point where a Flash platform meeting is hijacked (hijacked isn’t the right word, it wasn’t unwelcome and it drew the biggest turn out I’ve ever seen) – is it selfish (?) that there’s such a demand for tutorials to be made easily digestible for them, when traditionally any other kind of development is usually approached by everyone else peaking in?

I’m not sure, I can’t decide. Maybe it’s more honest – that instead, for example, it’s the look and feel, the slick presentation layer and the interactivity of the interface that’s so attractive (it’s Flash-like) – and a lot of people do start playing with Flash because it looks good. Flash is inherently a visual platform. Maybe Flash just is the closest platform and Flash development easily lends to iPhone development.

Whatever the case, thinking as a platform-agnostic programmer, I was looking forward to the meeting. I have an addiction to learning (or trying) new languages even if I needn’t, plus it was honestly disclosed that this week there would be no Flash content an iPhone 101 bent into shape for Flash developers to understand, it would be was tailored for Web developers generally – I was hoping for more conceptual comparisons rather than perhaps just pointing out syntactical differences – either way, curiosity had the better of me.

First up was Masi Woermann starting with An Introduction to iPhone Application Development. He introduced the broad concepts of iPhone development and the different approach developers must under go to create applications mainly looking at the workflow. Being primarily a Flex developer, Masi maintained comparisons between the architectures of a Flex app and an iPhone app – drawing parallels between Objective-C and Actionscript coding and their relationship to the UI components created with Interface Builder versus MXML.

He introduced the development tools and iPhone SDK, discussed some basics of Objective-C (pointers, memory management, classes) and eventually produced a very simple application – demonstrating the basics of interacting with visual components, straightward methods, getters, setters – some simple OOP.

It was good to see some hands on coding and that, obviously, although it’s a completely different kind of development – it might be intimidating but it’s not impossible. Watch it here:

Masi Woermann - An Introduction to iPhone Application Development

Then Matt Biddulph presented iPhone Development for Web Developers. Matt is primarily server-side developer working with the likes of Python, Ruby and Rails, but instead of going into any code expressed that his real interest in iPhone applications lies in the device’s connectivity, specifically the capability to connect to the Web and interoperate and network with data and objects found there.

He looked at the applications that Twitter and Facebook developed, quoting Joe Hewitt’s development wisdom with his work at Facebook.

He also criticised some of the failures of the current SDK, as Hewitt also did, specifically that some of the native features that you’ll see in Apple’s applications still aren’t available for third-party developers to utilise. I hadn’t realised this was the case, or would have thought Apple would hold back on anything – I guess with later releases more features will become available. The iPhone OS 3.0 SDK is due for release this summer, perhaps more will become available then.

Watch Matt’s talk here:

Matt Biddulph - iPhone Development for Web Developers

Matt also mentioned Phonegap, an open source cross-platform mobile framework for building apps with JavaScript. It’s been labelled as being ‘like AIR for the iPhone‘ and operates on Android and Blackberry, too. Again, maybe it’s just be another means to cut a corner and not develop with the native environment, but it looks impressive – and it seems powerful. You can take advantage of all the core features of the various platforms – geo-locations, the accelerometer etc.

It’s also created entirely by by Web developers. As the video on their site claims, there’s not many Objective-C developers but there are a lot of Web developers – so in keeping with the rest of these observations, there really are more and more opportunities and points of entry for Web developers to get into mobile and iPhone app development, it’s purely demand that has created these.

All in all, whether it’s ‘in favour’ or not for Flash developers to want to develop iPhone apps is probably irrelevant – whether its a for profit or to expand a skillset probably doesn’t mater either. Hopefully all the attention will cause a shift in the perception of developing for mobile devices in general, I know I still cringe whenever anyone mentions Flash Lite – but it seems that’s starting to enjoying the beginnings of a resurgence too.

Then I think of initiatives like Adobe’s Open Screen Project and think this could be a really exciting time for mobile devices regardless, maybe there’s just so much fuss over the iPhone right now because it’s the iPhone.

As I write this post an email has just arrived in my inbox announcing there’s new group meeting specifically for developing iPhone, the London iPhone Bootcamp – ‘part seminar, part hackathon, part workshop’ – they too, are looking for the next killer iPhone app!

Thoughts?

Helps Both Ways: Facebook's official Actionscript 3.0 Client Library

Last month I talked about Ted Patrick’s “Facebook on The Flash Platform“, an Adobe eSeminar discussing development with the Facebook API using Flash. In particular, I pointed to an open source Actionscript API library to work with in the absence of Facebook themselves offering ‘official’ support as they (then) did only for PHP and Javascript development.

This week though, Adobe and Facebook announced a partnership they’d managed to keep neatly under wraps and have now released a new official open source client library for Actionscript 3.

This joint effort is intended to be a complete resource supporting all Facebook APIs, including Facebook Connect, for all Flash and Flex applications for Facebook.

Over on the Adobe’s Facebook Developer Connection, Adrian Ludwig (Adobe) and Josh Elman (Facebook) talk about the library and the partnership. There’s also documentation, example applications, quick starts, inspiration and code.

Adobe Flash Platform - Facebook Platform | Adobe Developer Connection

In his post, Serge Jespers points to a nice quick start by Danny Dura that uses the library to set up a simple connection to Facebook in about ten minutes.

You can tell both Adobe and Facebook are excited about this, adding social elements to games, user experiences or interactions makes them endlessly more engaging, it almost goes without saying. But now that these experiences can be as easily enabled – and in my opinion, enhanced - by Flash, I hope will prove to facilitate some great applications.

It’s equally beneficial for Facebook and Adobe. It means even more applications for the Flash platform and an easily entry point for yet another set of developers to integrate with the Facebook API.

And to help kick that off, Rich Tretola at InsideRIA has announced a new series of articles covering development with the new AS3 library, authored by Mirza Hatipovic – an ambitious 20 articles, from a simple Hello World to advanced PHP and database-supported applications.

I’m particularly looking forward to seeing and playing with the Facebook Connect API – not sure if InsideRIA will cover these – but hopefully whatever I do get up to, I’ll get round to writing about.

Learn: Lee Brimelow's Flash Camp dead drop

Ted Patrick has posted a recording of his Adobe eSeminar “Facebook on The Flash Platform” that he presented last Thursday.

Josh Elman, Facebook Platform Project Manager, joins him – offering a little technical history and strategy behind the application platform and Facebook Connect also.

Facebook on The Flash Platform

It’s a good introduction to building Flash applications using the Facebook API. It’s clear that building on the Facebook platform grants developers an equal opportunity to create powerful and successful social experiences.

As Ted and Josh describe, by utilising Facebook users’ social contexts and by the ease of which you can distribute through the social graph, applications can generate a huge amount of traffic – and as Josh puts it, developers can profit wildy. ;)

Ted gives a simple overview of the architecture of a Facebook application, the various application states and talks about FBML, Facebook’s XML mark-up – and shows how to build a simple single-component Flex application that really demonstrates how easy Facebook have made the information retrieval possible via the API.

The Q&A is worth listening to (it starts around 37 minutes), Ted and Josh discuss important development aspects outside of the actual coding – how hosting is managed, handling session keys and such.

But Ted also points to a promising looking Actionscript library designed for Facebook application developers, simply called The Facebook Actionscript API - which definitely sounds worth checking out (no pun intended).

As yet, Facebook only ‘officially’ support their PHP library, but continue to work with developers in the community to support the other languages. Josh claims this will only improve over the next couple of months and through the year – hopefully (it sounded) to develop similar ‘official’ library counterparts.

Ted’s also posted his Facebook on The Flash Platform sample files.

Yesterday: Flash Camp London 2009

Yesterday I visited Flash Camp London ‘09, an all day community-run Adobe sponsored event on all things Flash Platform.

Last September I attended Flex Camp ‘08, (essentially the same, but obviously focused on Flex) so I expected much the same – cool demos, sneak previews, maybe some insight to what Adobe have in the pipeline for the future – and got pretty much exactly that.

Flash Camp '09

Serge Jespers‘ opening keynote held a lot of optimism and promise for the future of the Flash Platform, quoting the huge number of downloads to date and pointing to the constant growth in market share that the Flash Player and AIR are enjoying – throwing in a couple of digs to the various doubters in the sums while he was at it.

He spoke about the Open Screen Project and Adobe’s ongoing aim to achieve a level of open portability across multiple platforms – not only in the browser and onto the desktop, but to mobile devices too and television platforms. On the subject of the mobile platform, he discussed prototype versions of Flash Player 9 (and 10?) running on a few devices he had to hand (though unfortunately no demo) and expressed Adobe’s wish to have those ready for manufacturers by the end of the year, with intention to have them consumer ready for the end of 2010.

Seb Lee-Delisle was first up, showing off some of the Papervision work he’d recently completed with his agency. He also had some nice demos of the augmented reality tutorials that have been going around lately. These usually use nice applications of the ARToolKit, but Seb pointed to a Flash port I hadn’t yet come across called the FLARToolKit. Presumably with which, you have full control via Actionscript. The Papervision blog has a pretty cool example of the kind of things you can achieve with it.

Next up was Michael Chase, Senior Creative Developer at AKQA. He presented his latest work, Nike Football, which involved a lot of work with Pixel Bender – the new video processing and visual manipulation platform available with Flash Player 10.

Pixel Bender is a non-destructive way to manipulate the pixel data of images and videos by means of developing bespoke plug-ins that function in Flash in a similar way to the various visual effects and filters do in Photoshop or Illustrator.

He demonstrated the Pixel Bender Toolkit, the GUI software used to create these filters. It’s purposely almost identical to every other program in the Creative Suite. Adobe are really pushing for seamless integration across the whole family of software for creators – the vocabulary, workspace, tool sets – all feel very familiar.

For the Nike site, Michael basically developed one filter for use across all video and image content. This seems straightforward enough, but it’s an brilliant advancement only made possible by using Pixel Bender. This way, there’s no need to render of every piece of video with the filter on – or subsequently re-render when the filter is inevitably tweaked (which, of course, could only be the case if permission was given to manipulate supplied video footage in the first place). It also means the video filter doesn’t have to be designed by a creator skilled in After Effects or other video editing software – as said, the Toolkit handles very much like Photoshop, which most designers are fluent in – I think Michael said you could actually use Photoshop to create filters anyway.

It also means you can change the single filter once and apply the changes to all the assets rather than having to edit every piece individually – and as he suggested, not having manipulated the source material means the un-filtered source can be reused elsewhere. And of course because it’s just Actionscript before it’s compiled, the whole plug-in script can be manipulated by a Flash developer.

It was good to see this in use, I’d only really seen the default demo ‘Swirl’ effect that a lot of others there also seemed only to have seen (I’m not sure of the real name). That ’swirl’ is so drastic it seems to have no possible use case, so I’d not really considered Pixel Bender since. Here though its use is subtle, well executed and well placed – I’ll have to give it a go.

Mike Chambers then discussed ‘Scripting with Actionscript 3.0′. Though relatively well-covered territory for the developers, he set about debunking popular misconceptions of Actionscript 3, going through the benefits of migration and giving some examples.

He started with a little background on the new Actionscript version, discussed how the Flash Player was hitting the limits of performance that AS2 could achieve, that Actionscript 3 was heavily driven by the need for application development – which by that point a lot of (the now) RIA developers were forcing into Actionscript 2. They also had Flex in mind.

As I agree with him, ultimately, AS3 isn’t that different to AS2, but it is just different. It’s not harder, or ’slower’ per se. On a language level, the syntax is still simple and very much the same – it’s the APIs that might present more difficulty for those migrating. The APIs in Actionscript 2 grew organically, expanding where needed, but unfortunately did so inconsistently. It’s that realignment that’s a larger change to overcome.

Arguably, any developer with OOP experience, where consistency is promoted, wouldn’t struggle. He suggests that learning Actionscript 3 is future-proofing yourself for new languages that will be far more digestible now that Actionscript contends as a stronger language.

The Timeline is not Evil!

With that in mind, he did admit that the way Adobe present Actionscript 3 can be somewhat intimidating to those without that kind of basic knowledge. The documentation is very much aimed at developers – the code examples are in class and package structures, assuming programming experience where the previous help documentation never did.

Timeline coding is still possible, easily, but it isn’t documented anywhere near as much as class structured code. With one or two caveats, it actually works in almost exactly the same way.

As well as the ‘future-proofing’ mentioned, Actionscript 3 heralds a whole load of other advantages. It’s more verbose (probably where the argued ’slower development process’ claim lies) but in that, offers better debugging – the compiler can be set to be more strict and to detect errors earlier, even – and it’s also the language for new libraries and APIs (think Papervision, Alchemy, the many tweening engines) both from Adobe and efforts from the community.

Richard Dean presented his work on the EA Spore microsite, specifically his efforts built using the Inverse Kinematics and 3D of Flash CS4 – demonstrating some nice timeline-based animation effects, the use of the new ‘Bone’ tool to build character skeletons (more about this later) – as well as some handy tips and best practices.

James Whittaker’s presentation ‘Your First Custom Chrome AIR App With Flash CS4′ delivered exactly what it said on the tin. He offered a walkthrough on how to build your first AIR application, how to design a custom chrome and the various provisions that must be made in doing so, up to publishing an AIR application file and customising the various settings in the new CS4 GUI. He also spoke about handling icons, digital signing, then creating a nice installer badge at the end. His presentation files are already up online.

Lee Brimelow had a huge amount to say about the new CS4 version of Flash – apparently trying to cram a whole day session into his 45 minute slot. He spoke about the new animation model in Flash, how it’s more like After Effects now – again, the overlapping of software uses in the Creative Suite – how even the timeline in the standard workspace is at the bottom of the screen, more along the lines of video editing software.

So much more of the animation process is automated now, to great effect. Motion paths are automatically constructed, even for simple tweens. The path can be treated like any other line in Flash thereon, allowing curvature, adjustment of Bézier angles. Adding a keyframe and point in the middle of a tween no longer creates an awkward corner, but a curve to compliment the original motion path.

There’s far more control. The tween itself is handled as a unique object, so moving or resizing or changing the length of an animation is much easier and also independent of the clip being tweened – there’s no more clumsy attempt to select multiple frames to modify a complete tween.

Again there was demonstration of the native ‘3D’ in Flash Player 10. Lee couldn’t emphasise enough though, that these is intentionally simple 3D effects for transitions and such – not for full 3D immersive environments, for which he recommends to look to Papervision or similar. When the 3D tools are in use though, it’s seamless. There’s a tool to rotate by the Z-axis as simply as there is one for the 2D axes – in doing this, Flash starts to look like 3D rendering software.

These renders are possible because of the ‘notorious’ inclusion of a constantly-running Flash Player on the stage – it’s how Adobe have addressed differences seen in author-time to run-time. In having an constantly running instance of the Flash Player, there should be far fewer discrepancies – although, as they are fully aware of – is a memory hog.

Lee also pointed out the code snippets panel Flash CS4 offers – something I thought Mike Chambers would have mentioned. They’re basically small templates of handy bits of code that anyone unfamiliar with Actionscript (or Actionscript 3, for migrating developers and designers alike) to add common bits of functionality – mouse or frame event handlers for example.

Again we saw Inverse Kinematics – these are great for character animations and (I think perfect) for mocking up prototypes when realistic proofs are required but perhaps the resource isn’t available to fully code them. They’re very quickly put together but equally very effective. Simply constraints applied to skeleton joints create faux-physics that look very convincing. Have a look here if you’ve not seen these in action.

All of that is possible with zero code. Also, all the drag-drop manipulation possible at author-time can also be translated for the user to play with at run-time with the tick of a box – still, with no coding.

Finally Lee demonstrated the new motion editor, which has also has given a huge amount of control to the author compared to what was available before. The complexity of a tween (whether an ‘x’ position or alpha value or whatever) can now be broken down into multiple channels of manipulation.

For example, previously the complexity of control over a tween was determined (and limited) by the tweening graph. This remains, but now different types of easing can be applied to the different parameters within that graph. Say a clip was moving diagonally across the stage – the horizontal movement could have an ease out whilst the vertical direction may have an elastic easing (or obviously any combination). All the tiny tweaks and nuances to animations that couldn’t be easily achieved in previous versions of Flash, or even those only achievable by code now look entirely possible on the timeline at author-time. Lee’s tutorial is a must-see.

Finally, Serge returned to discuss ‘Flex workflows with Flash CS4′. He demonstrated some good techniques in working across Flash and Flex within single projects – firstly how to use Flex metadata tags in Flash, then how to create classes using the Flex SDK and compile those as Flex Library Projects to use as SWC files within Flash (and the Flash CS4 use of SWCs is so much better – adding files to the library rather than to the classpath list) – then likewise compiling components in Flash to handle in Flex. The latter also maintains coded methods on the Flash components that can be handled within the Flex projects, easing the workflow between Flash and Flex developers no end.

Similarly, to ease the workflow between developers and designers (and as I thought would get a mention), Serge ended by demonstrating Flash Catalyst (previously ‘Thermo’). He created Flex components from Flash graphics, multi-layered PSD files and Illustrator assets – all of which generated MXML code that a developer can play with later.

All in all, a great session – Chester and the guys were never going to disappoint. ;)

Various content online can be found in a number of places if you look for the ‘flashcamp_uk’ tag – there’s a whole heap of conversation on Twitter, I expect photos on Flickr and videos on Youtube and Vimeo will surface soon enough. I’ll also put up links to presentations files and source code as and when they find themselves uploaded online.

Update (09.03.09): Serge now has a video tutorial over on his blog demonstrating how to use simple Flex Library Projects in Flash.

Dance just like a Casanova.