Flash On The Beach 2008

Awesome.

I got back from the conference yesterday, feeling both inspired and depressed (because it’s over again). We got to see a lot of great sessions, and I think most of us returned with a lot of new ideas, starting with reserving 20 minutes each day to play around :-)

It all started with Rob Chiu’s impressive sequence, which perfectly set the tone for the next 3 days:

These were the sessions I attended after that:

Monday:

• Richard Galvan – Flash Now and in the Future: Some new, and some old stuff on the Flash platform
• Marco Casario – Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR: Showed us how easy it is to incorporate API’s in your AIR apps
• Branden Hall – Brilliant Ideas that I’ve Blatantly Stolen: Inspired me to (code-)play some more with Flash itself.
• Geoff Stearns – YouTube Lessons Learned: Interesting to see some background info on one of the most used swfs on the internet. Saw some funny youtube video’s aswell :-P
• Erik Natzke – Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play: One of my last year’s favorites, showed some more background on how some of the drawing was done.
• James Paterson – Modulating a Lot: This guy creates some CRAZY WEIRD interactive animations. One of this year’s drug addicts.

Tuesday:

• Mike Downey – The business side of AIR: how to sell your clients on AIR apps
• Jeremy Thorp – Emergence
• Grant Skinner – Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know: Great to see that Grant is telling the same that we are teaching our students
• Jam Session: Keith, Mario, Joa, Andre and Carlos each did a 10 minute session showing us a selection of the stuff they do
• Lee Brimelow – Platform Jiu-Jitsu: Saw some cool wrestling video’s, linked to Flash platform idea’s
• Robert Hodgin – The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life: Personally made the book store sell out their Processing books last year :-)

Wednesday:

• Geoff Lillemon – Stop and Smell the Internet with Geoff Lillemon and Anita Fontaine: Really weird (but cool), Tim Burton style fine art.
• Andre Michelle – Adobe made some noise! Andre is one of my favorite speakers, the stuff he does with audio in actionscript is crazy.
• Koen de Weggheleire – Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3: co-owner of Happy Banana, funny session about matrices and bitmapdata.
• Mario Klingemann – Here be Pixels: This guy blows my balls of every year. The way he solves certain problems is just crazy…
• Jonathan Harris – The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure: Stood in front of 800 flashers, saying there hasn’t been made a masterpiece in flash yet…

Thank you John & the FOTB team to throw another great conference, thanks to all the speakers for inspiring me (see you in Miami?) and thanks to my employer for giving me a chance to attend FOTB08!