I was just looking over some of the upcoming conferences, and was a bit shocked at the DX3 pricing. $1,499 at the door!!! $1,099 early bird pricing. Wow. There's also a $100 community pass which lets you into the expo hall, tech showcases and one night time event.

FlashForward, also put on by Lynda.com, has similar pricing. A full premium conference pass is $1,499. The minimum you are going to pay to get in is $899 early bird. Or you can pay $50 to go to the exhibits and Film Festival. What's with this charging people to see exhibitors, which are just there to sell you stuff?

FiTC is far more reasonable. You'll wind up paying between $275 and $975 Canadian, which seems to be about $230-830 USD. Interesting to note that FiTC also includes student pricing, which is pretty cool.

FiTC is historically a great quality conference. I haven't been to a FlashForward in a while, but its reputation seems to be suffering in recent years, and DX3 is an unknown. I can't see that charging up to $1,500 is going to help either one do well.

Flash on the Beach last December, probably the best conference I've been to, was £199-499, or about $260-660 USD. Rumor has it that the conference just about broke even, which is pretty awesome for a first time conference. And they gave out awesome schwag including laptop bags and tshirts to every attendee. They also paid speakers twice what FlashForward does, covered full expenses, and provided over the top speaker schwag. It makes you wonder what the $1,500 pays for.

Although both FlashForward and DX are in Boston this year, I have not been invited to speak (definitely won't be now ) and I'm probably not going to dish out that kind of cash for a conference. I can't imagine that either one is going to be 2-3 times better than FOTB or FiTC. I guess a lot of people will get their companies to pay or write it off or whatever. Anyway, it will nice to have Flash friends in town, and I'm sure I'll hang out with people at any parties that don't require a badge to get in.

Of course, I could not fail to mention 360 Flex which is $100 for a 3-day conference. Now we are talking!

Advice to conference creators. Cut it back. Don't worry about super fancy venues. We just need a place with decent sound, video, and above all, wireless. Forget about lavish conference-sponsored parties. They usually suck. Honestly. We can find clubs and restaurants on our own. The best times are when a group of people leave the main party and wander around, ending up someplace together, eating and drinking and talking.

People go to conferences for two reasons:

One, to see good speakers with good content, to learn and be inspired.

Two, most importantly, to network and meet friends, talk geeky Flash stuff over excessive amounts of food and alcohol til daybreak.

Make those two available, cheaply, and you've got a success.

I'm feeling quite refreshed and ready for another day of geekery. There weren't too many drinking shenanigans going on last night.

The official watering hole for the FOWA drinkipoos turned out to be a yuppie nightmare. The entrance hallway was filled with gaudy images that were probably intended to recall 1950s pin-ups but actually just looked like page 3 pages torn from a tatty copy of The Sun. The drinks were ludicrously overpriced and getting out of the toilets required a significant toll charge. All of this would have been mitigated if there were some ancillary benefits such as watching young nubile bodies gyrating on a dancefloor but a sign at the entrance made it very clear that dancing was forbidden. This being England, the sign added, "we apologise for the inconvenience."

Before long, a rebellion was organised and a gaggle of geeks made a mass exodus to a lovely cosy pub across the street. Happiness and chattiness emerged. After that, there was time for one civilised nightcap in the hotel bar with the dynamic duo of Tara and Chris, Google's Jonathan Rochelle (a scholar and a gentleman) and Natalie-free from Simon's clutches while he worked frantically on his slides.

It's day two of FOWA now and there's still no sign of free WiFi. Khoi has kindly given me a BT Openzone scratch'n'sniff WiFi card he got yesterday so I'll use that to dip in and out of the river of connectivity and expand on this running commentary throughout the day.

Mark Anders

Adobe kicked off the day with a Flex demo. Having attended Flash on the Beach, there wasn't anything new for me here but it was interesting to watch other people's reactions to the speed of Actionscript 3 and the ease of downloading an Apollo app.

Chris Wilson

Microsoft's Chris Wilson is on stage giving a state of the Web address. He talked about the origins of Ajax, gave a nice shout out to microformats and he mentioned the power of tagging (Hi, Chris!). There's plenty of talk about security which isn't that enthralling to me personally but its probably the most important aspect of IE7 for most people on the planet. Alpha transparency in PNGs; now that's more like it.

Khoi Vinh

Khoi is talking about The Future (capitalisation intentional) which will, as he says, be awesome. But first, let's hear about some of the design challenges at The New York Times. He's showing some nice examples of what art direction is. You'll see art direction in the print version of the paper all the time, but the online counterparts are just templated. There are exceptions like the fifth anniversary of the September 11th attacks and the infographics for the November elections, but of course these are events that are predictable and can be planned for. For breaking news, real-time design just isn't possible. yet.

Khoi makes an interesting point about the schizophrenia in new technology. At the same time that we're getting into hi-def television and DVDs, we're also flocking to YouTube even though the video quality is really lo-fi. And while SLR cameras are getting more and more powerful, we're using crappy little camera phones more and more. This schizophrenia throws up some design challenges for a media outlet like The New York Times.

There's no such thing as a free feature, says Khoi. And remember, the more expressive a designer gets, the more the user has to pay for it (download times and such). So for any new feature, there must be a really valid reason for it to exist. Oh, and options are obstructions. Too many prefs are a sign of unresolved design issues that couldn't be squeezed into the main interface.

Thank you, Khoi. And now it's Simon's turn. Hmmmm. I wonder what he'll be talking about: OpenID, perhaps?

Simon Willison

Oh man, Simon's on a roll. Talking a mile a minute, getting jibes in at Microsoft, cracking jokes about Ben and Mena Trott. he's got the audience in the palm of his twirling, whizzing hand.

Long story, short: OpenID rocks. If you're creating any kind of membership-based site, you need to check this out. If you're member of a lot of different sites, you need to check this out. Oh, and in case you missed it, both AOL and Digg announced support for OpenID over the past few days. The momentum looks unstoppable at this stage.

I love the fact that the evangelism for OpenID is coming from passionate developers like Simon, not from some corporate representative. Like the microformats movement, it's bottom-up rather than top-down. Other companies are buying slots at this conference to pitch their products but Simon gets to talk about OpenID because it's so freakin' cool and can't simply be ignored.

Ah, OpenID and microformats: now there's a cool combo. Simon has won my heart and the hearts of everyone else in the audience, I suspect. He's talking about portable social networks and everything. Bravo, Mr. Willison!

Jonathan Rochelle

After a pleasant lunch with some of the Last.fm posse, I'm back in the auditorium to hear what Jonathan from Google has to say about Google Docs and Spreadsheets (killer name, indeed). These aren't the kind of Web apps I'm likely to use myself but I'm interesting in the technology behind them. I'm assuming that, given the complexity of the applications, the Ajax used will be of the non-Hijax variety.

Open Mic

Time to break out into something a little unusual. This, as Ryan puts it, is the user-generated part of the conference. Over the past few weeks, delegates have been able to log on to the FOWA site and vote for some short presentations they'd like to see at this point. The three highest-scoring subjects will now present.

1. The virtual office. Okay, that works.

2. A documentation technique called Jedi - Just Enough Documentation for Interactions. Great backronym!

3. The topic with the most votes is. which apps will succeed and which will fail in 2007? Who knows?

Daniel Appelquist

And now it's time for a talk on mobile. Let's hear from Daniel Appelquist from Vodaphone. I'm not entirely sure that a provider is necessarily going to be the most subjective voice on this but we'll see.

Actually, there's something interesting stuff here, especially around the intersection of mobile and Ajax. There's plenty of talk about standards, so that's all good. I'll have to corner him later for a chat.

Rasmus Lerdorf

Now let's hear from the creator of PHP, Rasmus Lerdorf. He's taking us on a trip down memory lane, looking at Mosaic and early versions of HTML and PHP. Rasmus basically wrote PHP to scratch his own itch-it's the typical open source story.

Here's a reassuring confession from someone who has written a programming language:

I hate programming. It's tedious. It's no fun. It's like flying: sitting in a smelly metal tube with other people. But I love problem-solving.

Looking at PHP today, it's a lot more verbose. The Computer Science geeks like it now but it sure has moved far away from being a quick and dirty tool for getting something done. Ironically, there are students today that only have a background in object-oriented programming and have to be taught what procedural programming is.

Here's an interesting idea on why people join an open-source community: oxytocin, a neuropeptide otherwise known as nature's trust hormone. That's in addition to the usual incentives like self-interest and self-expression. It's the same motivation that drives people to play World of Warcraft in a big way. Open source projects like PHP are like Web 2.0 community sites: Flickr, Digg and Wikipedia would be nothing without the user-contributed content. The same goes for any open-source project.

In addressing the issue of performance, Rasmus has lost me but that's due to my own mental deficiency rather than any fault with his presentation style.

Security is even tougher. As he says, "basically, you can never click on a link." He has two browsers: one for browsing and one for sites that have personal data. It's kind of paranoid, it's kind of sad but, when you understand the consequences of cross-site scripting, it's entirely justified.

PHP5 makes it trivially easy to take XML from Web services and do stuff with it. I can vouch for that.

Time for a quick announcement.

Tariq Krim

Tariq is from Netvibes. I haven't played with it myself but Mike Stenhouse was raving about it yesterday.

There's a big announcement coming right now. Here it is. a Universal Widget API or UWA if you prefer a TLA.

If you care, you heard it here first folks.

Wait, here's another announcement: support for OpenID. Yay! All the cool kids are doing it.

Right. Make way for the guys from Moo.

Richard Moross and Stefan Magdalinski

Print is dead? Bollocks says Richard. And of course he's right. Derek Powazek would agree, I'm sure.

Moo cards are cool. I've got some: little cards with my Flickr food pictures and the URL of Principia Gastronomica. A significant proportion of this audience also have Moo cards. Best of all, anybody here can get free Moo cards if they give these guys a business card in return.

Business cards don't have to be boring. They can tell a story.

With Moo cards, the difference makes all the difference. Y'know, Qoop launched much the same product-business cards made with the Flickr API-a week before Moo cards launched. But Moo could compete on the differences: unusual size and high-quality recycled card. Everybody talked about Moo cards; nobody talked about Qoop's cards.

Partnership is everything for Moo. Without Flickr, they'd be nothing.

Marketing is a four letter word: free. Giving away free cards is great marketing. I concur: the free cards I got from Moo clinched the decision to buy cards from them.

The attention to detail in Moo's physical package really seals the deal. There are little Easter eggs in there and the luggage-tag card that comes with every pack gets everyone talking. There's an incredible amount that has to be done by hand but that's what guarantees the right level of quality.

Now Stefan is giving a peak behind the curtain at the technical side of Moo. If you want to know what he's saying, well, you should have come to the conference then, shouldn't you? You can't expect me to do everything now, can you?

Tagged with futureofwebapps07 fowa07 chriswilson khoivinh simonwillison openid rasmuslerdorf php netvibes moocards

I just realized that my speaking schedule is getting pretty damn full for the next few months. Here's what I got:

March 2: Boston University Center for Digital Imaging Arts. Two presentations on Flash to students in the Graphic & Interactive Design program. I did this once before a year or so ago. Pretty cool.

March 7: I agreed to present something on the State Pattern at the BFPUG Design Patterns discussion group.

March 15: I'll be speaking at Harvard University's Flash User Group.

April 22-24: Not sure the exact day yet, but speaking about Apollo at FiTC in Toronto.

May 1-3: Again, not sure of the day, but I'll be doing a workshop at the Boston CyberArts Festival, in conjunction with NEiA.

The next definite event after that would be November 1-4, Flash on the Beach in Brighton UK. But who knows? There's also DX3 in Boston in May, but haven't been asked yet. Same goes for FlashForward, also in Boston in September. But even if I don't speak at those, I'll definitely hanging out at night with all the cool people who will be coming to my home town!

I knew about this a while ago, but I guess it was officially announced yesterday at the London Flash Platform User Group. FOTB will have a second running, this November, again in Brighton. I'll definitely be there, I know John Grden is signed up. If there's any way you can make it to this one, I highly recommend it. It had the best vibe, and the best group of people for any conference I've been to.

There's no details on the site yet, but here's where I got the info:

http://www.flashcomguru.com/index.cfm/2007/1/26/Flash-On-The-Beach-2007-thats-seven

Ayer estuve en las charlas del London Flash Platform User Group y ayer tocaba Papervision3d y Componentes en Flex. La charla de Mike Jones sobre Componentes Flex ya la había visto en el Flash on the Beach, así que no voy a comentar nada.

Pues Papervison3d es un motor de 3d para Flash, parece que el definitivo. El proyecto es idea original de Carlos Ulloa, un gallego muy majete que lleva ya un tiempito viviendo en Inglaterra. Ha currado para Sony haciendo juegos para la Play Station y ahora mismo trabaja para Hi-Res. Casi nada.

Carlos ha estado utilizando Papervision en proyectos comerciales desde hace un año y medio pero el empujón definitivo al proyecto se lo ha dado hacerlo Open Source. Por lo visto en 2 meses y con la ayuda de más gente (John Grden responsable entre otros de Red5 y XRay) el proyecto ha sido rehecho completamente, incluyendo el paso de AS2 a AS3.

Desde el punto de vista de alguien que haga 3d "de verdad" seguro que las demos y las posibilidades aún son muy pobres, pero visto desde el mundo de vista Flash, a mi me parecen muy buenas. También tengo que decir que yo de 3d no tengo mucha idea (vamos, ninguna), así que soy fácilmente impresionable.

Dos cosas que me parecieron muy, muy interesantes:

1) Por lo visto los grandes programas de 3d (3D Studio, Maya, Blender) comparten un formato de xml que se llama Collada para describir escenas. Bueno, pues Papervision3d importa escenas en formato Collada. Ayer Carlos tenía abierto al mismo tiempo Maya y el player de Flash. Hizo un cambio en Maya, exportó, F5 y listo. Allí estaba el cambio. Parece que un visor de Collada en Flash ayudaría bastante a modeladores de 3d. Si hay alguno en la sala que lo comente, por favor.

2) Están pensando en usar Red5 para mandar por streaming dentro de un flv escenas Collada en tiempo real. Es decir, tú entras en un juego con un mundo enorme, pero sólo cargas al escena que necesitas. Según te vas moviendo a otras Red5 te manda la que necesites en streaming.. Yeah!

Clarísimo ejemplo de la potencia del Open Source: Papervision + Red5 + Collada = juegazos en Flash.

Ayer Carlos comentó que Adobe ya se ha puesto en contacto con ellos y que están muy interesados en el proyecto. No lo dijo pero yo quise entender que se planteaban añadirlo al player nativamente en algún momento. Para mi hay cosas más importantes para Adobe en la ToDo list del player 10 (como solucionar los bugs pendientes), pero bueno.

Pues nada, todo el que esté interesado que se pase por la web, el foro o la lista de correo.

Larga vida a Papervision3d!

A very happy new year to everyone. 2007 is already shaping up to be a very busy year, not least on the speaking side of things; February sees me going to Seattle having been very kindly asked to speak at Microsoft HQ in Redmond, then in March it's off to SxSW(my first time) in Austin where myself and Jim Coudal will do a little free form ideas kinda thing. April I'm in Toronto for FITC, one of my fave conferences and then May it's a brand new conference from Lynda.com in Boston, Dx3 - which incidentally mN have just done the corporate identity for.

Speaking of mN, look out for a fab new site we've just finished for a new BBC tv show which will be airing soon, and keep your eyes peeled for our own new site; it's taken longer than we (or should that be I) anticipated, partly due to me redesigning some parts of the interface. Judging by the emails I've been getting and the people I bumped into at Flash on the Beach, many are intrigued by what's going on in the little teaser trailer we put on our current site. All will be revealed soon. Also look out for the next issue of Computer Arts Projects which has a lovely big feature on mN and while you're at it check out future copies of .Net and Digit. Remember we're always on the look for new talent to be part of the mN adventure. If you think you've got what it takes then get in touch.

Right now I'm spending quite a bit of time getting into NodeBox, the free Mac OsX Python based 2D graphics program. They've recently released a library called CoreImage - think dynamic real-time scriptable Photoshop type thing and you'll get the idea of how powerful it is - and that's just one of the very cool libraries for this fabulous piece of kit. I was talking to Rich Shupe about NodeBox at Flash on the Beach, as we were wondering if all this hardcore AS3 stuff that's soon to hit in Flash 9 will put up a slight barrier to entry for designers getting into the beauty of code. We started to remember the days of simple things like Hypercard and the like. Anyway, one of things I was telling Rich about was how NodeBox has this crazy menu item called "New with code". Instead of starting with a new blank document you can choose "New with code" and it creates some random code (that always works) that just does "something". This can then act as a spring board for generating ideas or more importantly help you understand the Python language. I just love that.

Clearleft is a UCD, or User Centred Design consultancy. We spend time learning about the people who use our clients products, and then put those users at the heart of the design process. We do this using a variety of techniques from user surveys and contextual enquiry, through to persona creation, wireframing and usability testing. The ultimate goal of this process is to create experiences that are useful and meaningful to the people using our clients software.

As a company we specialise in the architecture and design side of the equation. We understand programming and development, but it's not a service we offer. When clients come to us for implementation, we prefer to partner with another agency that specialises in back-end development. We've been designing a lot of interesting web applications recently, so Ruby on Rails seemed like a natural choice of development technology. One of the interesting things about working with Rails developers is their love of agile development.

Not being a developer, I've always been a bit nervous about agile development. I've heard people evangelise the benefits of reduced documentation, fast iterations and peer programming, and it logically makes sense. However I've always seen agile development as a bit of an ideological clique, and terms like extreme programming and scrum methodologies hardly make it accessible to the lay person. Because of this I've been aware of the concept for some time, but never really looked into it. It's always seemed much more relevant to developers, so we've done our thing and let our dev partners do theirs.

A few weeks ago I was lucky enough to attend the Flash on the Beach conference in Brighton. As I mentioned at the time, my favourite talk of the conference came from Aral Balkan. During his wide-ranging presentation, Aral touched on a number of topics, but the one that piqued my interest the most was his take on agile development and how it fitted into a user centred design philosophy.

At first glance you'd be excused for thinking that the two techniques were diametrically opposed. After all Agile development is about making the developer's life easier, while UCD is about making the user's life easier. However the ultimate goal of both techniques is to deliver more useful software, and there is a lot of crossover.

Sat in the audience listening to Aral describe agile development, I was amazed how similar parts of it were to our UCD process. The agile process starts with a "Planning Game" where the client and dev team sit down and create a series of "user stories" in plain English. These stories are then broken down into tasks which are estimated and prioritised. This is pretty much exactly what we do, except we call it an IA workshop. We start by talking to the client about their users and examining any user data we may have gathered previously. Using this information, we"ll develop a set of "user personas" and create "scenarios" and "user paths" based on these archetypes. The user paths are broken down into tasks and each task is estimated and prioritised based on utility, complexity and time/cost.

In agile development, project specifications and other documentation is eschewed in favour of rapid implementation. We take a similar approach, and avoid written documentation in favour of representative wireframes. Rather than spending weeks trying to explain how a system will work in words, we build a non-functional paper prototype or a semi-functional XHTML/CSS prototype. Our clients can then start playing with the site before a single line of code has been written, so changes are fast and involve little overhead.

This is where we diverge slightly from the agile process as we wireframe the whole system in one go whereas agile devotees will only implement one user story at a time. I prefer to plan the site out fully first as I feel it makes for a more holistic approach. One process invariably affects another, and if you're only concentrating on one story, it is easy to miss important patterns or vital connections. We've never done the small, fast iteration thing before so I'd be interested to see how it works. However I'd be worried that it would make user testing difficult as you would either be forced to do lots of small user tests which would cause resource problems, or wait till enough of the system has been designed to run a multi scenario test, at which point it becomes more difficult and costly to re-program the interactions

Minor issues aside, I think the similarities between agile development and UCD are fascinating. There is a great article over at UXmatters at the moment called Clash of the Titans: Agile and UCD which mirrors my feelings on the subject. I urge you to check the article out and would love to hear your thoughts.

Sorry for the delay! - Conference Lag! Flash on the Beach Speaker notes can now be found on the home page.

Christian Heilmann has posted the questions and answers that were the basis of the German Podcast that he translated for us. They had given both Aral and I a set of questions to answer on accessibility and Flash not so long ago. After meeting and chatting to Geoff Sterns at Flash on the Beach I would like to add to the answer of the last question -

18) What is your wishlist for web 3.0? Is Flash going to be a major player in the future?

I would like to insert Flash into a page so that it works without any backflips or cartwheels. I don't want to have to include in external js libraries. I don't want to have to think "is the script I use gonna fit into the Web Standards philosophy" or "Is the script gonna break Jaws" or "what happens if the user has the Flash plug-in and JavaScript disabled". We may know and think about these issues but there are still many developers who do not. They don't follow too much about what is going in terms of Web Standards, don't know and understand accessibility, trust things to work and sometimes even blame themselves when things don't work. Those are the people who really need the Web Standards on their side. Not only do they need to get more clear guidelines on how to insert SWFs into a page but they need the browser plug-in handling to be less broken.

Geoff posted a request earlier this year - Where is the Browser plug-in task force.

In the comments Geoff gave a few suggestions to start this process:

For the browser makers:
- Fix how your browser handles the object tag.

For the plug-in makers:
- Make sure your plug-in works with the object tag. I know this is largely dependant on how the browser handles the object tag, but we have to start somewhere.

For the public:
- Educate people on proper plug-in usage, try to wean them off the embed tag - but to do this, first we need solid object tag support in the browsers.

So that is my wish for next year and I don't think we should wait till Web 3.0.

After coming back from flash on the beach and listening to Brandon Hall, and Keith Peters great sessions on AS3, I've been quite eager to have a play around. Personally I always find the best way to learn any new language is to make a game, and I thought my blog could also do with a little more color, so i downloaded the FLEX 2 Beta from Adobe labs and got cracking.

I wanted to make something which used the new AS3 specific features, but also some of the Flash 8 features, such as bitmaps and filters, which I have dabbled with only briefly. I while ago a made a nice little demo with some circle things that build doozer constructions into the sky, this had always suffered from a bit of slowdown once i got to a certain amount of onscreen content so I figured this would be a good base for conversion. Im also pretty excited by what Nintendo are doing with the Wii, so though i could ditch my yellow circle creatures, and paste a little homage to Mario in there.

Each mario is a movieclip, this allowed me to import a animated GIF directly. To get him facing left, i just set scaleX to -1 (remembering scale has change to 0-1 for 0-100%)
The background is made by copyPixel calls from an offscreen bitmap to the background bitmap. I use the technique Keith outline here to directly import the asset, unfortunately I couldn't get this to work for an animated gif, instead I had to drop this into flash 8 and then import the swf.

When you click on a character, I create several Bitmap instances, and again use the copyPixels command to create the animated exploding tiles. This time a drop shadow filter is applied to give the 2.5D effect.

You can see the finished thing in banner form, on the blog http://www.freesome.com, for the banner version I use the stage.StageHeight property to detect Im in banner mode, then disable the theme tune playback until mouse over. In full screen mode, you can resize the window and refresh to make the movie fit the window. Not really a game as such, see how long you can stop them reaching the top of the screen - but i find it oddly enjoyable... I guess you just dont get enough chance to shoot Mario normally :)

What did i enjoy about AS3?

I love the eclipse based Flex environment. The code completion is, if anything, even better than FlashDevelop, an especially cool feature is the automatic adding of import statements. Its also a Mac native application, where as FlashDevelop is .NET only.

The speed is cool - I've tested with 1000 of the little critters on screen and still found very little slowdown. Looking at some of the papervision 32 AS3 demosthere are circulating on the beta list, i think we've about reached the level Atari ST/ Commodore Amgia power now.. . exciting.

There isn't so much to learn. Introducing AS2 when they did was a good move by Macromedia - even if it did not change the underlying architecture it gave us lots of time to practice with the typing variables and so on. If you've been doing this for a while now, and it really does make your life simpler so there no reason not to, most of the transition work is no hassle for you. All the new import statements and re-jigging of classes and properties will take a little while, but its not so bad. For example it took me quite a while to figure out how to change the mouse pointer to a pointing hand (its DisplayObject.buttonMode == true by the way).

A couple of things I found i was a little unsure which related to AS3.

Different types of displayObject. We have, MovieClip, Sprite, and Bitmap classes. I'm still not one confident when to use one over the other, i'm sure i could optimize better if i did.

Garbage collection. Grant Skinners articles on this subject has made me sure this is going to be a problem for many. I definitely found some some slowdown if I've got lots of exploding objects on screen. Im not sure, but this may be related to how i remove the parent objects. I need to have another read of Grants articles i think :(

I found the way to load things like sound a little long winded, you need three separate classes to load a sound which seems a little excessive.. but I guess once I get all this functionality into a class of its own it will be simple, but yeah, a quick and dirty loadSound - takes six lines of code now...

You can find the source here.