We’ve already noted that many of our Flashforward 2005 speakers are prolific, but Craig Swann can only be described as ubiquitous in the Flash universe. So we’ll take the easy way out and list the things Swann and his colleagues at CRASH!MEDIA haven’t done. (Note that our research is shoddy and it’s possible Swann did, for example, win a pie-eating contest; we will correct any errors that are brought to our attention.)

• Crag Swann and his team have not yet co-authored a book on Flash for Gardeners or Birdwatchers. (Merely Game Development, ActionScript, XML, Communication Server, Site design, Interface Design, Math, Audio, and tomes for people who are Mystified and/or Dumb. See crashmedia.com –> menu –> books.)
• Swann has not yet judged nor won a Punkin’ Chunkin’ competition. (But he has judged and/or won just about every Flash competition, including ours: he won in ‘02 for looplabs, was a finalist in San Francisco this year for the Bacardi Freestyle Contest site based on that looplabs work, and is a finalist again in New York for the CRASH!MEDIA site itself; plus he’s been a reliable judge of ours for years.)
• Ferrari has not yet, apparently, commissioned a site from Swann’s team, but Pontiac, Chevrolet, Honda, Cadillac and Mercedes Benz all have; and that’s just one industry of a dozen or so industries vying for their attention. Unfortunately their Flash work for Harlequin, “The world’s leading women’s literary publisher,” is all internal for the sales force so far.

Swann will be sharing his expertise in sound with us at Flashforward New York:

Sound Ideas
Sound is often, sadly, the most overlooked and undervalued element in an interactive project. Yet sound is one of the most powerful media available to communicate not simply message and meaning but also emotion, the key to connecting with a user. As an interactive platform, Flash offers a host of audio possibilities. In this session, Swann highlights sound for gaming experiences, UI, navigation, interactive toys, installations and integration with other technologic platforms. He discusses mixing, sampling, sequencing, triggering, using audio input, MIDI, audio visualizations, physical sensors and inputs—all different ways to harness the power of audio in the Flash environment. This session is open to all levels of Flash users who are interested in using sound in unique ways in their own Flash projects.

Interactive audio continues to be one of the most compelling reasons to use Flash on a web site, so learn from the master. And watch out for a demo of the Harlequin work…

Your friends might call you Flash Nerd, Flash Geek, Flash Genius, or even the Grand Master of Flash, but there’s only one Flash Guru: Guy Watson, and we’re proud to have him presenting with us again at Flashforward 2005 New York.

What, you might ask, are his Guru credentials?

• In addition to providing the Flash community with insights, tutorials and source code on his own site, flashguru.co.uk, for the past five years, Watson was a moderator at actionscript.org, has been a senior moderator at Flash Kit Forums for over four years, and runs the ExtendFlash mailing list about Flash extensibility.
• Watson has written a 3-part tutorial on Flash Extensibility for internet.com; an article about the JavaScript API on Macromedia DevNet; the Foreward to Extending Flash MX 2004 (a book co-authored by Flashforward speaker Keith Peters); and his work has been featured in Create Online & Computer Arts magazines.
• He has judged the Favourite Website Awards, is a long-standing judge of our own Flash Film Festival, and won the Navigation category with us in 2001 for www.relevare.com.
• And of course, he has done all this while also being a Macromedia Certified Flash MX 2004 Developer and successful independent consultant.

Since so many of us are still making a mess of our menus despite his years of patient tutelage, Watson will be presenting on the simple but critical topic of Effective Flash Navigation:

A well-planned and designed navigation system is essential to the success of a website. Otherwise, users get frustrated and eventually leave. In this session, Watson shows examples of good, bad and ugly navigation systems and discusses the pros and cons of each. Watson explains the fundamentals of designing a website navigation system and conducting live usability testing. Finally, he shows how a developer can simply integrate the browser “back” button with Flash websites and make them infinitely more usable.

Yes, that’s one of the session descriptions you paste into the reimbursement proposal for your boss — they’re paying you to listen to Guy Watson. Such a deal.

He will also be participating in a panel discussion on the Flash community along with Aral Balkan, Mike Chambers, Branden Hall, Peter Hall and Grant Skinner — we should have probably booked more than an hour for this, but it should be an amazing meeting-of-the-minds.

And on top of all that, his avatar can raise one eyebrow too! Must be a British thing…

Everyone knows: Flash does vectors, and vectors scale; from phone to flat-screen, using all available pixels to render your creation in as much detail as possible. But what if your interface were so large that users had to stretch or squat to reach the buttons? What if your virtual world were so wide that visitors would need to get up and take a walk to reach the other end? Nikolai Cornell has been experimenting with these issues and will present his findings at Flashforward 2005 New York:

Human Scale Interactivity
“Life-Size” is a series of interactive media design installations that explore human-scale interaction, environmental interface and display systems. The research, experiments and projects that comprise “Life-Size” are used to embed media into environments, and to enhance interior spaces and facades by making them respond to the movements of people through the space. Cornell’s presentation shows how to move away from the mouse, keyboard and monitor and to focus on integrating architecture and media design through projects that connect physical space with immersive projected content.

Cornell has provided stills and linked to video of some of these installations on his site, madein.la, and you can tell just from the body language of those who interact with them that experiencing these virtual spaces on this scale is completely unlike the same experience on a small-screen at the end of a mouse.

Watch the video of the Interactive Cityscapes opening, particularly late in the clip when someone gently disturbs a flock of roosting crows by touching them on a wall-sized screen. The birds fly offscreen, then across the next screen, and the next and the next, passing other visitors interacting with other portions of this world who probably assume the birds are just random atmospheric animation, finally settling back down a good walk away from where they started. It’s an incredibly simple interface (touch) but the experience, even viewed passively in third-hand miniature, is goose-bump-inducing.

Cornell’s site also showcases the breadth of his design talents, including a link to his stunning Born Magazine project Untitled (It Must Be the Barracks Stove), which won the Typography category of this year’s San Francisco Flash Film Festival.

We’re very proud and excited to have Nikolai Cornell at Flashforward, and hope you will join us as well.

Finalists Announced for 2005 New York Flash® Film Festival

Once again you have told us about some of the best Flash work happening right now, and our judges took it from there, choosing the finalists that will comprise the 14th Flash Film Festival.

After you’ve looked through the 60 finalists, you can vote for the People’s Choice award, the one prize in the Festival that’s chosen directly by you instead of the judges.

Want to argue the merits of your favorite site? Post your comment to this blog entry and make your case!

And don’t forget to register for Flashforward so you can attend the live festival presentation and awards ceremony on July 7.

We’ll be contacting the creators of these works over the next few days, but if you see your own site among the finalists, get in touch so we can be sure to find you, especially if you don’t remember nominating your own site.

If you’d like to promote People’s Choice voting on your own site, feel free to swipe this button or build your own:

Good luck to all the finalists!

By the way — the thumbnails above were chosen for this post to illustrate a definite theme among many sites this year: mosaics of ‘found’ image thumbnails as interface/design element, sourced from Google, Amazon, Flickr, etc.

All the speakers at Flashforward 2005 New York are prolific, but when you try to sum up Aral Balkan’s contributions to the Flash community, one thing becomes clear: his coffee is much stronger than ours, and he drinks much more of it.

There’s the usual stuff that would make anyone proud — co-author of a couple Flash books, founder of Ariaware training and consulting company (née Bits And Pixels) — but Balkan apparently takes care of that in his spare time. The other 46 hours in his average day are spent nurturing the Flash community:

• He’s director of the London Macromedia User Group, an organization which attracts many of the top Flash minds to its meetings on a regular basis, and also hosts an online community forum of its own.
• He’s director of Educational content on Ultrashock and contributes many of the more useful tutorials and articles himself.
• He’s a Macromedia Certified Instructor who also writes articles for DevNet.
• He maintains the “What is Flash?” Wiki, a resource site whose most recent success has centered around the use of NaturalDocs for community documentation of Flash. (And a mailing list on the subject for good measure.)
• He maintains Flash Ant, which is not only the RIA blog serving as a hub to all this activity, but also an open-source project to extend Apache Ant for use with Flash.
• He released Ariaware’s RIA Platform as the open-source project ARP at osflash.org/arp.
• And much much more…

But most exciting of all, Balkan has recently helped create a home for all things open-source involving Flash: OSFlash (osflash.org). This is where the action is: phenomenal progress is being made here on multiple fronts on a near-daily basis. Whether you want to participate or just enjoy the fruits of this passionate labor, OSFlash is where you should be spending your time.

With so much going on for Aral, what will he be speaking about at Flashforward? A subject that’s maddeningly difficult to teach well: ActionScript 2: A Visual Introduction for Right-Brainers. An excellent session without a doubt. The question is: will he be coding, blogging, and moderating his kingdom of communities while he’s presenting, or will he take a short break? In any case, with Balkan and many other important figures in open-source Flash in attendance at the conference, you’re sure to see another surge of creative activity.

Oh, and check it out: his avatar can raise one eyebrow. That’s just cool.