In this podcast, Lynda Weinman chats with Branden Hall of Automata Studios, who will be rejoining us at Flashforward2006 Austin to present a session titled, “Prototyping (And Deploying!) Visual Brain Storms.” It will be focused on Flow — “an open-source patch-based rapid prototyping system for Flash” developed by Automata Studios.

Lynda and Branden discuss Flow, the current state of the Flash platform and community, and other recent events in his life and work. This is a nice long chat (over 30 minutes) so sit back and enjoy!

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• Interview with Branden Hall (AAC) — download the interview (enhanced AAC)
• Interview with Branden Hall (MP3) — download the interview (MP3)

Stuart Eccles has posted a two-part tutorial (plus a small addendum) on the integration of Flex 2.0 with Ruby on Rails 1.1. If you’re a fan of either or both technologies, you should definitely have a look:

Part 1 — Part 2 — Part 2 Extra Time

Of course our Flashforward Austin schedule is replete with Flex 2 content; would anyone be interested in attending (or presenting!) a Ruby on Rails session as well? Let us know, and we’ll see what we can work out…

(A meta moment: apart from our blog (which is WordPress/PHP) the entire Flashforward web site, including the custom CMS, store, members areas, etc. is built with Ruby on Rails, so we can vouch for its elegance and power.)

Just a quick post to consolidate links to the important Adobe software updates of the past week:

• Photoshop: DNG Converter & Camera Raw 3.4 Update
• Photoshop: 9.0.1 (CS2) Update
• Dreamweaver: 8.0.2 Update

Hope it’s helpful!

In this podcast, Lynda Weinman chats with James Paterson, whose work can be seen at the newly re-launched presstube.com. James is an old friend of Flashforward, and he’s also the artist who contributed the latest (amazing) speaker banner on our home page.

James shares the story of how and why Flash became his creative tool of choice, how he maintains separation between his personal and commercial work, and sums up his recent adventures and projects. He also prompts Lynda to utter the immortal words, “Oh yeah, you can swear on my podcast!” Future interviewees: take note!

• iTunes — Subscribe to our Podcast via the iTunes Store. (enhanced AAC)
• RSS — Direct link to the RSS feed for other aggregators. (enhanced AAC)
• Interview with James Paterson (AAC) — download the interview (enhanced AAC)
• Interview with James Paterson (MP3) — download the interview (MP3)

There’s a nice resurgence in buzz about Apollo today, thanks to a long article about it on news.com, informed by an interview with Kevin Lynch.

Many of you have also noticed that Mike Chambers will be presenting a couple sessions about Apollo at Flashforward2006 Austin: Understanding Apollo and Building Your First Apollo Application.

Mike talks a bit more about his Flashforward sessions in his latest podcast, and we suspect more details will be revealed as the year progresses. Stay tuned!