Thanks to all the speakers and attendees who participated in the Flashforward@Macworld sessions — we hope this was a worthwhile experience for all of you! Here’s a recap for anyone who couldn’t attend and wonders what it was like…
The sessions began with a welcome from Lynda Weinman, leading into an introduction by our Adobe friends Mike Downey, Mike Chambers, Justin Everett-Church, and special guest star Grant Skinner. Aral Balkan has copious notes and commentary on what was demonstrated in this session; be sure to read it! Also check out additional info from Mike Downey and Grant Skinner.
One note I took that Aral doesn’t mention: Apollo’s HTML rendering will apparently be powered by WebKit, the browser engine that underlies Safari and other OS X apps. Will this be true of the Windows runtime as well? I should have asked, maybe someone who knows can comment here.
The next session was perhaps the final public performance of Michael Ninness’ famous Photoshop & Flash workflow topic, which has packed rooms at Flashforward conferences for years. As was made clear during the Adobe intro, Flash 9 will feature such amazing Photoshop import functionality that these tips will be obsolete. It’s up to you all to find flaws in the new implementation so Michael does not retire from his speaking duties!
Chris Georgenes committed the Macworld sin of presenting his session on a Dell, but the attendees forgave him when he not only shared the techniques behind his successful Flash animation career, but also generously shared his source code. By the way, anyone who hasn’t seen his 2006 holiday card needs to go watch it right now. Thank you Chris! And if you ever run out of cute scenes of your own daughter to animate, you can draw mine instead!
The final session of day 1 was Robert Reinhardt’s Flash Video topic during which he shared, among other tips, his extensive research into which codecs make the most sense under various circumstances. When Robert posts his session notes we’ll link to them; meanwhile here are his files from Flashforward2006 Austin and Seattle.
The evening event for Flashforward participants was a lynda.com casino party hosted by Adobe, in the same beautiful space where the Flash anniversary event took place last year. We all gambled with fake money, then exchanged it for real raffle tickets at the end. Good fun — thanks Lynda & Adobe!
Day 2 of the Flashforward sessions was delayed until after the Macworld Keynote. Moments of reflected glory: some of the Flashforward team are briefly visible in this video footage from Nightline. (Can you spot them?)
A more interesting story involves our friend Beau Ambur, who somehow managed to post the very first iPhone image on the web, and got a few hits as a result. Here’s his account:
I’ve been using ZoneTag’s from Yahoo! for a while which lets me instantly post any photo to my Flickr account as soon as I take the pic. So of course I had my handy dandy camera phone with me and was photo blogging throughout the keynote, mostly to be able to show the guys back at the office later.
Not too long in to the keynote it got pretty interesting when Jobs was talking about three new devices, which turned out to be the new Apple iPhone. As soon as an image came up on the screen I took a photo and posted it to Flickr. About 10 minutes later I got a SMS from one of the guys in the office telling me my photo stream was #1 on DIGG. I thought this was pretty crazy and maybe that it made it up there as the newest post.
So after some crowd rushing to get some up close shots of Jobs I headed back to the office. Now this is where they craziness of the net comes in full force, I went to digg.com and my frick’n photo was getting digg’d left and right non-stop. Digg’s where coming in by the 1,000’s and it was already the top digg in the last 24 hours. It’s pretty crazy what a difference timing makes as this looked to be the first iPhone picture to hit the net, and get picked up on Digg. With any luck it’ll be the top digg of the month, Apple is get kudos left and right for pulling off another incredibly designed product, but the oh so fuzzy camera phone shot of an iPhone is still out pacing the digg’s apple.com is getting.
The rest of the day (our day, at least) belonged to Aral Balkan, who presented an in-depth tutorial on object-oriented ActionScript, followed by an introduction to Flex Builder 2. Similar sessions have been popular at recent Flashforward conferences, but this one was tricky, because none of us knew how code-curious the Macworld attendees would be. Aral did an excellent job of adjusting his presentation on the fly based on questions and other feedback, and seemed to keep the audience very engaged. He also presented the clearest explanation I’ve yet heard of the relationship between Flash and Flex; maybe he’ll post a version of that to his blog and we’ll share the link!
Our final Flashforward activity was the following night — a Greatest Hits edition of the Flashforward Film Festival, in which we shared some of the most entertaining trailers from recent events. It almost didn’t happen, due to a misunderstanding about the nature of the time slot: this was billed as a “birds of a feather” session, which apparently means talking quietly in a circle, so all the sound and projection equipment had been removed from the room. Thankfully they were able to put it back, and we showed off some of what Flash can do in (your) expert hands.
Separately from Flashforward, lynda.com created a huge, beautiful booth presence for the Macworld show floor, just across the aisle from the Adobe installation. So once our Flashforward duties were complete, we spent the rest of the week demonstrating the Online Training Library to current and future subscribers, and crossed paths with many other Flashforward friends, including Lee Brimelow, Rich Shupe, and others. Nice to see all of you!
Final thoughts: This was our first time participating in Macworld, and I hope we introduced some new people to the brilliance and generosity of the Flash community. Thanks to everyone who participated! Is this the sort of thing you’d like to do again? Please let us know.
We enjoyed it tremendously, and the Macworld staff was very gracious about putting up with all our strange requests. But we’re looking forward to producing our own events again later this year: Dx3 (May 15-18) and Flashforward (September 19-21), both in Boston. Detailed announcements about each of these will be coming soon, and we hope to see you at both!
