Heartfelt thanks to the speakers, sponsors, exhibitors, judges, finalists, and attendees who took part in Flashforward2007 Boston. Your enthusiastic participation is what makes the event worth producing, and we hope you came away feeling educated and inspired by everything you experienced. From our perspective, the Flash platform and the Flash community have never been more vibrant. Thank you for letting us be a part of it.

If you missed the event or want to relive it from another perspective, here are some links worth visiting; we’ll update this post as more are discovered, so please share yours in the comments if they aren’t here already.

Updated 15 October, see [NEW] items below.

interviews, podcasts and video-blogs

• Flashforward: Robert Hoekman, Jr.
• Flashforward: Marc Leuchner & Matt Wright
• Flashforward: Dave Schroeder
• Flashforward: Lisa Larson
• The DV Show: Andrew Kirkpatrick
• The DV Show: Chad Perkins and Chris Florio
• The DV Show: Lisa Larson
• The DV Show: Mike Sommers
• The DV Show: Scott Janousek
• Zoom In Online: Mike Chambers
• Zoom In Online: Aral Balkan [NEW]
• Zoom In Online: Jay Laird [NEW]
• Aral Balkan’s Vlog:
  • First day in Boston
  • First evening, including Speaker Dinner
  • Wednesday interviews with speakers and attendees
  • Kevin Lynch interview
  • Day 3

image galleries

• Flickr tag: flashforward
• VUVOX galleries

press & blogs

• eWEEK:
  • Adobe Maps Future of Flash, Flex, AIR
  • A Pitch for the ‘Deseloper’
  • Adobe AIR Bus Rolls On
  • First Adobe Media Player Beta on Tap
• CNET: ‘Astro,’ ‘Moxie’ and AIR on display at Adobe Flash confab
• Barrett Sonntag: collected speaker notes
• Daniel Rinehart: notes from various sessions
• Jay Laird: 1, 2
• Peter Elst: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6
• Robert Hoekman, Jr.: 1, 2
• Mike Chambers: 1, 2
• Seb Lee-Delisle: 1, 2
• Aaron Simpson: festival higlights
• Bill Perry: 1, 2, 3
• Kathryn Rotondo: 1, 2
• dirtystylus: 1, 2
• Donovan Adams: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5
• Tony Macdonell
• Craig Campbell: 1, 2
• Matt Wright

This post will be updated as new links are discovered. Please post yours in the comments!

[Christoph: We have a new home page banner showcasing the speakers and topics that comprise Flashforward2007 Boston! It was created by our friends at Plug-in Media, who also took the time to write up a few words about the design and development process behind this piece. Seb is planning to go into more detail about the technical challenges in his own blog, and we’ll link to those posts as soon as he does. Take it away, Dom & Seb! And thank you again!]

Dominic Minns:

Aha! The Flashforward Banner! What an honour, what a challenge, what a fantastic opportunity to be utterly ridiculous in front of all of our peers.

There’s such a great tradition of stunningly tasteful and beautiful work done on previous banners (the esteemed Magnetic North, Presstube etc.) that we absolutely couldn’t pass by the chance to, in our own special way, pervert the entire institution and do something entirely irreverent.

“Why do this?” you may cry, “We preferred the beauty!!!” Well, I loved the beauty too but beauty for me is always made all the more beautiful by the ability to laugh at itself. I think this might have been why Lynda asked us to do the banner. At least I hope it was. If not, then “Oops.”

So, what’s funny about Flashforward? Well, Lynda had liked the 1950s B-Movie style of our website so that set the tone for the banner’s humour. Concept-wise, the rest was easy. What would Flashforward be if it formed the basis of a 1950s B-Movie? Would it be a conference for sharing digital ideas and techniques within the global Flash community? Or would in fact be the DIABOLICAL SCHEME OF CREATURES FROM ANOTHER WORLD TO ENSLAVE MANKIND WITH THEIR DEADLY COMPUTER WAVES FROM BEYOND THE STARS THAT BLAST THE FLESH OFF HUMANS!?!?*%

Bingo.

Sensibly, we thought this would be best achieved with some form of mezmeric mind vortex, through which the names of the new High Zombie Planetary Overlords (speakers) could appear and brand their identities in blood straight onto the brains of humanity. Luckily Seb had his new AS3 3D system which, after a bit of tinkering with, would do the job well. All that remained then was to populate it with a few nightmarish visions of the horrors about to befall mankind and, Bob’s your uncle, we were there.

When coming up with concepts and illustrations, I concentrate first on narrative. What you’ve just read is the outline for some crazy yet detailed plot about aliens taking over humanity with a mind ray during a bogus digital event. The banner’s purpose is, of course, to advertise speaker names, not to tell our story, yet because the story’s there we had oceans of ideas for stuff to put in. I find it to be a really fun way to work that often yields the best results, things mostly being funnier if there’s a connection between them, regardless of whether or not you understand what that connection is.

At the end of the day there’s no hard and fast rules when it comes to funny ideas. You can be sure that no matter how much you’re laughing at something, there’ll always be someone who doesn’t think it’s in any way amusing. However, if you don’t think it’s funny then the chances are that no-body else will either (unless of course you’ve just slipped over on a banana skin and landed in a puddle made of custard pie). Cruellest of all, by the time you’ve examined what exactly it is that makes something funny, you’ve inevitably stopped laughing.

It’s best therefore to aim to please yourself (I laugh at my own jokes). See you in Boston (I am annoying company).

Seb Lee-Delisle:

We had quite a tall order to follow in the footsteps of such Flash luminaries, so we had to make sure that not only did the banner have a great concept and amazing artwork, but it also had to boldly stretch Flash in areas that it had never been stretched before. The original idea was that the background should have the same effect as mezmerising rotating spirals, but obviously that would have been too easy. And, as the Plug-in Media motto goes, “it’d be boring if it were too easy”.

I thought that the perfect modernised version of the spinny spirals would be an endless vortex stretching away infinitely ahead of you. Think Stargate, Bill and Ted and Doctor Who (do you get Doctor Who over there?).

[Christoph: Yes we do, and I’m still upset about Rose.]

Naturally this represented quite a challenge in Flash, even in AS3. We’ve been working on the Plug-in Media 3D system for some years now, and we’ve now ported most of it into AS3. But this is the first time we’ve used the AS3 version for a commercial project.

The vortex is made up of a series of rings of 3D points, naturally they can’t actually go on for ever, so when the camera goes a little way down it, we shift each ring of points along, and change the colour of it, so it looks like we’re seamlessly travelling through it. This is quite hard to describe, so there’ll be a proper step by step explanation on the blog. Thankfully the system has a “fog” system which, in this case is black to stop you seeing all the way to the end of the vortex.

The 3D arrows are built in code, and rendered with a simple shader using the Plug-in Media 3D engine. The speaker panels are drawn into a Sprite and then converted into a bitmap that’s mapped onto the 3D plane that flies towards the camera. The blood is applied using a very simple custom built particle system (see my Flashforward presentation for more of an explanation of particles!)

It was really fiddly to get the arrows and the speaker panels to travel through the middle of the vortex, and not jump every time the vortex shifted, but that’s another story.

And then finally we added a system that checks the framerate and alters the quality of the movie dependent on that.

[Update: Seb posted his first article about the banner, including a cool wireframe view!]

Consoles are stealing the best Flash games! Cool!

What do I (Christoph) mean by “game”?

Those of you with $10,000 PC rigs will laugh, but consoles have been my primary gaming systems for a decade — PS1/2/3/P, GBA/Cube/DS/Wii. I recognize that I’m not representative of all gamers but it’s my primary hobby in both time and money terms, so I think I must represent some cross-section of this market. Or not, who cares? ;)

That predilection hasn’t kept me from pouring hours into some amazing Flash games including, of course, the finalists from every Flashforward Film Festival, but it’s usually been a different (and lesser) caliber of experience to me. Chief among my complaints:

- Controls: mouse & keyboard are just awkward (for me) compared to a controller for most types of game.

- Performance: a mid-range Mac has historically not been the best-performing platform for Flash.

- The Browser, etc.: any kind of dramatic mouse movement takes the pointer “out of play” and the whole thing is less immersive when the game is nested inside a div, inside a page, inside a window, inside an application, inside an operating system.

Then something interesting happened: some of the best Flash games began appearing on consoles!

The first one I enocuntered was Alien Hominid — a well-known Flash game that I repsected became a PS2 title that I adored, and is now on several platforms including the 360.

More recently, flOw, a Flash experiment/MFA Thesis (blogged here), became a PS3 experience I played through from start to finish without pause. (And was almost a Wii release instead!)

Last winter’s Flash phenom Line Rider is scheduled to be released on the Wii and DS this spring.

In the past few days, we learned that N+, an evolution of the classic Flash-Ninja game N (also blogged), will appear on the PSP and Xbox 360

We also found out that Wakfu, the new game from the creators of Dofus, will have its own DS complement.

Overall this has been an exciting trend, seeing Flash games ported over to “real” game platforms. And it proves that independent game developers can, by first creating their vision in Flash, get the attention of the Big Boys who might never have taken their concepts seriously otherwise.

For the latest generation of consoles, it’s not always necessary to port your Flash game — for systems like the Wii, PSP and PS3, which have their own web browsers and Flash plugins, it’s possible to create your game in Flash but optimize it for play on consoles. (Examples: Wii, PSP; still looking for a good PS3 portal.)

Flash games are increasingly able to escape their shortcomings on the desktop as well — since the Wiimote and Sixaxis can both be used on desktop systems, it must be possible to use them for Flash games as well (but I’m still loking for good examples of this). AS3 has enabled huge performance gains on all systems (even Macs). And one promise of Apollo is Flash games without the browser, and with more capabilities than SAFlashPlayer or a self-running Flash executable can manage.

And don’t forget Flash Lite games!

All of this leads me to the following conclusions:

If you want to make games, you should seriously consider Flash as a platform — at minimum it’s a great environment for prototyping and developing your ideas; plus it allows you to deploy your game to a vast collection of systems and consoles and, with Apollo, gives you the promise of creating an immersive experience on the desktop as well.

If you’re a gamer, you should pay attention to Flash, even if you look askance at “casual” games — it’s one of the ways that independent developers with limited budgets are able to put unique, groundbreaking work out there for you to experience, and the best Flash games arguably compare favorably with what consoles can offer.

And if you’ve read this far, you probably either have a dozen more examples to support what I’m saying, or two dozen to refute it; either way, please share your thoughts!

PS: I almost forgot! Game industry veteran John Say will be presenting his insights into Flash game development and the game market generally in his session, Video Game Opportunities with Flash, at Flashforward2007 Boston. That will be one of my must-attend sessions, and we’re working on some other game-related topics as well. Stay tuned!

While we’re on the subject of speaking at Flashforward — ever since reading Aaron West’s post earlier this month, “How to be a Poor Presenter,” and then Zeldman’s “Conference Speaker’s Pledge,” I’ve been trying to think of some wisdom I could impart after eight years of watching Flashforward presentations from backstage. Here are a few that seem important to me. Anyone is free to add more in the comments!

• If something crashes, don’t panic. Everyone in our audience works with computers every day — these are your peers and they understand that these things happen. It’s not a magic show where you must keep the strings from showing. If you recover gracefully, it can be pleasantly humanizing.
• Have a graceful recovery plan. Only copy of your source file corrupt? Network card just smoked and you need to be online? Have five minutes to kill while your machine reboots? Think about what sort of calamity could break your presentation, and try to plan a workaround. Run the server on your laptop. Put your files on one of our stage machines, so you can jump over if yours glitches out.
• The screen is large but small. The native resolution of the projectors is 1024×768, so set your screen to the same resolution and get comfortable — save your workspace layouts so you can quickly toggle between different modes, and be sure your code is BIG and high contrast.
• Fill your time. We’ve standardized on 75-minute sessions, which is usually enough to go into real depth about a subject. Please do! If your Standard Conference Outline is tuned for 60 minutes, and you decide to spend the last 15 on Q&A, that’s fine, but if there are no questions, have enough material ready to keep talking. Better still, rework your outline and find the places where an extra example or discussion adds value. (Also: don’t save the best for last, then run out of time!)
• Share your secrets. Everyone in the room is already impressed by your work, or they wouldn’t be attending your session. So do more than just show them your portfolio — talk about the process that led to these final products, the challenges and discoveries, the resources you turned to for help, the best practices you established as a result. Give away your source code, and highlight the cool bits. Attendees should ideally be inspired to stay up all night practicing what they just learned from you. (Seriously!)
• Practice, but not too much. If you’ve never been on stage, or even spoken up much at team meetings, it can be intimidating to present a session. A bit of practice with friends or in front of your webcam can help you identify your worst verbal tics and remind you not to mumble. But on the other hand, our attendees have amazing BS Radar, and if your persona is too brightly polished you’ll lose their attention. We like our heroes humble!
• Party Gently. Getting the Flash community together for some face-to-face fun is one of the main goals of the event, but if you sleep through your session (whether in bed or on stage) then you let everyone down. Give us 75 minutes of your best effort, and the rest of the trip can be fun! (And if you know that 9 am is never a good time for you, tell us and we’ll schedule you after lunch instead.)
• Flash is not a four-letter word. We have one or the most diverse audiences you’ll see at a technology conference: old and young, artists and programmers, students and grandparents, liberals and conservatives, citizens from around the world… even women! They all care desperately about your work, but they may not be quite so interested in your politics, or what you grunt at your fallen enemies in Halo. When the first two rows are filled with your best friends, it can be easy to forget that you’re meeting everyone else for the first time. Politeness != Censorship.

And finally, my Top Ten Tech Tips for the stage:

1. Bring your own power adapter & video dongle.
2. Turn off sleep, hibernate, screen saver, screen dimming, etc.
3. Turn off all auto-updaters (apps, OS, virus defs, newsbots, etc.)
4. Turn off your friends (cell phone, IM, Twitter, email, etc.)
5. Set your video out to 1024×768, 60 Hz.
6. Set your volume to about 75% of maximum and let the audio tech adjust from there.
7. The ethernet is faster & more reliable than the WiFi.
8. Come to rehearsal so we can double-check all that for you.
9. Watch the speaker timer.
10. Hide your “secret files.” Not just the stuff on the desktop, but in recent items, bookmarks, history, etc.

I’m sure I forgot twice as many as I thought of… tell us your biggest onstage mishaps! (Anonymously if you prefer…)

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!