codeeater's blog

FotB 07 The Day After - Good morning, Goodbye

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 09:09:02 +0100

I'm having a quick breakfast at the hotel before going to Brighton Station. The weather suits my mood: this is the greyest and wettest morning I've seen in a week.

I wonder: '06 in December, '07 in November, '08 in September - will FotB '10 be a real beach event? We'll see... :)

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 Final Day - See you in September 2008

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Wed, 07 Nov 2007 19:40:51 +0100

Last night's party went much better for me that the Casino thing. The music in the disco was a bit cheesy, but it's been a lot of fun to see John Davey, Brendan Dawes, Hoss Gifford (who looked a little like Dr. Evil) and others doing their thing on the dancefloor. And, like John Davey pointed out today - they had a GIRL IN A BOX! :)

I spent a lot of time drinking Gin and Tonic with Andrea and Dan - thank you for looking after me and for sharing the joke about the Yuguslavian with me ;-).

To my own surprise - a little tired but without major damage - I managed to arrive on time for today's first session. Again, I won't go into detail, but I attended Andy Polaine, Dr Woohoo, Andre Michelle, Marcos Weskamp (lately working for the Adobe XD team), the great impromptu session by Mario Klingemann, Aral Balkan (delivering the quickest demo of a flash-based data-driven web application - using SWX - I've ever seen) and Brendan Dawes and finally my personal highlight for today: Jared Tarbell. I have been in love with fractals since I had my first computer and even though I have seen a lot of great stuff in the last three days, his expriments are the ones that applied the most to my personal taste.

Flash on the Beach 2007 ended with a raffle where John Davey gave away a lot of great stuff by the speakers, the sponsors and himself - nice, even if I wasn't one of the lucky winners. He even shed a few tears when the speakers gave him a magnum bottle of champagne and a signed copy of the FotB artbook.

I hope everyone shares my opinion that this conference was a big success, the number and quality of great speakers surpassed last year. I wish I had been able to be at some of the sessions at the same time.
Location and venue: I have said it before and I'll say it again: I love Brighton.
I don't have the amount of experience with conferences, that some of the speakers and attendees have, but I think this is the friendliest conference I have ever been to. The same goes for the community: I met some people I already knew, got to know some others and I'm really looking forward to be here next year.
Taking with me a lot of inspiration, I hope I can at least put a glimpse of that into my own work. Anyway, I highly recommend this conference not only to designers, developers and people using Flash in general, but to anyone interested in rich media or interactive design - be it for professional or personal reasons.

Thank you, John Davey and everyone else who made this possible.

This may be my last post from Brighton, I'm leaving for Heathrow in the morning and then it's back to Munich.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 Day 2

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 19:59:35 +0100

Just a quick post, because I don't have much time left before the today's inspired sessions starts.

I saw another bunch of great sessions today, some more coding-oriented, some not: Ted Patrick (some best practices, not only for Flex but all software projects), Craig Swann, Aral Balkan (having a little trouble with the internet connection and the distractions by his bunny... :), GMUNK, Tink and finally amazing things by Robert Hodgins.

I'm off now to see Eric Natzke.

Video by Robert Hodgin

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 Day 1 - Scratching and Queuing

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Tue, 06 Nov 2007 01:12:29 +0100

For me the new "Inspired Sessions" concept worked quite well - although a lot of people returned only minutes before 8pm to the Dome and delayed the start.

Brendan Dawes did his best to match Joshua Davies' performance a few hours ago: he was funny, he was inspiring and he was swearing a lot... :)
In the end I liked JD's session better, but does it matter? No. Still a definite highlight was the live performance of DJ GKUT using Brendan's video scratching application.

The crowd then moved to the Casino at the seafront for the Ocean's-Eleven-Style party. I queued and waited in line getting to know an Italian guy who works in London and an art student from Leeds who had to leave to catch her train. After about an hour, I still wasn't inside the Casino. That's when I left for the Old Ship to have at least a beer with Andrea and Dan, a couple I know from the Hot Shots seminars in London in 2006 - so I can't report anything from the party.

I accept John Davey's apology - he talked to us several times, while we waited in the queue - and I understand that this was probably the Casino's fault, but I'd like to make a suggestion for next year: I think that most attendees don't care for a fancy conference party. Most of us would be happy with a beer and a place to talk to some of the others - which the smarter people did anyway by retreating to the Old Ship or other pubs. Sometimes less is more.

Anyway, a long conference day comes to an end now.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 Day 1 - Let the show begin...

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 19:25:28 +0100

Sunrise at Brighton beach

Picking up my badge at the early registration yesterday left me enough time to enjoy breakfast at the hotel and still arrive at the Dome in time. Everything looks familiar, except for the coffee: this time it's for free! :)

The keynote started a little late, but after a short introduction by John Davey, Richard Galvan and the other Adobe guys managed to keep the schedule. As far as I know, they didn't show anything that hadn't been seen at Adobe Max or other earlier conferences (some Flash Player 10 "Astro" demos, Hydra, Flex profiler, some Thermo screenshots, a little Flash CS4 codenamed "Diesel") except for the demonstration of how to animate inverse kinematics. That's ok with me - I didn't expect anything more - and they kept it short and sweet. What Andrew Shorten did announce, is that Adobe will extend their "On Air" tour throughout Europe - via train.

I stayed in the Dome to see Grant Skinner's 50 reasons AS3 kicks ass. A solid refresher of the innovations in AS3 from a developer's point of view.

In the Corn Exchange I watched Mike Chambers give an introduction to Adobe AIR - and saw him create "a robust HTML WYSIWYG editor" in 30 minutes... :) I have to admit that, I haven't touched AIR since his 2006 presentation on Apollo - also a welcome refresher. You can tell that AIR is close to its 1.0 release date.

I missed Keith Peters last year and heard many good things about his session, so after lunch I eagerly awaited his early-retirement plan "Make Flash games!" - a presentation on how he made some money out of games he created just for fun.

I knew what to expect from Hoss Gifford after seeing him last year and I wasn't disappointed. Can't say much more - you have to see him yourself... :)

Joshua Davis ended the regular sessions of the first day with an energetic and inspiring presentation of his work.

Conclusion: not a single letdown for me today. Today's sessions confirmed the expression I got last year. Flash on the Beach is not just a developer or designer conference. It's not even exclusively about Flash. It's about the work, the people and inspiration. Wow, sounds more dramatic than I wanted... :)

I'm going to grab some food now and return to the Dome for the "Inspired Session", this year's new concept for a relaxing evening session, with Brendan Dawes and after that the Ocean's-Eleven-style party in the casino.

Panorama of the Brighton Dome just before the keynote

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 Day 0 - Party Theme?

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 00:24:13 +0100

Before finally going to sleep, I just had this idea for a themed party: everyone has to be dressed exclusively in FotB goodies: flip-flops, towel, stickers, last year's beanie hat, ...

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 Day 0 - Bring out the Schwag

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Sun, 04 Nov 2007 23:27:57 +0100

Essential ActionScript 3.0 (Essential)

I went to the early registration this morning to finally get my hands on this year's goodies - I wasn't disappointed!

Everything was packed in a black backpack including a laptop compartment - what makes this IMHO stand out from the bags you get at other conferences is the FotB logo that's printed on the front :) - I don't know about you, but I think that if you are a designer or have any taste at all, the shitty logos of some other developer conferences are reason enough to not run around with their bags. In other words: I might really use this one...
Inside were some product and sponsor flyers, a nice session scheduler and two FotB stickers. More importantly there were two things that perfectly match the "On the Beach" concept of the conference (honestly: I was already expecting these last year): a large bathing towel and a pair of flip-flops both of cource with logo prints. Great and not your everyday-giveaway.
So much for the fun part but I kept the best until the end and I really wasn't expecting this. The backpack also contained a fresh new copy of Colin Moock's "Essential Actionscript 3.0", probably the no. 1 printed ressource on Actionscript there is. Ok, some of the attendees may already own a copy, but still this is great gift.

At 9:30am I attended the first part of Michelle Yaiger's introduction to AS3. I left after the first break - definitely not because of the quality of the workshop, I think Michelle was doing a good job - but because I realized she was covering very basic topics (when I booked the workshop as part of the enchilada package, I didn't really know what it was about - my fault).

Instead I enjoyed my last day of free time on the beach of Brighton together with my girlfriend who will be leaving tomorrow morning. We later met with some of the German attendees that I know in the lobby of the Old Ship where we also spotted some of the speakers enjoying a couple of beers.

I won't post "my" choice of sessions that I'll be attending in the next three days - basically because I haven't decided yet - but expect some posts live from the conference!

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 T-1 - At the beach

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:10:23 +0100

No wind, no fun

Not a cloud in the sky - but also not much wind. That's good, if you want to lie at the beach and read a book - but bad, if you want to fly a kite. Still, after running around for two days, we had a great time relaxing.

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 T-2 - Geocaching, Marina, Cliff Walk

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Sat, 03 Nov 2007 16:05:40 +0100

After a fine breakfast we took a long walk to the Hove Park, where we placed a Geocoin we brought with us from Germany into the "Goldstone".
On the way back we took the bus all the way to the Marina east of Brighton and had some nice views of the white cliffs.
The day ende with a good vegetarian dinner at "Food for Friends" and going to the Odeon to see the movie of Neil Gaiman's novel "Stardust" (memorable highlight: Robert De Niro as gay pirate captain Shakepeare).

Panorama - Klippen östlich von Brighton

Read and post comments | Send to a friend

FotB 07 T-3 - Exploring Brighton

nobody@vox.com(Codeeater) — Thu, 01 Nov 2007 21:51:44 +0100

I haven't had time to see much of Brighton last year and the weather wasn't all that great - smart move, to make it happen in November this time.

From the Alvia Hotel we started a long walk down to the ocean, along the beach and Brighton Pier. We ate the notorious fish & chips for dinner while watching a beautiful November sunset, café latte and cookies for dessert. Even better than I remembered it and Susanne loves it, too - great first day, I wouldn't mind living here for some time.

We just returned to the hotel and we'll definitely fall asleep soon - after all, we had to get at 4:30am to catch our plane.

Panorama Brighton Pier

Panorama West Pier

Read and post comments | Send to a friend