Flash On the Beach’08 is over !

It was my first time at Flash On the Beach (and in Brighton), and I haven’t been disappointed ! I think that it’s the best conference that I’ve ever attended so far : Brighton is a colorful city with a tremendous nightlife, the Dome is a wonderful venue and there was really top inspiring speakers.
 

I will not do a review of all sessions that I attended, but let’s have an overview of each days and see what I personally retain :

Day 1

Keynote
Marco Casario – Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR
Branden Hall – Brilliant Ideas that I’ve Blatantly Stolen
Mark Anders – A Preview of Flex 4 and “Thermo”
Tink (Stephen Downs) – Flex Effects: Transitions as Design Elements
Erik Natzke – Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play
James Paterson – Modulating a Lot

This first day was very emotional for me : I have never been before to a so huge event I think. I was very happy to meet familiar faces and people that I only knew from twitter or their blogs, all “mixed” together with well known speakers, FOTB team and anonymous developers or designers. I really <3 that community ! The first big announcement came from John Davey itself : in 2009 you will have a Flash on the Beach in Miami !

“[...] Party in the city where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
Welcome to miami
Buenvenidos a miami
Bouncin in the club where the heat is on
All night on the beach till the break of dawn
Im goin to miami
Welcome to miami [...]” Will Smith – Miami

Congrats to John, and I wish a big success to the FOTBM. Back to 2008 and Brighton, all sessions were really nice, with a whole different way to present their subject (I loved Tink’s slides !). I’m curious to have a look at the Flex MDI component built by Comtaste to compare it with FlexMDI. I was a bit excited by the new capabilities of Flex 4 “Gumbo” (FXG, new way to manage states…) but not so much by Thermo : not sure what to think about this product yet. Inspired sessions (Erik Natze and James Paterson) were really what they are meant for : INSPIRING ! I’ve never seen them before and I was really impressed by what they are doing programatically (look at my pictures on Flickr to have an idea).

Day 2

Mike Downey - The business side of AIR: how to sell your clients on AIR apps
Adobe – Town Hall Meeting
Grant Skinner – Things Every ActionScript Developer should know
Peter Elst – AIR Beyond the Basics – Taming the Desktop
Lee Brimelow - Platform Jiu-Jitsu
GMUNK (Bradley Grosh) – GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9
Robert Hodgin – The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life.

The second day was perfectly in line with the first one. I wrote down some nice ideas from Grant Skinner session. I loved the Adobe Town Hall Meeting which was in fact a full Q&A session. Nothing really new came out from here, they only confirm the development of the Flash Player for the iPhone (for those who care). Peter Elst made a nice demo using Merapi and a text to speech engine to pronounce swear words non allowed by the BBC in their Sport’s Desktop Monkey AIR application – lots of fun :-) Lee’s session was funny too, comparing a developer with an UFC fighter. Mike Downey’s session on Adobe AIR could have been more “intense” : why always showing us the same examples (ie. Anthropologie, eBay and Nickelodeon) instead of some new “wow” (enterprise) applications? I only learned that there was this lighthouse program which could be interesting in my current project (Mike if you’re reading this, get in touch…).

Day 3

Ben Stucki – Advanced Flexing for Flash Developers
Seb Lee-Delisle – Papervision3D Simplified
Andre Michelle – Adobe made some noise!
Koen de Weggheleire – Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3
Paul Betlem – The Ying and Yang of Flash
Jonathan Harris – Beyond Flash

I was expecting a bit more from Ben Stucki’s presentation on developing custom components (I don’t know exactly what but didn’t learn very much or I was too tired maybe). PV3D session from Seb Lee-Delisle took me by surprise : even if 3D is far from being part of my daily job, now I really want to give it a try! Thanks Seb  In a fully packed room, Koen played “The Fly Killer” with his webcam to entertain the whole audience. Cool ! The inspired session was really nice especially the first part where he talked about the human face of the internet and how he was able to gather information from newspapers, blog and other internet source to do social and demographic studies. The second was more “depressing” and a bit “mystical” in my point of view. Hopefully he ended with those beautiful ballons & wishes shoots. 

Conlusion

I really enjoyed my days in Brighton and at Flash on the Beach. The team there made a great job, speakers were really good and I was so happy to meet my [360|Flex] friends again. If you would be able to attend only one conference, Flash on the Beach is that one ! 

Maybe there was also some subliminal messages to decode : “Be on drugs to be more creative” (private joke), “Quit your job and do freelancing to be happier” (it will be the subject of another blog post) and… Iguanas seems to be one of my favorite place in Brighton – neverending happy hour

Posted in Conferences, Flex