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The baby’s wail reached a crescendo as I tried for the fourteenth time to unlock my jammed bag. My jammed bag containing my passport, all my money, phone, everything. The woman in the queue behind me utters that most terrifying of womanly sounds, she tuts. I start to wonder the likelihood of Gatwick’s security section having a bolt-cutter on hand, or maybe if there is somewhere I can get one in duty-free?

My incredible dinner

A few short hours later and I was standing in the dark and the drizzle outside my hotel in the center of Amsterdam. I felt good, despite the moral berating the taxi driver had given me, convince as he was that I had only come to this part of the world to drink heavily, smoke a kilo fat joints and catch some venereal diseases from window dwelling ladies of ill-repute. Explaining to him that I was simply here for a Flash conference didn’t seem to alleviate the situation, he probably just added voyeur to my list of potential crimes.

The taxi drivers suspicions aside, I was in fact here for the Flash In The Can conference, which kicked off with an obligatory keynote from the ‘Platinum Sponsor’ Adobe. The hour was mostly spent promoting  Flash Player 10.1 and AIR 2.0, specifically their compatibility with a multitude of mobile devices. It was around this time that they showed a slide of all the companies that Adobe had been working with to pull this off, and there was a distinct Apple shaped hole in the list. There was a heavier note to the silence in the room as everyone was clearly thinking about this absence. In fact, the iPhone packager that has been added in Flash CS5 wasn’t even mentioned…

The FITC was also the home of interpretive dance

What was mentioned, however was the improved text editing features that have been added. Something that has been long overdue in my book. Still, it looked incredibly useful as the functionality has pretty much been lifted straight out of inDesign. They also demonstrated the new code snippets feature, that allows users to just drop functionality (such as controlling movement with the keyboard keys) straight onto an object on the Flash stage. There was also a brief demonstration of the new-found links between Flash Professional and the newly named Flash (previously Flex) Builder. Something that, if done well, could cause a lot of problems for third party flash development tools such as FDT.

Despite the lack of Apple in the keynote (made all the more obvious buy the fact  that everyone at the conference had iPhones, everyone) there were a couple of talks building apps for the iPhone specifically. Even an incredibly useful one (if with a hint of bitterness) on optimization by Adobe Flash guru Mike Chambers.

A big surprise was, even though FITC is primarily a Flash conference, the amount of love thrown Unity’s way. For those that don’t know, Unity is a 3D game development tool that can run highly detailed 3D content directly in an Internet browser. Whoever I talked to, nobody had a bad word to say about it. Even Flash genius and founder of Papervision3D, Carlos Ulloa has abandoned his baby in favour of the complex models and smooth running of the Unity plugin. This may have something to do with Adobe embracing Away3D as their 3D engine of choice, but I think it’s more likely that Carlos just realised that Unity was more suited to what he wanted to do. To see what he has been up to check out his project HelloRacer.

Hello moto.

Of particular interest to me was the talk by Ozzy Flash guy, Shane McCartney on Character Animation for Games. Topics covered were dynamic blending between timeline animations, and Artificial Intelligence for simple game character. One of Shane’s projects YooBot is an excellent example of the dynamic blending effects he was talking about, and below is one of my favourite examples that he showed of simple AI in a game. The white arrow is seeking the smaller, coloured arrows and they in turn find an obstacle and try and hide from the hunter.

Here I come, ready or not

Check back in a little while to hear the rest of my adventures in Amsterdam, and see some of the amazing examples of Digital prowess I saw at FITC including some awe-inspiring stuff from Jared Tarbell.