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Jet lag. Who thought that would be a good idea? I’m pretty sure it wasn’t me, but apparently I must suffer nonetheless. You see, shortly after my trip to Amsterdam I was lucky enough to continue my cloud-hopping and jet over to Vermont, US of A to strap my feet to a plank and point myself roughly down the nearest black run. This is my overtly roundabout way of explaining the radio silence surrounding the second half of my trip to Amsterdam for those not sure where I’m going with this. For those interested in my holiday- it was awesome.

Excuses aside, lets take a mental trip back to the rainy city of Amsterdam (The BBC informs me that at the time of writing, the weather in Amsterdam is in fact Sunny, but this is a trip back in time, yeah- I can do that) for the Flash In The Can conference. For those in need of a clear picture of our destination check out this video recently posted by the folk at FITC.

The amount of programming talent on display at FITC, left me feeling somewhat overwhelmed if I am honest. There were incredibly talented people pulled in from all over the world to blow our little minds, and Joa Ebert took great pleasure in doing so. One of the things I was most disappointed by at FITC was the lack of source code that was shown in the lectures. There were exceptions obviously, most notable being Shane McCartney, Mike Chambers, and Jared Tarbell who all posted their source code online after their talks. In a way I can see why, if you’ve worked hard on something you don’t necessarily want to show people exactly how you did it. Joa, however was quite confident in showing off a lot of his source code. I’m pretty sure this was because he knew that no one knew what the hell he was showing anyway. The man has written his own programming language in Scala. He has tailored it specifically to the way he thinks, and doesn’t mind that it would make it very hard for anyone else to understand, a fact he freely admitted when asked by a member of the audience. Still, you have to hand it to him, the guy knows what he is talking about and has been responsible for fixing a number of bugs in the Flash Player, not that Adobe have taken them on board.

The Hogwarts of Flash

We were also treated to the technical prowess of Japanese ‘Creators’ (The term used in Japan for anyone who does either design, development or both) Keiichi Yoshikawa and Masakazu Ohtsuka, the latter being the man responsible for Wonderfl, the online Flash builder. Despite their obvious technical prowess however, the presentation itself was a bit of a disaster. An excerpt from my notes reads:

“Poor guys - first project takes ages to load then crashes”

followed by:

“…then the web-cam didn’t load”

Technical difficulties aside, it was clear that they were incredible programmers. It just goes to show that the demons of presentations can screw anyone over.

A particular highlight for me was the talk by Jared Tarbell, which is funny as it wasn’t particularly related to Flash. It was more about the strange things that occur all around us in the natural world and the man-made, and how the two interlink. It also looked at how maths dictates a lot of what happens and how it can lead to some fantastic infinite patterns. One thing in particular stood out in my mind at the end of the presentation, as I’m sure it did for may others, and that was the shortcut circle. It’s basically a circle of LEDs that once lit, toggle the state of the next ones in the sequence. This leads to the lit LED appearing to move around the circle. However, if you put a shortcut in the circle a surprising pattern emerges. Click the image below to give it a try for yourself - once the flash has loaded click on one of the LEDs to begin the sequence and then just watch.

Click to view the flash version

As is the case with most of these things (including holidays to Vermont) they are over before you know it. Indeed, before I knew it I was at the FITC after party downing vast quantities of free booze and having my ankles inspected by a woman dressed as a latex Red-Riding Hood. I really wish I hadn’t worn my thick, thermal socks but dammit it was cold.

Blue, blue, electric blue, is the colour of my room...

The evening ended in the… well, morning with me trekking from central Amsterdam back to roughly where I thought my hotel was. Taking blurry pictures as I went, I was very aware of the taxi that I had book to whisk me to the airport in the next few few hours, but I had more pressing issues at hand. Like all these canals and bridges look the same. They had seemed like such convinient navigation aids on the way over, and now they had turned on me.

My last photo of Amsterdam, location unknown.

Suddenly there was a hotel porter in my room, shouting. Apparently he was trying to inform me that my taxi had been waiting for fifteen minutes. Some hasty dressing and a bit more shouting later and I was in the taxi and off on my journey back to London and a full day of work. The Dutch have an expression you know - Wie boter op zijn hoofd heeft, moet uit de zon blijven, or “He who has butter on his head, should stay out of the sun” - think about it.

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.

What’s it spell? Or rather what does it create an acroynm of… RFID (Radio Frequency IDentification).

The best example of RFID in action is your trusty Oyster card. Each Oyster has an RFID chip holding your Travelcard or Pay As You Go details, when you touch it on the yellow receiver you pass the details through to the database.

Using a relatively cheap bit of RFID kit, set up and supplied by our guest star Iain “The Innovator” Millar - We triggered Play, Stop and Forward iTunes controls with just our boardroom lazy susan, some Post Its and a MacBook Pro.

It was relatively straight forward process to define the action the RFID tag should perform, and once programmed could be “stuck” to pretty much anything.

This stimulated a healthy discussion about possible uses, from both our team and other guest star Robbie “Caboose” Toay.

Stairway to heaven
Sneaking up to people going done tube escalators a putting stickers on them that correspond to a note, reader at the bottom plays the tune!

DVD collection
Putting sticker on your DVD collection so you can still browse via the nice covers, when you choose one you wave over the reader and it plays the relevant DVD from your previously digitised collection

Sympathetic music playlists
Each person has a sticker that correspond to their musical tastes, when in a room (office, bar etc.) the system knows who’s there and plays a sympathetic playlist!

Dating events
Readers hidden under mats lets you know who’s single unobtrusively

City wide events
All TFL stations, Hide & seek, Treasure hunt, pub crawl etc.

Membership cards
‘barman pours you drink as you enter….’

Table football
Readers behind goals, sticker on balls, tied into flash application, shows ‘Goal to Jamie!!’ when goal scored

Lazy Susan
Brilliant music playing system by rotating Susan….

Oyster cards
not sure what but the fact that everyone has got one and we could potentially tag everyone is pretty smart.
Key, Phone, Wallet
Reader on your door at home, if you have forgotten anything when leaving you house will stop you (via stickers on the key items)

Food descriptions in restaurants
When dishes arrive (Yo Sushi style) the list of ingredients and additional information displayed (history of the dish etc.)

Throwing badges
Dave’s Adobe badges have stickers put on them and when thrown onto the reader launch the relevant application

Kick a big bag of flour
Reader in a  big bag of flour sticker on your shoe – booting the bag sends an email

Theme tunes (current favourite)
Reader on the door we all have our own stickers that when we walk in trigger our ‘theme tune’ to be played

Watch this space for prototypes coming soon…

3D Glasses

Our in-house Flash guru Mr David Robinson presented us with some cool Flash demos this week.

The most spectacular was a 3D Flash demo, so fish out those 3D specs from way back when and take a look at this site! Word of warning it made me feel a little bit ick but everyone else was fine.

You can buy 3D specs here if you can’t find any at home.

Heres a widget (whats a widget?) based upon our xmas card.  The widegt can be distributed on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and other platforms, and we can also track and analyse its usage!

Try it out here!

We’ll have much more widgety goodness coming soon so keep coming back.