Peter Elst

I just found this great video on the future of programming languages by Anders Hejlsberg, who was the lead architect of the C# programming language. Its definitely an interesting presentation to watch to get a perspective on where things are heading. (via Sean “the Flex Guy” Moore)

I don’t generally blog politics and this is going to be the one and only time I’ll bring up this years US Presidential election.

While the campaign so far has arguably resulted in some of the best political satire out there, the world is facing some serious challenges and whether we like it or not, the US plays and will continue to play a substantial role in getting this resolved.

Some people are frustrated to see how in Europe and other parts of the world the public consensus seems to lean heavily towards one candidate. That may well be true, and that bias could be explained in part by overcompensation because of our need for change and inability to make a difference through voting.

Those of you in the US can make that difference, I’m not going to ask you to vote for one candidate over the other but please do your research and most importantly vote. We are counting on you to turn the page on the last eight years.
 

When you go to conferences as much as I do and meet up with old friends and acquaintances, the number one question is: “So, Peter what have you been up to?”. I realized that, unless you follow me on twitter and actually read the dozens of messages I post there every week, fairly few people have a clue what I’ve been doing these last few months.

Well here goes, apart from the Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 courses I teach in Belgium and the UK, I spend a good bit of time tech reviewing several books. Two great titles that are coming out soon are AdvancED Flex 3 (Friends of ED) and the Adobe AIR Cookbook (O’Reilly).

I’m also co-authoring a couple of books, one that has already been announced is AdvancED AIR Applications (Friends of ED).

Turns out I’ve so far attended 10 events and conferences this year, presented a total 12 sessions and have enjoyed every minute! That said I’m not sure if I’ll be able to keep things going at that rate.

While I’d love to be in the position to speak at all conferences that would like to have me over, unless my basic travel and accommodation expenses can be covered (which thankfully and increasing number of conferences are able to do), I’m going to have to become very selective in what I take on. I’d prefer to spend my personal travel budget on community events that genuinely have limited resources or are just starting out. That’s not a dig at Adobe MAX by the way, there are different reasons why I won’t be speaking there this year.

The ActionScript Conference in Singapore is going to be my last conference speaking engagement of the year and have not confirmed anything for 2009 as of yet.

We’ll see how things go, after Singapore I’m heading to India for a couple of weeks and will get back to business again by the end of November.
 

Thanks to Zohar Babin for pointing me to some further information about the FlaCC project on the LLVM.org website. Scott Petersen gave a talk on August 1st at the Apple Campus for the “2008 LLVM Developers’ Meeting“.

The title of his session was “Flash C Compiler: Compiling C code to the Adobe Flash Virtual Machine” with the following session description:

FlaCC is a research project that compiles C code to ActionScript using llvm-gcc with a custom flash code generator. This enables almost arbitrary C and C++ code to be executed safely and efficiently within a Flash container on web pages. This talk describes the implementation of the system and shows several compelling examples that use it to run other language and CPU interpreters within Flash as well as run existing large programs within C. The demos are also extremely impressive

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I’ve been doubting whether or not I should blog about this, seeing controversy seemed to me what he was after, and this post would only be adding to that.

Jonathan Harris’ session at Flash on the Beach blew me away with some of the most inspirational art projects I’ve seen to date, I was genuinely moved by the work he presented. At the same time this talk left me incredibly frustrated after hearing his perception of the Flash community and a message that seemed devoid of any sense of reality.

He started off by saying he was going to present a different session than was previously announced and he had “something important he wanted to say to the Flash community for a long time now…”. That line came back at regular intervals during his talk, seemingly building up to his big message. It almost felt to me as if he was after a “Michael Moore addressing the Republican National Convention” moment.

Photo taken by schobiwan
 
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If you paid close attention during some of the Adobe sessions at Flash on the Beach you’ll have heard about a project called FlaCC, basically a way to compile C and C++ libraries to ActionScript bytecode.

I haven’t seen a whole lot of people talking about it as of yet even though - if this works out - it is in my opinion one of the most exciting developments in the last few years!

From what I can tell this project goes back to what we saw presented by Scott Petersen during the sneak peek sessions at MAX Chicago 2007, the most impressive of his demo’s was without a doubt running a cross-compiled version of Quake in the Flash Player (or an AIR app as it turns out).

Here’s the video I recorded back then:

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This session by Seb Lee-Delisle was my favorite technical session of this years Flash on the Beach. The most approachable presentation of Papervision3D I’ve seen to date and its definitely inspired me to pick it up again for future projects.

You can download the source code for this talk from Seb’s website.
 

I did my “AIR Beyond the Basics” talk at Flash on the Beach on Tuesday and was pretty happy with the turnout — especially since I was up against a jam session with Keith Peters, Joa Ebert, Ralph Hauwert, Carlos Ulloa, Mario Klingemann and Andre Michelle

The internet connection unfortunately failed on me and had to skip over a couple of cool demo’s — think I’ll do a recording soon walking you through the various code samples and post it here. If you want to give it a try yourself in the meanwhile you can download the source code from the link below.

Example code includes:

Feel free to get in touch if you’ve got any questions about these AIR APIs and I’ll be happy to help you out.

Download source files (10.7 MB zip file)
 

Another year, another great Flash on the Beach keynote. This year Richard Galvan, Serge Jespers and Mark Doherty took the stage to talk about Flash CS4, AIR and Flash Lite.

At some point during the keynote Richard mistakenly says that Flash Player 10 beta has reached 60% adoption, I’ve been told by Adobe that there have been 6.5 million Flash Player 10 beta downloads at this time.

 

First prize: Ronny
Second prize: Kristof
Third prize: Nate Chatellier

All runners-up will be getting a ticket to the <head> conference, thanks to everyone who participated and our generous sponsors!

I will soon be contacting the winners to get the prizes sorted.