Peter Elst

Things are certainly on the up for the European Flash community, whereas we would usually have one or two conferences a year we’ve now got no less than four conferences over a period of six months!

I’ve been confirmed to speak at the following conferences:

* Flashtival, Rotterdam - the Netherlands (September 27th, 2004)
* FlashEurope, Barcelona - Spain (November 3-5, 2004)
* MediaElements, Enschede - the Netherlands (November 11-12, 2004)
* MX Europe, London - United Kingdom (January 31st - February 2th, 2005)

Sit yourself down and check out the partial list of speakers for FlashEurope that aSH has up

Speakers among many many others include: Andries Odendaal, Brajeshwar, Chafic Kazoun, Erik Natzke, Grant Skinner, Marcos Weskamp, etc.

There might even be a couple more events that I wasn’t aware of, talk about an exciting few months!

Great news, the latest updater to Flash MX 2004 (version 7.2) codenamed Ellipsis has just been released for download. A lot of performance issues were adressed and among many other improvements there now also is a standalone ScrollBar component.

Mike Chambers discusses the importance of the Ellipsis updater

Chafic Kazoun has a great article up on the skinning architecture

(via Scott Fegette)

I’ve been confirmed as a speaker for the Media Elements 2004 conference with sessions on “CSS and webstandards” and “Flash Elements”. The two day conference is held in Enschede, the Netherlands on the 11th and 12th of November and has some great international speakers in the lineup including: Sam Wan, Keith Peters, Guy Watson and Florian Krüsch.

This promises to be one of the best conferences to date, really looking forward to it!

Yesterday evening we held our MMUG Belgium launch event, spent the afternoon doing some last-minute preparations and met up with my partners in crime Serge Jespers and Peter van den Wyngaert to get the meeting venue set up (in the boardroom no less, thanks to Bruno @ Telenet!).

Went to pick up the Collab guys, Thijs Triemstra and Leo van der Veen, at the station around 6 PM, got some ‘fast’-food and arrived back at the venue around 7 PM just in time to get them all set up before people started arriving.

We had a great crowd of around 50 attendees, a lot of them armed with wifi notebooks and high bandwidth connections thanks to the complimentary Telenet hotspot connections. Thijs and Leo presented some very cool experiments with multi-user environments, text-to-speech-to-flash, gadgets controlled through Flash interfaces, controllers sending feedback to Flash movies, etc.

Then, on top of that, we had a surprise visit by no less than Colin Moock — author of some of the most authoratitive books on ActionScript and driving force behind Unity, a Java-based XML socket server which Thijs uses for a lot of his projects — through a special dedicated version of Collab.nl. There were a couple of questions for Colin and he shared his views on the future of multi-user environment for the web and what to expect for the release of Unity 3.

After a short break we did our raffle with no less than 30 give-aways including two licenses to Unity MDK Express, two Ghostwire component sets, one MX Developers Journal subscription, Friends of ED and O’Reilly books and a fully licensed copy of Macromedia Studio MX 2004 Professional. To make sure nobody went home empty handed, every attendee will be getting a free license to Zoomifyer for Flash.

Next meeting is scheduled for mid-September, after a short summer break we’ll be back with another great session on Macromedia-related technology. Thanks to everyone for the great feedback!