Peter Elst

As promised here is that long overdue roundup of this years’ FlashForward conference in San Francisco.

Day one

The highlights of day one were without a doubt the “Best Practices Expert Panel” by among others Chris Georgenes, Joey Lott and Robert Reinhardt and “The Cost of Copyright” by Lawrence Lessig of the Stanford Law School.

I’ve seen my fair share of best practices sessions but this one really stood out because of its practical, hands-on advice on Flash animation, ActionScript and video for Flash. Its tempting just sticking to explaining established practices in the community and presenting them as is but the guys really outdid themselves and showed some great techniques and time-saving tricks.

Originally I hadn’t planned to see the session on copyright but am very glad I did. Lawrence Lessig gave an inspiring talk on the current state of copyright on the web, how “all rights reserved” became the norm and is incompatible with a medium like the Internet where every pageview is essentially a “copy” and how initiatives like the Creative Commons license can promote a legal framework for “remix culture” as is prevalent in the Flash community today.

In response Mike Chambers released a code-snippet the very next day that adds a “view source” and “view license” item in the right-click menu for the Flash player plugin.

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After a couple of very busy months, blissfully ignoring my spam-infested blog, I’ve managed to invest some time cleaning it up and upgrading to the latest WordPress release. Some 1374 deleted spam comments later its looking brand sparkling new, even if I do say so myself!

That said, I’m back in the blogging business and there are loads of things I plan to post about in the coming days including:

• FlashForward 2005 San Francisco roundup (better late than never, great conference that didn’t nearly get the amount of coverage it deserved)
• The “Scripting Design - CSS(Cascading Style Sheets) in Flash” ATE(Ask The Expert) session notes (once I retrieve those from my defunct notebook) along with a couple of great new examples on how to extend the TextField.StyleSheet parser
• Some XML(eXtensible Markup Language) tips and tricks I recently discovered and are brilliant for storyboarding Flash applications
• Upcoming events and planned sessions

And of course the obligatory post with my thoughts on the Adobe > Macromedia acquisition … so stay tuned!