Peter Elst

I’ve been over in London for the last few days which happily coincided with the Adobe Live event — headed over to the Olympia for Wednesday nights London MMUG meeting, a panel on “The future of the Internet as an Applications Platform”.

Speakers included: Ben Watson, Bola Rotibi, Andrew Shorten, James Governor, Andy Hood and Aral Balkan. Turned out to be a very interesting evening indeed, think some very important topics were raised and it was good to hear everyone’s take on it. What I took away from the evening was the need for open data, going into the direction of a synchronized web (*cough* Apollo anyone?) and the need for accessibility not just as compliance to government legislation but as a real project goal. Last but not least as many in the audience, I’d agree with James that “DRM is crap”… or at the very least seriously flawed.

Thursday late afternoon I came over to Adobe Live again, sneaking into a couple of sessions (I forgot to register) and hanging out with Tink and Aral at the MMUG booth.

Somehow my blog attracted enough interest to get invited by James to join him and several other movers an shakers from a wide range of different background on an Adobe sponsored wine tasting geek fest. One of the best nights I’ve had over in London for a long time! It was great meeting up with everyone especially Ben Watson, Group Manager for Adobe’s Developer Relations, who will hopefully be coming over to our local MMUG next time he’s in the area.

Looks like I’ll be over in London quite a bit in the coming weeks, so might organize a little get together myself — feel free to drop me a line if you’re interested!

This years AfterHours Mega Session was brilliant as expected, some very cool and inspiring presentations — definitely not the predictable blend of topics you already see at many other events.

[update] my presentation is now available for download

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Koen De Weggheleire has an excellent post up today on image compression techniques for Flash 8. He discusses downgrading the color palette as well as RLE and LZW compression. A very interesting read!

Also be sure to check out Mario Klingemann’s BitmapExporter class if you’re interested in the topic:

http://www.quasimondo.com/archives/000572.php

Adobe has just released a prerelease of Spry, a set of JavaScript libraries that leverage XML and XPath for easily creating interactive web pages and applications.

What I particularly like about it is that it integrates nicely with your HTML content, no funky scripting is required. Just include the JavaScript libraries, specify an XML dataset and create a dynamic region. You can set up repeating regions, sort and filter data without much hassle.

Hope to find some time this weekend to look into it some more and build an actual application!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/spry/
http://www.adobe.com/devnet/logged_in/pgubbay_spry.html

[update] You wonder if this release date is just a happy coincidence with Kevin Lynch delivering a keynote at the Ajax Experience conference later today.

If someone told this to me a year ago I would *never* have believed them. Its just incredible to see the possibilities Flash Player 9 is opening up!

Darron Shall (of FlashVNC fame) and Claus Wahlers have set up an open source project building an emulator for the Commodore 64 in Flash. Over the last few days they’ve made incredible progress and they’ve now got the basic display code and a basic keyboard implementation in place, meaning you can actually run BASIC commands.

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Multi-Mania is without a doubt one of Belgium’s best multimedia events of the year, this year promises to be no different with more than 20 people presenting in three different tracks.

Head on down to the Schouwburg in Kortrijk on June 29th to see such people as Aral Balkan, Christophe Herreman, Edwin van Rijkom, Wayne Smith.

I’ll be participating in the Open Source Flash panel together with Christophe Herreman, Edwin van Rijkom, Waldo Smeets and Serge Jespers (moderated by Aral Balkan). Looks like it’ll be great fun!

More information on the website: www.multi-mania.be

Just got back from the Adobe Fusion event in Brussels and came back excited to see to what extent Adobe and Macromedia software already play nice together.

I thought I was pretty much up to speed on integration between Photoshop, After Effects, Illustrator and Flash but the guys managed to show us some very cool tips and tricks on how to have them work together. Pretty cool! Serge did an impressive walkthrough of creating FLVs with alpha transparency, using cue points and round-trip editing with Photoshop.

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