Peter Elst

Tonight was the last event of the onAIR Bus Tour and am very glad I made it out to Chicago in time to attend it!

Mike Chambers, Ryan Stewart, Danny Dura and Kevin Hoyt walked us through the ins and outs of developing with AIR. We saw a cool showcase for digimix by Alan Queen and Grant Skinner closed the evening by showing us some of his recent AIR apps.

Eventhough I have been doing quite a bit of experimenting with AIR in the last few weeks I picked up a number of really good tips and tricks, especially with regards to script bridging between JavaScript and Flash. Can’t wait to give that a try!

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Just half an hour before I need to head out to the airport and what do I see? My MacBook Pro power adaptor is at it again — what the heck is wrong with these things? Last time it burned through at the magsafe connector, this time its happening at the base.

First stop in Chicago will be by the Apple store getting another piece of expensive hardware that will probably last me just a few months.

Just have to hope it doesn’t burn down the house next time round.

I lost track of this story for a while after I heard the code of the public art piece by Ben Rubin at the Adobe HQ in San Jose was cracked. The winners have since been announced — Mark Snesrud and Bob Mayo, two local research scientists.

Turns out the semaphore was broadcasting the full text of “The Crying of Lot 49” a novel by Thomas Pynchon (1966).

Each of the four discs had four possible positions (horizontal, left diagonal, vertical, right diagonal) which together made up 256 combinations of its alphabet.

In addition to the discs there was a soundtrack with a low-power radio broadcast on AM 1860. It was possible to crack the code solely using the discs or the soundtrack. The soundtrack used a system where the first voice announced a word of the phonetic alphabet (alpha, bravo, charlie) followed by a second voice stating a number. In this case the first voice on the soundtrack represented the first two disc positions and the second voice handled the last two resulting in the same 256 character alphabet.

Its really fascinating to read up on how the code actually works and how the winners got to their solution.

http://www.sanjosesemaphore.org

MAX Chicago is kicking off in under a week and its going to be absolutely huge with over 4000 people registered so far!

My session is entitled “Introduction to OOP with ActionScript 3.0” and you’ll be able to catch it either Monday (October 1st) at 2PM or Wednesday (October 3rd) at 3PM.

Some sessions that I plan to attend are:

- “Best Practices for Developing with ActionScript 3.0” by David Hassoun
- “Design Patterns in ActionScript 3.0” by Leo Schuman
- “Flash Lite 3 Development” by Bill Perry
- “Flex on Rails” by Tony Hillerson

Also really looking forward to the final on AIR Bus Tour event on the evening of the 29th. Hope to see you there!

Flashforward was the first ever Flash conference I attended back in 2001. I remember how thrilled I was to see Brandon Hall and Sam Wan in person and hear them talk about cutting edge technology — loading XML into Flash, something that took me days (if not weeks) to get my head around.

I remember seeing Kevin Lynch present a sneak peek of Flash 6 at the Macromedia keynote and how we would get a scrollbar component that automatically snaps to a textfield. I remember how that got a standing ovation and how Adobe’s keynote was greeted with the occasional boo and ironic laughter when they presented LiveMotion.

Things have changed, but Flashforward has remained one of the absolute best Flash conferences out there. Without it I’m sure I would never have gone freelance, traveled as much as I get to do now or be blogging this post from the airport wifi for that matter.

Thanks to Lynda, Christoph, Toby and the rest of the team for what they continue to pull off.

Flashforward2007 Boston was a blast!

The Papervision3D sesion with Carlos Ulloa is up next, still half an hour to go but better go grab a seat as I’m sure its going to be packed.
 

13:32:02 GMT-0400 - Carlos takes the stage and starts talking about next generation web experiences — going beyond technical limitations

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Last day of the conference already, how time flies. This morning will be kicked off with a keynote by John Maeda from MIT Media Lab on “The Aesthetics of Computation”.

Stay tuned for more…

09:05:56 GMT-0400 - John Maeda takes the stage — wants to introduce us to his graduate students who are showing a next generation of a graphics environment. Read the rest of this entry »

In Chafic’s session on “Building and Architecting Flex Applications” — stay tuned for live updates!

16:35:09 GMT-0400 - Chafic says his session is aimed at clearing up some misconceptions around Flex, feedback on the book etc.
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Those of you that follow my blog will probably know that I have a number of presentations on OOP and ActionScript 3.0 lined up this September and October. So, what better excuse to do a little giveaway?

If you attended any of my sessions at Flashforward Boston, MAX Chicago or MAX Barcelona and have something to say — email me, leave a voicemail message, or what the heck record a video.

Any feedback is welcome, good or bad and you’ll be automatically entered in the prize draw.

The winner gets a signed copy of Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0 and some other goodies (still to be determined).

I just finished my presentation at Flashforward2007 Boston and absolutely loved it! My session covered the basics of object-oriented programming with ActionScript 3.0 and a little introduction to Design Patterns (Observer, Singleton, MVC).

Managed to get a full room with Aral Balkan presenting next door so am pretty impressed about the turnout. Great audience response and questions afterwards so, thank you Boston!

As promised here are my session notes for download, I’ll be posting a more in depth example of MVC with AS3.0 in a couple of days. Enjoy!

Download (PDF - 2,9MB)
Source files (ZIP - 396Kb)