Another good day at Flash Forward. There were more presentations I wanted to check out today, which resulted in schedule conflicts. So I ended up basing which seminars/workshops I attended based on the amount of presentation notes that were included in the conference workbook. So in this post I'll also be including links to presentations I did not attend so we can all learn together.

Macromedia Keynote
Kevin Lynch, Macromedia

Nothing really newsworthy from the presentation that hasn't already been reported from previous conferences (better performance, cleaner text, new video codec, graphic effects, tabbed panels, etc.), but it was pretty cool to see the new graphic effects in action, especially the animation of the dog and its dropshadow animating with ease. There were a few things to note though:

• - Kevin is encouraging developers to add a "View Source" and "View License" option to the context menu of our Flash movies. That concept seemed to pop up often today, usually pointing to Mike Chambers' weblog post on the technique.
• - The 8ball Flash mobile emulator was demoed and is quite awesome. It loads in a graphic of the actual phone/pda/mobile device and the profile of the screen resolution, as well as the button functions, so you can see exactly how it will perform on that device. They also plan to release frequent updates as new devices ship with Flash Lite.

Breathing Life into Flash Graphics
Josh Ott, Freedom Interactive

For Josh's presentation, he basically ran through a bunch of techniques that he has used through the years as a Flash designer/developer/animator. I'd expect to see some of his work popping up in the Flash Pearls gallery in the future. Techniques he touched on included sliding, masking, zoom transitions, and simulated typing of text (a la Strong Bad emails).

Effective Flash Navigation
Guy Watson, FlashGuru

Seemed like a useful presentation, but there were a good deal of notes in the workbook, hence why I attended Josh Ott's presentation instead. Apparently notes/files/other useful info will be posted at his website.

Playing Nice with XHTML &Flash
Matt Richmond & Geoff Stearns, The Chopping Block

Basically, you should be using Geoff's FlashObject whenever you embed a .swf. If you're not, go learn about it now.

ActionScript 2.0: A Visual Introduction for Right-Brainers
Aral Balkan, Ariaware

I missed the beginning of Aral's presentation because I was out to lunch with Matt & Geoff from The Chopping Block (who were introduced to me by Micheal Raichelson), but I was still able to catch the majority of it. Aral did an excellent job at explaining AS2.0 as best you can in one hour. If you're lucky enough to live in his neck of the woods (somewhere in the UK), definitely check out his classes on Flash, he's a great teacher. And then, as he says, go read a couple books and you'll be an expert before you know it :p

Macromedia Town Hall Meeting
Doug Benson, Christian Cantrell, Mike Chambers, Kevin Lynch

As with the keynote speech, nothing extremely new and noteworthy to report. Questions about the Adobe's purchase of Macromedia were asked early but quickly subdued because Macromedia still cannot really comment on the situation until the whole legalness (is that a word?) of the deal gets sorted out and the 2 companies are actually working as one. They did point out that they acknowledge that many of the Abobe and Macromedia products have a strong community backing them and will do their best not to upset them. Let's hope that holds true.

A few other minor notes:

• - The download for Flash Player 8 will be less than 1MB. Tests with a 1.5MB download have shown no major issues of user rejection to download it because of the size, so they feel a file size of less than 1MB will result in yet another quick version penetration of the Flash Player update.
• - Meta Data in .swf's will be searchable by the Flash Search Engine SDK.
• - There are no current plans to add a 3D rendering engine to the Flash Player. Reason being it will add significant file size to the download, and they do not see a large demand for it right now. Kevin commented that when Director added that capability, he was very excited, but it ended up not being as widely utilized as he had hoped. They did say that once they see the demand for it, they will build that feature into it. That was followed by a quick "show of hands" survey to see who wants that now, and I'd estimate about half the room felt that was the case.
• - The only improvement to the built-in Flash components for 8ball is a new video component, which they were fairly excited about, but did not demo for us.

Colors
Veronique Brossier

This presentation took place during the Macromedia Town Hall meeting, so I did not get to check it out, but the Flash Workbook states that all notes from the presentation can be found at http://www.v-ro.com/ff05k. That link isn't live yet, but I'd expect an updated link on her homepage once it is available. From what I overheard at the Pre-Film Festival reception, it's definitely worth checking out.

Flash Film Festival Winners:

• Motion Graphics
  tokyoplastic
• Application
  UK General Elections
• Educational
  gotoAndLearn()
  (awesome trailer, be sure to check that out too)
• 3D
  Power Bright
• Story
  Craziest
• Art
  Oculart
• Typography
  Type Drawing
• Navigation
  Saints and Soliders
• Cartoon
  Manege Frei
• Commerce
  Emerald Nuts
• Original Sound
  Flowering of Forgotten Gifts
• Technical Merit
  Ten by Ten
• Game
  Laser Envy
• Experimental
  Amaztype
• Video
  Billy Harvey Music
  (he had a great acceptance video too, wish you could have seen it)
• People's Choice
  Conclave Obscurum

For more information on Day 2 of the conference, be sure to check out Michael Raichelson's podcast.

Additional Wrap-Ups:

• - FlashForward 2005 NYC, Day 1

• - FlashForward 2005 NYC, Day 3

Long first day at Flash Forward 2005 in New York City. Lots of useful information from the Flash community, which I've compiled here:

Actionscript as a Toolbox
Branden Hall

Tips for increasing performance of SWFs:
* Branden's tips, as well as Jacob Correia's (which are listed later), are based on that fact that even though Flash is vector based, for every frame it displays, it must first create a raster version of the stage before it can display it. So having no vector graphics will improve performance, but will obviously bloat the file size. So the key is to find a balance between the two.

• - If a movie clip's _alpha is 0, set _visible to false (this prevents Flash from having to use resources to render it and then hide it)
• - Use AS2.0 variable typing (improves your code and speeds up debugging)
• - Do not use lexical scoping (yeah, I didn't know what that was either, and I'm still not sure I do, but this helps)
• - When using "for" loops, do not continually evaluate a condition that will not change, i.e. instead of
  

  for(var i = 1; i < myArray.length; i++) {
  	// do stuff
  }

  use
  
  

  var myVar = myArray.length;
  for(var i = 1; i < myVar; i++) {
  	// do stuff
  }

• - Use local shared objects (which are like cookies for Flash, see Tech Note) to force an obtrusive Flash ad to only annoy the user once.

• - Use external .as files for code (allows for more efficient user control and prevents disaster when an .fla is corrupted)
• - Use "frame breaking," which is basically instead of doing a ton of stuff on one frame, run the function for x seconds on one frame, and then move to the next frame and continue the function from where you left off (see http://www.waxpraxis.org/coding/20/programming-pretty---part-ii for a detailed run down on the technique)
• - Make movieClipLoader and the Delegate class your best friends.

Google, Where's My Flash Site?
Peter Hall

Peter's presentation explained his work on Ripple, which is "is an open-source framework, whose primary objective is to make Flash content searchable by search engines." Check out the project page at osflash.org to learn more.

Ripple makes use of XPath for Flash, which can be downloaded from xfactorstudio.com.

Game Workshop: Designing Online Flash Games
Jacob Correia & John Say from Say Design

The focus of the presentation was on Flash game development, but Jacob's tips expand to other uses of Flash. His presentation and other related files are online.

Topics in the presentation include:

• - Choosing Frame Rate
• - Performance and Optimization
• - Preloaders
• - Bitmap Smoothing
• - JSFL (Javascript Flash)
• - 3rd Party Flash-to-.EXE tools

Jacob also will be posting a useful Frame Rate Counter Component (provides a numeric and graphic representation of the current Frame Rate of the SWF)

Sound Ideas
Craig Swann, Crash!Media

Amazingly awesome presentation on using sound with Flash. Unforunately I didn't get a chance to speak with Craig because he had to leave immediately when his presentation ended at 5pm so he could haul ass to JFK airport to make a 7:30 flight to Barcelona for a wedding. I'm glad he kept his commitment to Flash Foward. Rather than explain here, just check out his files and presentation notes.

Then came the free (as in beer) hors d'oeuvres and alcohol. Yea for sponsors who know how to please.

For more information on Day 1 of the conference, be sure to check out Michael Raichelson's podcast.

Additional Wrap-Ups:

• - FlashForward 2005 NYC, Day 2

• - FlashForward 2005 NYC, Day 3

Luis from lessrain.com has compiled a set of links of best practices for optimizing your SWF files. Nothing earth shattering, but a good refresher nonetheless.