The general topics slated to be covered are:

• Getting Started (Intro, project types, pros/cons, comparison to other editors)
• Shortcuts ('QuickFix' code generation, refactoring, searching, etc.)
• Integration with Eclipse (SVN, ANT, XML, and other helpful plug-ins)

I will speaking on the third item, Integration with Eclipse, presenting an introduction to simple ANT integration and workflows, along with some of the Eclipse plug-ins I use on a regular basis.

Here are all of the details from the flashpdx.org site:

David Knape, Jon MacDonald and Matt Gitchell will show how they use the FDT development environment in their daily work.

When: Thursday 10/15 11:30 - 1:00pm
Where: Second Story 714 N Fremont St #200

Pizza will be provided, seating is limited to 25.

Please RSVP with shane {at} secondstory {dot} com

PowerFlasher, the makers of FDT, have generously donated a copy of FDT Pure edition for a raffle, and will send discount codes to anyone who provides an e-mail address for the raffle.

(Don’t know what FDT is? In short, FDT is a professional code editor for ActionScript. More info on FDT at http://www.fdt.powerflasher.com. )

After spending a few days pre-conference in London, I've arrived in Brighton for Flash on the Beach 2009 and the first day of workshops. I chose to attend the iPhone App Development For Flash Developers workshop taught by Julian Dolce today.

While I certainly didn't grow any fonder of Objective-C today, I did learn quite a lot. During the eight hour session we covered a pretty wide range of topics and tasks. First Julian gave us a few hour Objective-C overview before we all took the virtual pet example from Colin Moock's Essential ActionScript 3.0 book and coverted it to Objective-C. This was a great task since everyone in the room knew AS3 and was more than likely familiar with the virtual pet example.

After a break for lunch we all jumped into some quick equivalents of ActionScript 3 code in Objective-C, and then used those examples to build a sample application with some animated images, touch events (taps and dragging), audio. Lastly Julian gave an overview of Interface Builder and then went over some general tips and tricks.

Julian will be posting his slides, sample code and some recommended additional reading on the page he setup on his website: http://deleteaso.com/iphone-workshop/

Hopefully I'll find a way to learn to like Objective-C as much as I do AS3 since developing for the iPhone, as I learned today, can certainly be a fun experience.

Thanks, Julian!

I'm excited to be heading over to Brighton, UK once again this year to attend Flash on the Beach 2009. Besides all of the wonderful speakers and catching up with everyone, I'm equally excited for a new addition this year: The Elevator Pitch.

The conference website describes it as "...exactly what the title suggests - 20 'newbies' / 'oldies' / whatever you want to call them, get 3 minutes to show their best work, a new idea, live coding, live drawing, whatever."

This is great for two reasons. First, for the past two years the most well attended sessions were the 'filler' sessions where several speakers got up and free-formed it for five minutes each to fill an hour long session left blank by a speaker who had to cancel last minute. This always leads to exciting presentations about small projects these guys are working on, rather than some topic that takes an hour to present. Second, one of my favorite events in Portland is Ignite, where presenters have only 20 slides that automatically rotate every 15 seconds to get their point across. When you are forced to distill a topic down to only a couple of key points, it often ends up being a much better presentation.

I also think it is great to be giving some up-and-coming talent a chance to speak. Most people (myself included) find it difficult to put together a presentation on a topic that would fill a whole hour. You either end up having way too much content or way too little content. And the prep time pre-conference can be a time consuming nightmare. But if you only need to prep for a three minute talk, there are no excuses.

You can see a full list of the topics that will be covered by Flash on the Beach's 3 Minute Wonders at the conference website, but I'm really looking forward to topics such as "I can't draw, but I can program", "ActionScript to Objective-C (and everything in between)" and "Beta, my arse!".

Over the years, Stumptown’s become a central haven for independent thinkers with a quirk and a twist, producing some of the most darkly observant and refreshingly honest talents of our time.

That is what the Cut&Paste website says about Portland. And while I'd have to concur, tonight's competition will certainly be telling.

If you are unfamiliar with Cut&Paste, it is a digital design tournament taking place in 16 cities this year ending with a global championship in New York City. New this year are 3D and Motion competitions, in addition to the legacy 2D competition.

I kicked myself for not attending last year, especially once Tim May, the winner of last year's 2D competition joined us at XPLANE as Senior Interactive Designer.

If you can't make it to the competition tonight, you can watch the live webcast on the Cut and Paste website.

Yes indeed, "this nook in the Northwest, the City of Roses, is the new bohemia." Looking forward to seeing it tonight.

It is with huge regret that we have taken the decision to cancel FOTB Miami. Our intention was to bring FOTB with its awesome speaker line up, fantastic networking opportunities and of course terrific FOTB vibe to the USA, but low registration numbers have meant that we would not be able to deliver the high calibre event that Flash on the Beach has become well known for.

Looks like even conferences are having problems with the down economy, which in reality, makes sense. I was excited about the conference coming to the States, so I am obviously disappointed to hear the news.

One thing did pick up my spirits a bit, however: John Davey decided to not only refund everyone's registration fees, but also provided a free pass to FOTB Brighton 2009.

Looks like I will be going to Brighton this year, after all!

For the next 48 hours you can get a full three day conference pass for Flash On The Beach Miami for only $99 (as opposed to the regular cost of $359)!

When you purchase your ticket use promo code RSKNUTS1 and you'll get the discounted price. I bought my tickets at the "super early bird" discounted price and paid more than this - so $99 is truly a great deal.

Note that this promotion only lasts 48 hours and is ending at midnight PST on Wednesday 14th January.

I was prompted to start looking at conference prices for 2009 when I heard that Flash On The Beach Miami's Super Early Bird pricing has been extended through Christmas. John Davey, the conference organizer, sent me a short email stating, "I think everyone is worried about the economy, and although it is worrying me too, I think a show of 'giving back' will be appreciated." I agree, John. And, thanks!

So, without further delay, here is a breakdown of pricing comparing some of the 'major' Flash/Flex conferences:

When looking at the table, you'll no doubt notice a few things right off. First, FlashForward continues to be the most expensive conference of the bunch at about a whopping 50% more expensive than FOTB or 306|Flex for the standard ticket price. I should mention that FlashForward has not posted their prices for 2009 and the table includes their 2008 pricing. Since the conference just changed hands last year (it was purchased by Beau Ambur of Metaliq) and they dropped the prices at that time, it is most likely safe to assume that they will keep the prices as-is this year.

Another item to consider is that with a new edition to be held in Miami, Flash on the Beach no longer requires international travel. My prior comparisons all had to take into account a flight to London and the very lopsided exchange rate for US Dollar to British Pound. With that no longer being necessary, FOTB is now even a better bargin for those of us in the States. Especially when you realize that all of the headlining speakers from the Brighton edition have also committed to speaking in Miami.

360|Flex has always had some of the lowest prices for a conference. They started out with all tickets priced at $360, but had since risen the price to $480. For their next conference they are taking a new approach of tiered pricing. As you can see above, the first 100 tickets are at the old $360 rate, the next 200 are at the standard $480 rate, and the last are at a premium rate of $550 (which is still about half of the cost of FlashForward).

Of course there is always the extra costs that go along with conferences like flight and hotel. Those certainly add to the cost, but for the most part are the same across the board (except in the case of international travel and/or exchange rates as mentioned previously), so I don't take those into consideration here.

What are your thoughts on the price of conferences in 2009? Am I missing any conferences that you would like to see added?

If you haven't been to a Flash on the Beach conference yet because you had a hard time justifying the cost of travel to Brighton, your chance to experience the best Flash-centric conference has arrived stateside! Tickets for FOTB Miami to be held April 6th-8th, 2009 are now on sale. And, the first 199 people to buy tickets will get them at the unbelievable price of $299.

On that note, I've been adding up some numbers for my annual conference pricing comparison post - so check back soon for all the details on which conference is the best deal of 2009.

This Saturday, October 25th at 2pm PST, I'll be speaking at the <head> Conference on Working with SWX: The Native Data Format for the Flash Platform. Here is my session description:

In this session we'll cover the basics of SWX: what it is and what it is best used for, how systemwide simplicity benefits developers, how to use the free public gateway for integrating APIs into your mobile and web applications, and plans for the upcoming ActionScript 3 release.

If you are unfamiliar, <head> is a global web conference -- all sessions are attended online using Adobe's Acrobat Connect. There are a few local hubs scattered around the world, so you can also sign up to attend those hubs if you'd like to network, meet speakers in person, etc. Aral, the conference organizer, has arranged for an amazing line-up of speakers over three days.

Hope to see you there!

Ben Stucki - Advanced Flexing for Flash Developers
Seb Lee-Delisle - Papervision3D Simplified
Doug McCune - Steal this code: Decompiling SWFs for fun and profit
Koen de Weggheleire - Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3
Adobe Team - Flash Ying and Yang (Information on the Flash CS4 GUI and Flash Player 10 Development)
Jonathan Harris - The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure

- - -

Ben Stucki - Advanced Flexing for Flash Developers

Ben's session was all about using Flex to take advantage of your Flash knowledge, and while I'm not sure I walked out of the session feeling like a Flex pro as advertised, I did learn quite a bit.

The first big point Ben made was that Flex is a framework, not a set of components. I think Flash developers do tend to make this mistake because of the long history of UI components in Flash. After noting the difference Ben went on to speak in length about component development and how this would allow you to bring your Flash objects into Flex. Lastly, he ended up with some discussion on skinning in Flex and some lessons on the CSS syntax.

- - -

Seb Lee-Delisle - Papervision3D Simplified

Seb put on one of the most entertaining sessions of the conference -- not so much because of the content (which was good in its own right), but because the delivery was energetic and spot on.

For instance, in a throwback to the Speaker Jam session of the day before where Joa Ebert live-coded for 10 minutes straight, Seb decided to show how quick and easy it would be to make a simple Papervision3D scene:

As part of the joke he decides to play the Countdown theme song:

To round out the session, Seb provided 3D basics and an overview of models compatiable with Papervision3D.

You can view Seb's example files and thoughts on the conference on his blog. Peter Elst also has a good overview and some video of Seb's session on his blog.

- - -

Doug McCune - Steal this code: Decompiling SWFs for fun and profit

I last saw Doug speak at 360Flex Seattle where he spoke on Flex Component Development. Doug has become a big name on the Flex scene since then, and I was initially wondering why he'd be speaking at a Flash conference, even though the two are closely related. However, within the first five minutes of the talk I was glad I went to see his session.

Doug's session was about how to decompile SWF files and find classes that you could learn from. As an example of this, he decompiled Photoshop Express and easily located all of the image manipulation classes that the online application utilizes. From these classes he was able to build his own simple photo editing application.

Doug has posted his slides from the conference on his blog.

- - -

Koen de Weggheleire - Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3

Koen de Weggheleire has been sharing his work in manipulating pixels for quite some time. His session covered several techniques for working with pixels, was fairly developer heavy, and overall was worthwhile.

One thing to note that is only slightly session related -- all week in this room there had been a large swarm of flies who would always manage to land on the speaker during their session, interrupting them. So, Koen broke out an application he had written a while back called "Fly Swatter":

- - -

Adobe Team - Flash Ying and Yang (Information on the Flash CS4 GUI and Flash Player 10 Development)

Capping off the Adobe sessions at the conference, Richard Galvin and Paul Betlem spent an hour giving a great rundown of features in Flash CS4 and Flash Player 10 that have not been as high profile and/or highly discussed. Paul also spent some time discussing how features make their way into the Flash Player, the choices that need to be made and how they balance new feature requests.

Some of the features Richard discussed that are not as often highlighted in Flash CS4 included:

General UI:
* Instead of text entry boxes, the UI now features "hot text" where you click on the text to show the entry box.
* You can now do simple math in the text entry boxes.

Library:
* The library can be filtered through a search box located at the top of the library panel.
* You can now make changes on multiple library items at once.
* You can add a library item to a folder at the same time as creating it.

AS3:
* AS3-only SWCs from the Flex Framework can now be imported in the Flash projects, with the exception of the component architecture. You can set this up under the advanced AS3 setting dialog box.
* CS4 includes support for conditional compilation, meaning that you can include conditionals in your code and only if that conditional applies in your project setup will it get included in the compiled SWF. You can do this by adding the following to your code: CONFIG::CONSTANT { code }

Other:
* The Kuler panel is no included in Flash CS4.

3D:
* There is a 3D transformation tool that moves in relation to the selected object. You can also set the tool to be "global to local" and it will be respective of the stage or object you are working with.

Inverse Kinematics:
* You can put IK within a shape to simulate an old-style shape tween. Makes for very easy shape tweens.

During Paul's discussion on Flash Player 10 he mentioned that FP11 is already underway (as one might have guessed) and he mentioned this is how they are choosing new features based on the following: compelling broad appeal, robust and extensible, aligned with the platform, it is something that can't already be created in ActionScript, and considering the base code size for the Flash Player.

Paul also mentioned FLACC, and Peter Elst has a great write-up on FLACC and I highly suggest you check it out. It includes some video from Paul's portion of this session.

- - -

Jonathan Harris - The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure

Before this conference I had never heard of Jonathan Harris by name, but I certainly knew about his work, such as We Feel Fine, what is described as "An exploration of human emotion".

Jonathan started off by showing some of his older work which includes some really well done print infographics - very much in-line with the work done at XPLANE. He then moved into the interactive space and that is truly when he became known for his work.

But, what has really sparked everyone's interest has been what was said towards the end of Jonathan's talk.

Jonathan started off by saying "What I have to say may be a bit hard to hear":

And depending on your views, it probably didn't get much better from there.

In the interest of not replaying the whole saga over again, read over the following two slides and then be sure to click through to read the Flash community reactions. I feel my comments might have been beneficial to the conversation when there was still one going on, but a few weeks later they won't add much that hasn't already been said.

Reactions:

Erik Natzke

Peter Elst

Jeremy Thorp

and lastly, a message from John Davey, the conference organizer.

And here is Jonathan's answer to all of the discussion floating around his talk. You can also view each of the slides on a Flickr pool Jonathan put together, along with a summary of approximately what he said with each slide in the notes.

- - -

Wrap Up

After attending my second Flash on the Beach Brighton, I am really looking forward to Flash on the Beach Miami and being able to attend this extremely well run conference in a country where everything isn't going to cost me twice as much.

I had a great time hanging out with friends I have met at prior years of FOTB, friends I have known for awhile now, and friends I finally got to meet in person this year. The conference was a much needed break from the daily grind and the Brighton edition of FOTB will certainly be one that I look forward to every year.