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!".

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.

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

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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.

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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.

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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":

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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.

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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.

Aral Balkan - Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit (or 5 Rules for Hedonistic Creatives)
Jeremy Thorp - Emergence
Grant Skinner - Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know
Speaker Jam Session - Six Conference Speakers
Lee Brimelow - Platform Jiu-Jitsu
GMUNK (Bradley Grosh) - GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9
Robert Hodgin - The Best 8 to 12 Hours of My Life

- - -

Aral Balkan - Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit (or 5 Rules for Hedonistic Creatives)

If you know anything about Aral, it is that he is one of the most prolific Flash community members. Between managing OSFlash.org, running his own web conference, and producing several open source projects of his own, this guy is always up to something.

With that in mind, it was great to see how Aral accomplishes so much in so little time. "Grab the low-hanging fruit" was just about that -- figuring out how to get the most reward in the least amount of time. Aral broke his process down into four areas:

Create: make something that works (anything) and worry about evolving it later. Stop worrying about architecture -- crappy code is better than no code. In essence, you can always change things later, just get it working and out there.

Share: By sharing your idea before you even create anything, it will create a responsibility for you to actually get it done.

Profit: Make money doing what you love. Maybe you can't just up and quit your full time job yet so you can work on your own projects, but you can start on the path to making that a reality. Making a little bit of money from your side projects will help that along nicely.

Play: Experiment - there are no mistakes. Make and use "happy" tools - those that are simple, practical, hackable and delightful. Do your projects and the tools you use to make them give you joy?

All great ideas to consider, and things that the community needs to be reminded of occasionally. I often find it too easy to just get into the daily grind, and I'm sure that is the case for others in the community as well.

- - -

Jeremy Thorp - Emergence

I last saw Jeremy Thorp speak at FlashForward 2006 Austin, and I was enthralled with his "intelligent" applications which would learn from its own actions or choices made by the person working with the application. Jeremy is still doing similar work, but I can certainly see the progression over the past two years. One of these progressions in Plumage which creates feathers with colors based upon Flickr searches:

Jeremy started off talking about flocking rules, how he uses them in his work, and how they apply to emergence. Jeremy has come up with a framework of sorts for his work with emergence called Agent-Oriented Programming (AOP).

Most useful for a large number of small, stupid agents, AOP is built on top of OOP and allows agents (objects) to make decisions allowing large communities to collectively solve problems. In AOP, agents interact to solve individual goals. Since they have mental components such as beliefs, choices and commitments, and are allowed to make mistakes, AOP makes for the perfect model for real-life systems. One of these systems is the stock market, an industry in which Jeremy is currently working to help them model the success of and/or predict the future of stocks.

A great example of AOP is an simulation Jeremy wrote called The Color Economy which is a system where pixels can trade colors for "profit". Using the principles above, the result can be seen in this video:

Using similar principles, Jeremy also modeled the old game of Rock, Paper, Scissors to see who would win most often. Certainly worth checking out Jeremy's talk next time you have the chance.

- - -

Grant Skinner - Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know

If you read my blog, there is an really good chance you know who Grant Skinner is. Grant described his talk as "the high-level talk I wish someone had given me five years ago", and honestly, I felt like I would have benefited more from this talk a few years ago. Grant is a great speaker and I certainly learned from this session, but there just wasn't that much new information for me here. I was really hoping for a much more technical talk like the last one I saw him give wherein he provided a lot of useful tips for developers.

Grant broke his talk into three sections: development, tools and misc. For development Grant provided a quick overview of OOP, frameworks and more, explaining why these are essential knowledge. Tools covered both developer (such as FlexBuilder) and business (such as BaseCamp) tools that developers should be using. Lastly, misc contained some overall good tips on both development and business.

You can view Grant's slides for his talk here.

- - -

Speaker Jam Session - Six Conference Speakers

Last year when a presenter had to cancel at the last minute, John Davey organized a "Speaker Jam" where some of the better-known presenters all got up on stage and contributed 10 minutes to the talk. It was a good way to see items that the speakers might not have time to show in their normal sessions or maybe the content just didn't fit the theme of their talk.

This year when one of the speakers didn't get their visa for international travel quick enough to board the plane, John once again decided to have a speaker jam. This year it included: Andre Michelle, Joa Ebert, Keith Peters, Carlos Ulloa, Mario Klingemann and Ralph Hewert - and this session was the most packed of the conference.

First up was Andre Michelle who demonstrated a project has been working on which utilizes Flash Player 10's new ability to dynamically generate sound. With his 10 minutes, Andre recreated a famous techo song from scratch using the project:

Next up was Keith Peters who discussed creating art from code, and his process for doing so.

I think the most impressive portion of the talk was Joa Ebert who did a live coding session with a 10 minute time limit to create the best possible visualization in Flash.

Here is a video of Joa in action... the speed at which he coded amazed the whole audience...

These speaker jam sessions always end up being one of the best parts of the conference. John, if you end up reading this, you should really build this into the conference schedule at FOTB Miami and next year for Brighton!

- - -

Lee Brimelow - Platform Jiu-Jitsu

Lee's talks are always informative and since Lee has more of a developer focus with his platform evangelist role at Adobe, his talks are usually more centered around developer topics, with some helpful design elements here and there. For instance, Lee made the point that "interactive = code", and if you'd don't want to code at least a little, you are not an "interactive" designer.

As with most of the Adobe team attending FOTB this year, their main focus was to inform everyone of the upcoming CS4 releases and Flash Player 10 features. Lee's talk was no exception, but he was able to sneak in some great ultimate fighting training and videos!

Here Lee is showing off the new text components that will be made available for Flash CS4 soon:

As with most conference Lee attends, he has a pretty good summary of the conference on his blog.

- - -

GMUNK (Bradley Grosh) - GMUNKICKDOWN 08.9

When I hear GMUNK is speaking at a conference, I feel pretty confident if I go to the session I will be entertained. Bradley is not only talented but he has a delivery method which comes across as very personal and witty. Sadly he didn't get wasted while up on stage during his talk like last time I saw him speak, but I did get a chance to have a drink with him at the after party that evening where we were able to discuss some the finer points of Portland, Oregon. But that is for another post :)

- - -

Robert Hodgin - The Best 8 to 12 Hours of My Life

This talk was excited me because I went in expecting to see the same work Robert showed last year at FOTB, and not much else, but rather I was surpisedwith a whole new theme and some great new work.

I chose the above photo to start off the recap of Robert's talk because, as it turns out, drugs were a huge theme among the speakers this year. Not that any of them encouraged the audience to go out and take drugs, but most of them have had some run-in with drugs that altered their path to becoming what they are today: brilliant and innovative creatives.

Robert's first main point was as follows:

Which is to say that creating art while on drugs probably won't result in anything groundbreaking or worthwhile, but it may open your perceptions up enough to allow you to create something innovative. And by creating something innovative enough times, people will start to buy your skillset based on the work they have seen.

Without this notion, you end up with the following breakdown of time spent in your life -- creating crappy banner ads and being unhappy the majority of the time:

But start creating the work you want to do, get noticed for it, and you'll be able to start to make money doing it -- leading to a majority of time being spent making "fun shit":

In short:

Here are some videos of Robert sharing his work, which (although Robert would not confirm it - must be some legal issue with Apple) includes the latest iTunes visualizer included in iTunes 8.

You can follow Robert's progress on his Vimeo page and check out his recap of the conference this year on his blog.

If you get a chance to see Robert speak, I highly recommend you make an effort to do so. Always inspirational and a great example of how following your own desired path can lead to success.

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You can follow my semi-consistent #fotb twittering throughout the conference by following this link to twitter search.

Richard Galvan - Keynote/Flash New and in the Future
Carlos Ulloa - The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It
Branden Hall - Brilliant Ideas that I've Blatantly Stolen
Mark Anders - A Preview of Flex 4 and "Thermo"
Tink (Stephen Downs) - Flex Effects: Transitions as Design Elements
Erik Natzke - Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play
James Paterson - Modulating a Lot

- - -

Richard Galvan - Keynote/Flash New and in the Future

As with the previous FOTBs, Adobe kicked off the conference with their keynote. This year the keynote was titled "Flash New and in the Future" and as could have been guessed, focused mainly on the upcoming CS4 release.

Just before the keynote, John Davey (the conference organizer) kicked everything off with an opening video by Rob Chiu highlighting the city of Brighton and all of the amazing speakers we would see that week:

Richard started off the keynote by providing some context for the upcoming CS4 and Flash Player 10 releases.

Next, AIR was demoed by Serge Jespers, a European Platform Evangelist for Adobe. Serge got the crowd going early in the morning by showing off AIR demos such as Desktop Keeley from The Sun. He also noted that South Africans are using AIR to file their taxes - something that made me think about how far behind the US government can be when it comes to user-friendly technology.

Richard then came back up to give some walk-throughs of the new features in the upcoming Flash CS4 release. No new information was really divulged here, but it was nice to see some of the CS4 features such as IK, new GUI enhancements, the new spray brush and more demoed live.

You can watch a video of the entire keynote below, courtesy of Peter Elst:

- - -

Carlos Ulloa - The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It

Haven seen Carlos' session last year, when Papervision3D was just gaining momentum, I was excited to see what was possible with the engine in its current state. Carlos has certainly pushed the boundaries of PV3D, and used his new (future) company's website as an example wherein they recreated the Monte Carlo racetrack and allow users to race the entire track using a Mini Cooper.

Most of Carlos' presentation was about process in innovating and working with PV3D, not PV3D itself. I found this refreshing - especially since I had been to PV3D training earlier this year and didn't care to sit through another presentation on how to use or optimize PV3D.

Following with the theme of inventing the future, Carlos spoke about how research leads to innovation:

1. Plan and Budget: Your designers should work with your development team to research together.
2. Define and Narrow: Define your objective and topic/area
3. Fine Tuning: Work across your teams to product mock-ups
4. Inspiration

Overall, a good session. Carlos has his thoughts about FOTB on his blog.

- - -

Branden Hall - Brilliant Ideas that I've Blatantly Stolen

Branden's presentations are always worth the time spent, so naturally I was excited to see him speak again. As one of the true developers on the speaking circuit who has been working with ActionScript since 1.0 his perspective is fairly unique.

The main takeaway of this presentation was to "be a selective thief" - use open source projects, look over the source code and learn from it, and pull out what you need to create your own masterpiece. I'm actually surprised, with the current large promotion of several open source Flash projects (think: PaperVision3D) that this even needs to be said anymore. But, it is always a good reminder and an even better lesson for those who are unaware of all the plug-and-play possibilities at their fingertips.

In addition, Branden made one really good point that I'd be remiss not to mention: no language exists in a vacuum. Going back to his prior point of "being a selective thief", Branden suggested that Flash and Flex developers start looking at other programming languages as sources of inspiration. Find out how they implemented a certain programming methodology and try to apply it to your daily coding where you can. It'll make you a more rounded, more aware and more experienced developer.

- - -

Mark Anders - A Preview of Flex 4 and "Thermo"

This is one session I was really looking forward to. Development on "Thermo" seems to be coming to a head, and they must be getting close to releasing a beta... or at least providing more details. I was really expecting to learn something new in this session, but unfortunately not much new was said about either Flex 4 or "Thermo" that hadn't previously been revealed.

Mark mentioned a few key points about the upcoming file format FXG, which enables the collaboration between Flex 4 and "Thermo", as well as between a good deal of the CS4 toolset. FXG is basically an XML file that defines Flash (and other) graphics in a Flash-indepent format. Mark showed off an FXG viewer app, written in AIR, that allowed you to edit the XML and preview the changes it made.

Next up was a discussion on states and how they are changing in Flex 4. Nothing new here as you can find information about this all over the web, so instead I'll just show you very blurry photo I took of the "new" Flex 4 application icon, in all its Gumbo-esque glory:

Lastly, Mark spoke a few minutes on "Thermo" noting that it is built as an Eclipe plugin just like Flex, and then he gave a brief demo of the application showing the process from static artwork to working scrollbar. I believe this is the same demo that Adobe has been giving of the application for months now, but the crowd seemed to be pleased anyways. I'd have to agree -- "Thermo" is a step in the right direction. Now cough it up already, Adobe!

- - -

Tink (Stephen Downs) - Flex Effects: Transitions as Design Elements

Tink has been a proponent of changing Flex from its standard skin or design since well... last year when I saw him speak at FOTB 07 about including Flash elements in Flex (which inheriently makes it looks 10x better).

This year Tink was showing off his work-in-progress transition library for Flex. The library does some of the heavy lifting for you and even includes some PaperVision3D effects. You can view more about the Efflex library on the project's website, or in this blog post about the FOTB presentation and recent developments with Efflex.

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Erik Natzke - Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play

posters for sale

Every year since I have been attending Flash conferences I have seen Erik speak at least once, and every time I walk away inspired and wishing I owned some of his artwork (more on this in a second). Erik's session is always one where I can just sit back, relax, and enjoy the art show in front of me.

Erik always starts off talking about his process, which almost always starts with hand sketches:

Then he almost immediately jumps into a short reel of some of his amazing work:

After the talk, Erik laid out a few of his prints and immediately had over a hundred people hovering around the table trying to get a sneak peak. Unfortunately he wasn't selling any of his works at the conference, but here's a hint for you that I had to email Erik to get: the http://store.natzke.com URL Erik refers to in his slides wasn't working for over a week after his talk (it is now), so he sent me a link to the Flickr photo set he created showing all of the prints available for sale. Some great work there -- check it out, but be prepared to get lost in the artwork for an hour or so...

I also recorded a few videos during the talk. In this video Erik talks about his process and shows a short reel of his work:

In this video Natzke talks more process while showing another reel of work:

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James Paterson - Modulating a Lot

I'll be honest, I hadn't heard of James Paterson by name before this conference. But I had certainly seen his work and website, http://www.presstube.com. If you don't know who James is, this photo pretty much sums up his uniquely irreverent style:

James got his start doing funky animations in Flash, but over the years has evolved to taking his style to different venues such as this live modern dance performance where his animations were projected really large onto the ground as a interactive backdrop to the performance:

James is a really funny, talented guy, and the only way to really get a feel for his work and the work as a result of his collaborations is through video. So, I took some during his presentation.

This first video is a clip where James talks about his "virtual zit popping" via Flash. This is a great example of James' fun style:

In this video James shows a 3D sound engine that was developed by his long-time collaborator Amit Pitaru. The video shows a song being created on the fly by Amit using the application:

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You can follow/view my semi-consistent #fotb twittering throughout the conference by following this link to twitter search.

However, Paul was quick to mention that this comes with one cavat - since Apple decides what runs on their platform, they could ultimately veto the platform add-on and kill the project. It should be noted that if Apple agrees, Adobe will apparently have the player ready "very shortly".

The big question that now remains: what version of the Flash Player will it be? FlashLite? Flash Player 8/9/10? I would think with all the games they have running on the iPhone that they could get Flash Player 10 running pretty well. Or, version 9 at the very least.

You can read more details from other bloggers who are also attending the conference, such as Flash Magazine and read all of the "me too" posts from industry news sources on Techmeme.