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?

However, when Lynda.com sold FlashForward to Beau Ambur and Metaliq a few months back, I was hoping things might be changing. Surely they wouldn't keep the cost of attendance so high, would they? I even had the thought that if the price got down to the $400 to $500 range, I would consider attending once again. So when I received an email today announcing FlashForward 2008 San Francisco festival nominations were open and providing a link to the pricing information, I was excited to see if changes had indeed been made.

Sadly, I was disappointed. Yes, the prices seem to have went down slightly. But the early bird price is still $899, and the cost goes all the way up to $1099 for at-the-door registration. I guess this year Flash on the Beach (for which I have already bought my 2008 pass) only wins by $464 instead of $664. That's progress, right?

Both conferences will no doubt be worth attending -- last year's Flashforward was a great experience for me, and although I didn't attend, FOTB was touted as the best conference of the year in the Flash community. Both will have a very similar list of speakers and cover similar topics, offer plenty of time for networking, and undoubtedly offer the yearly recharge of interactive development passion. In fact, there are only two considerable differences: location and price. And when you are trying to convince your employer to pay, it all comes down to pricing.

I originally assumed, like most Americans would considering the strength of the British Pound to the Dollar, that a trip to Brighton for FOTB would be considerably more costly. But, as it turns out, it is $664 _cheaper_ to attend FOTB in the UK then it is to attend Flashforward in Boston. This amazed me, and I'm writing this post in hopes that Flashforward (and Lynda.com, the producers) will take notice at the discrepancy.

I calculated the $664 difference by factoring in the only sure costs in each location -- the conference pass, airfare, and hotel accommodations. Here is the breakdown:

Flashforward
Conference Pass: $1099
Airfare (Portland to Boston, continental.com): $600
Hotel (Conference Rate): $249/night x 5 = $1245
Total: $2944

Flash on the Beach
Conference Pass: $400
Airfare (Portland to London, continental.com): $880
Hotel (Hotels.com): $200/night x 5 = $1000
Total: $2280

$2944 - $2280 = $664

Now, obviously this isn't scientific as there are still costs like taxi fares, meals, incidentals and entertainment, but these costs would generally be the same no matter which conference you attend. I realize that the Dollar to British Pound conversion rate would skew things a bit due to the locations of the two conferences, but even if that skew was equal to $664, it still costs me the same to attend FOTB and get a free vacation to the UK.

FOTB can produce a conference equal to Flashforward's and still price their passes at less than half. Same speakers, same topics, similar community, and half the price. With conferences like FITC, Flashbelt and 360Flex all pricing themselves _way_ below Flashforward, and OSFlash offering conferences online for free, how long can they continue to charge $1100 to just get in the door?

[Update: The official FOTB blog has just picked up this post. See you at the conference next month!]

The thing that surprised me most was that a lot of the cool interactive projects coming out of Comcast were developed and/or started in their media lab. For example, The Fan 3.0 was launched and won People's Choice at FlashForward 2006 in Austin.

Keep tabs on the cool happenings at Comcast here (http://labs.comcast.net). And if you have a Comcast internet account, be sure to sign in and take advantage of the awesome interactive offerings.

In the past few months I hadn't heard a word about Wallop. I was wondering what happened, and today I saw a blog post from Ryan Stewart entitled "Signs of life at Wallop". It helps to explain the lack of communication coming out of Wallop/Microsoft (where it was founded -- surprising, I know, considering it is developed fully in Flash).

But, I'm interested to hear if anyone is still using, or better yet developing for, Wallop. It looks like they may be re-developing in Flex and I'm sure with all the hoopla around Flex these days that they'll pick up some interest there.

Check out Ryan's post here:
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=262

In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

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In a time when most corporations are effectively reducing the memorable experiences in our lives, Apple and Steve Jobs are thinking about enhancing those experiences. Brendan Dawes gave a great talk about this at FlashForward 06 in Austin, and ever since then I have been thinking more and more about where all of those daily experiences in my life have gone.

For instance, I am in the process of ripping all of my CDs to MP3 and storing them on a large external hard drive. For almost every CD I pickup I am reminded of an event that took place while I was listening to it, such as a warming up for a particular basketball game in college. Once I rip them into iTunes as a digital format, I'm not reminded of that experience nearly as often.

This idea goes even further because not only is this having an effect on me, but it is spreading to the population on a fairly grand scale. Keeping with the music theme, think about iPods and how many people now walk around with their ear buds in listening to music and thereby creating this lack of interpersonal interaction.

Kudos to Steve Jobs and Brendan Dawes for their efforts to bring the experiences back to our daily lives.

[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/HpovwbPGEoo" height="350" width="425" /]

I met Jared at FlashForward in Austin a few months back when he was doing a lecture on sound visualizations in Flash. You may also recognize him from the very cool PBS show "Texas Ranch House".

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“Flex 2 in Real Time Applications”

In this session Phil deconstructed the application his company has been working on – a luxury control and monitoring system for 200ft+ yachts. From one control panel the captain/user can access and view any of the sensors and monitors on the vessel. It was nice to see a commercial app built in the new development tools, especially one that needed to be processing so much information at one time.

I walked away with the assurance that Flex and AS3 could build just about anything I wanted it to. I'm really getting excited about Apollo and the thought that I can put my knowledge to use in desktop apps.

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“Interactive Animation: Sight, Sound, Motion”

This was one of the most inspirational sessions of the conference. Craig showed off several of his creations, most of them incorporating external sensors from places like MakingThings and Phidigts. The sensors allow him to get data into Flash which he can then use to manipulate his programs and/or artwork.

For example, one of the creations he demonstrated was the Etherwatch. This is a simple digital watch that has an Ethernet port attached to the face and sensors that extend down to his fingers which detect movement. The example he showed with this was the ability to play the piano in mid-air.

Another pretty cool creation was his "iLock" which was an ethernet connected lock that, when the key was turned, fired off a signal as to its locked/unlocked status. I could see this having cool uses for interactive art and/or even extremely practical uses once you have an application built.

You can find out a lot more about Craig's developments at his website: http://www.crashmedia.com

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“The Lusciously Delicious Moving Image”

Garrett showed off and deconstructed a few projects from Big Spaceship, including the new Nike Air site. While Garrett works mostly in video, he is extremely knowledgeable in getting that video into Flash and what will work best when displayed over the internet. This was important on the Nike Air site because of its heavy usage of video throughout the site.

Garrett went over his process for creating the seamless looping video of the athletes, which was no simple task. Taking the raw footage in After Effects, he first masked out the key (green) of the green screen (using AE Pro’s KeyLight) and then after painstakingly finding some frames that were close enough together, he was able to use a 3rd party plug-in to morph the additional frames (RevisionsFX’s re:Flex). Overall he says he spent about 2-3 weeks alone in editing the video. I was amazed with the outcome and what he was able to demonstrate on stage in such a short time period.

I learned the most about the source video, meaning how the video was shot. Big Spaceship shot everything digital in high-definition at 60 frames per second. This allowed them to get a better image for keying and also allowed additional effects on the site, such as the speed ramping (such as where they slowed down the basketball player while he is dunking.

Check out more from Big Spaceship in NYC: http://www.bigspaceship.com.

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“AS3 in Action”

Beau is working on quite a few cool applications, one of which includes a code editor web application called FlapJax. His end-goal is to have a fully functional AS editor that you can access anywhere with a web browser. In fact, it is functional enough at the moment that he is writing the rest of the application in itself!

The majority of this session was spent going over new features in AS3 and discussing the additional benefits of the new language. We also discussed and got a first look at the components that will be coming out with the Flash 9 IDE. They have a much smaller footprint/file size and are extremely skinnable. Both of these were issues that developers have complained about for the past two iterations of the component architecture. Oh, I should note that Beau also mentioned that Grant Skinner was helping to develop the new components, which is great since he is so active in the Flash developer community.

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“Finches to Flash: Darwin in Design”

I have to admit, I considered attending another session, but I am extremely glad I went and saw Jeremy’s lecture. Jeremy did an amazing job of taking a scientific subject matter (genetics) and breaking it down so that anyone could understand it. However, what I found more impressive was how he connected it back to design.

One portion of the lecture was entitled, “Evil Machines that Want to Take Your Job”. By this Jeremy means that through genetic computing, a computer can eventually figure out what the general population likes best in design and then apply it. For instance, Jeremy created an application that comes up with a random logo based on some starting parameters that you give it. Then, he chooses two he likes best from every pool to “mate” and come up with the next iteration. Through genetic computing, he will eventually have a design that it extremely close to what is the “perfect” design.

But the real message wasn’t that computers can come up with designs on their own – I think most people recognize that a computer can make random artwork. What Jeremy was trying to say was that we should apply this technique to our own daily design habits. Currently, design is a pyramid process in which the designer starts out by brainstorming a bunch of design ideas once and then works their way up the pyramid by filtering out the ideas they deem as better than the rest. However, what if we started with five design concepts, chose the best two, the used those two to form another set of five? By repeating this process, you are bound to find the exciting and abnormal that will make that artwork/logo/design stand out from the rest.

As humans we use this process a great deal of our daily lives. Why not apply it to design and see what happens?

Be sure to take a look at Jeremy's site: http://www.blprnt.com

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"Hillman on Video" was great for lots of reasons, but the one that sticks out most in my mind really had less to do with the session, and more to do with Hillman himself. About 3 or 4 years ago I invited Hillman to come speak at Oberlin College when I was a senior in the Art department. He gave a great presentation, but very little of it was about video. Today he spoke mostly on video, and it was great to hear him speak on his evolution. It was exciting for me personally because I had a reference point of my own and knew about some of the past events in his life he was speaking about.

Seeing the journey someone has taken from owning and running a very successful firm, to weathering the dot-com bust, to deciding to spend a good deal of time on his own personal projects was amazing. I remember him talking to me on the ride to Oberlin from the airport about this new DVCam he had just bought -- his first at the time. Crazy.
Later in the day I was able to spend a good deal of time talking to Hillman about what we had both been up to since his visit to Oberlin. It turns out that he has some really good friends in Portland and visits all the time -- hopefully I'll be able to buy him a beer and pick his brain some more sometime.

Oh, I should also point out that he has a new(ish) book out all about his venture into digital video. He was kind enough to sign a copy for me, which I will be reading promptly. I'll try to share my thoughts here when I am able.
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"Learn to Love Actionscript -Flash for Designers" was up next. Honestly, I took one note in this session: Trevor Dodd's website URL. I don't think this was a bad session, I just think I chose poorly for my skillset. Being a professional developer, I knew everything he was talking about, and as such I didn't gain much knowledge from the hour.

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"Migrating to AS3 from AS2" was an eye-opener. Caleb Haye came across as this extremely genuine and nice guy, who could program extremely well. Oh, and he happens to have the coolest job on earth: he is part of the "Yahoo! Media Innovation Group". Basically he gets paid to play with the newest thing out there, always staying 12-18 months ahead of the curve. So basically he has been using AS3 as long as anyone else out there, and was extremely knowledable on the subject.

He first discussed the differences between the two languages, but in a manner that was clear and concise. He then described how to migrate your projects into the new syntax, which really shouldn't be all that difficult. I think thats the best thing I gained from this session: it really won't be that hard to get up to speed on AS3 in a short amount of time.

As a comparison he showed the AS2 Yahoo! Search API he wrote alongside the AS3 version. With the AS3 version he had 3 files, while the AS2 version had over 20. While it will have a much steeper learning curve, it seems to be well worth it.

One really cool feature he pointed out today was
function(arg1, arg2, ... rest) { }
By using the "... id" convention in your function definitions, you can accept any number of arguments. This might not seem like a big deal to Java or C++ developers, but for AS this is huge.

More info on Caleb at http://www.caleb.org (I guess it pays to work for Yahoo! -- who also registers domains :) ).

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"Flex Builder 2 for Flash Programmers" was another great session today. Not knowing much about the Flex Builder IDE I think this was a great head-first jump into it's world. It's an amazing code editor and sports a ton of features I would love to see in the Flash 9 IDE. Hopefully they'll be adding them because it can't be too, too hard to port them over after building them for Flex Builder. Well, at least in concept anyways.

What I think will be weird at first is the lack of a timeline. Now everything is created through code and the use of "screens" and the viewstack in MXML.

The best feature I learned about during the session was event bubbling. This is where an even fires up the chain of objects until it is told to die. You can setup a listener on every level to receive the event notification and complete different actions as necessary. The beauty is in the fact that you don't have to write an event listner for every individual button anymore. You can feed all the events into the same listener and test for the button's id from there:

buttonHandler(ev:Event) {
trace(ev.currentTarget);
}

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"Mashup Baby!" was the last session I saw, and man, does Mario come up with some great ideas. His session was all about how he pulls data sources from public APIs and other public/social sharing sites like YouTube, Flickr, and del.icio.us.

When an API isn't available, he'll often use PHP and RegEx to "visit" the site and pull the data he wants from the page. So basically he is creating his own APIs for sites that don't have them. For example, he'll scrub the del.icio.us daily tag cloud to grab the day's most popular topics. So simple, yet so ingenious.

He also showed some amazing projects, including one that is yet to be released entitled "PictureDisko". Check out his site: http://www.quasimondo.com/

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There is so much more I could write about all of the sessions today. I'll try to do a conference recap post that has a ton of links and more info from my notes on each session next week.

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In "Understanding Apollo", Daniel Dura of Adobe showed off some upcoming features in Apollo. Most of them hadn't been seen before, as the application is still in early beta stages. Before the session I was still a bit shaky on exactly what Apollo could do and how I would use it to add to my skill set. But, man, am I excited about it now. The whole concept of writing once, deploying everywhere has made Flash what it is today. If Adobe can pull this off with the same grace for desktop applications, we may just have a takeover in desktop development platforms. Combine that with the ease of use due to all of the API's Adobe has written for it and you've got a framework that enables and empowers users to create extremely cool branded experiences for the desktop. I was most impressed with how the developer is shielded from the cross-platform nightmares. Using the API, you can do any number of things using a high level of code -- meaning that C/C++ is not necessary anymore. Heck, even Java should be worried about this. Apparently the end goal for Adobe is to also be able to publish Apollo apps from within Flash. When that day comes, keep an eye out for hundereds of small open source apps, similar to how we currently have desktop widgets in OSX being developed on an as-needed basis by everyday people.

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"Analog In, Digital Out" with Brendan Dawes was amazing. The best part of the day. I think I was in need of some insipration because I was starting to get really tired from lack of sleep before the trip followed by a long day of travel. Brendan is one of those people who comes up with the wackiest ideas and then has the drive to see them through realization. He had a couple of really good points today:

+ What is "Magical" is not always what is necessary. Lickable wallpaper: we don't need it, but why not? Let's have some fun!

+ With the digital age we're missing the "experience" part of our lives. No longer do we open a book to read, or have items left over with imprints of our lives on them. Everything is sterile and digitally stored where we can't directly create a memory from it. Digital photos are nice, but holding an old printed photo with notes on the back of it makes your day. Looking at them on the computer just isnt the same. Where has all of our stuff gone? On a harddrive.

+ Why can't computers be as simple to use as a pencil? The pencil has a built-in progress bar (length), you know at a glance how well it will perform (sharpness), and users never try to write with the wrong end - they automatically know how to use it.

+ Twist the 1's and 0's. Who says you have to play a DVD in a DVD player? Who says a vinyl album has to store information about music (as opposed to say timecode for digital video)? Try it. No one will die.

+ Iteration is better than innovation.

+ Mariah Carey Syndrome. She's got great range, but does she need to do it on every single note? Use Flash as a highlight - don't use it because you can. Bad sites happen from trial with new technologies, but that's a good thing. The problem is that Mariah Carey has been singing for well over 10 years now.

The last thing presented was this amazing video where UK's best DJ and Brenden got together and did this performance art piece where they had digital video timecode imprinted on a vinyl album. Then the DJ used that album to 'scratch'/mix the video (and its audio) just like it was any other album. When mixed with other turn tables, it was amazing to see the video and its audio track mixed in with other beats. I believe this was called, "Getting Down with Ms. Pinky". (Reminder to self: find a link to this video).

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"The Evolution of Flash Animation: Bed Rock Revisited" with Sandro Corsaro was mainly for designers, but I had heard he put on an amazing presentation, so I decided to check it out. I'm glad I did, even if I won't use many of the techniques he was teaching. He is an amazing illustrator who works solely in flash, and has done several broadcast 2D animations. He had some great tips based around what he called the "stretch and squish" method of animation which was the basis for the Hanna-Barbara cartoons of the 60's and 70's.

The thing I took away from this sesson the most was my own thoughts about how the Flash tool is extremely unique in how to covers so much ground. How someone can use it only for animation (and know nothing about programming) and another person can use it only as code, and the two can get a very similar result is just amazing...

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"Ultimate Guide to Flash Runtime Compositing" with Rich Shupe didn't really show me anything new, but it was a good refresher. I went with the hope of seeing more on creating programmic art (hence "runtime compositing"), but what it really ended up being was an overview of Flash 8's features which were new at last year's conference. Blend modes, 9-slice scaling, bitmap data class, filters and bitmap caching were all covered from both an IDE and Actionscript aspect. All the source from the presentation are posted here, : http://www.fmaonline.com/ff06austin.

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Looking forward to tomorrow's sessions and continuing a great week.