linkbizkits

Apollo outside the box
Keith Peters
http://www.bit-101.com
The presentation files

With this presentation Keith wanted to challenge the definition of what an apollo application is. He like to think of Apollo as the Flash Player on steroids. Apollo actually outputs a swf file when you compile it. Its not a regular swf file and won’t play in the normal Flash Player. It’s got all kinds of added Apollo capabilities.

As Apollo lets you chrome the window however you want, even making it trasparent, it allows you to do some fun stuff (although maybe not very useful). He showed some example that are quite silly. He had a sheep running on the desktop, an asteroid game that plays over the desktop, putting bullet holes on the desktop, he even found a way to hack a screensaver out. Now obviuosly these examples are not very useful in everyday life, but I think that was the point. To show us that Apollo can be used for fun as well.

One of the major drawbacks to Apollo as I see it is that right now, you have to download Apollo runtime as well as your own Apollo application. So a user actually has to go find the Apollo runtime to be able to use your apps. Not very convenient.

Beyond this however, I can see how Apollo could be a powerful tool to building cross platform applications.

You can’t do everything
Patrick Keenan
Alan smith
http://www.thmvmnt.com
http://prototype.themovement.info/
http://www.theundicided.ca
http://www.joinhive.com

This was a presentation about their work process and the tools they use in project development. They had some interesting ideas about structuring your process to help in project development. I wont go into to much detail here as they covered a ton of information. A lot of which we’ve heard before. For example, the different types of people (the judge, the director, …) and using those types effectively while working. Or the hats method where you get assigned a color hat (black for negative/critical, red for passionate, …) and you have to play that role to force you to think differently. And other methods like asking “what if your business was…” (a car, an animal).

Other stuff they talked about was just planning and how to go about it. They use things like Google calendar and basecamp like tools, but one item I thought was interesting because we started using this recently at work is the Post-it method. Just sticking those post-its up on a board really helps visualize the work that needs to be done.

iam(studio)static
Ron Gervais
http://www.iamstatic.com

I had seen this guy before when he was starting out and its interesting to see the evolution of where he’s going. They started out with their iamstatic site aas a way of showing their animations and personal projects which were mostly flashed based. Out of this grew a broadcast production company which they are today.

He talked about his projects (commercial and personal) and how they helped get them to where they are today. He showed one of their first commercial works done in 2004 and talked about how it was difficult for them as they had no real AE or 3D experience so they ended up doing it mostly in Flash. They’ve refined their 3D and AE skills since then but still get request for that type of work as its in their reel.

He says thats one of the traps of doing commercial work, you get type cast into a certain style of work. For him, this is where personal work comes in. It allows for total creative freedom and helps you break out of this mold. Personal projects also allow for more risk taking which brings a lot of learnings.

He finished by talking about doing the things that come naturally for you. In his case its drawing. He finds this helps him resource and find new creative avenues.

Papervision3D
Carlos Ulloa
http://www.papervision3d.org
http://blog.papervision3d.org/
http://wiki.papervision3d.org/

The idea of Pepervision3D came up when he was at a Spark conference in Amsterdam in November 2005 talking with Joost Korngold (http://www.renascent.nl/) and then on December 1 2006 it they handed it over to open source under an MIT licence. This basically makes it available for free even for commercial use. This was important to them because they wanted it to be used for commercial projects and felt this was the best way to get it out there.

The two main goals they had when developing Papervision3D was for it to be powerful and easy to use. It had to be powerful so that developers would use it in their projects and not just as a toy. They also designed with the flash developer in mind with AS3 style syntax.

However they alos wanted it to be easy enough to use so that the 3d designe or artist could use it without the need of a flash developer. This is part of the reason they used Collada. It allows designers to use their own 3D packages. As Collada is xml based you can open the file and make changes right there. Other things for the designer include being able to create and modify objects without having to recompile and previewing scenes in real time.

Finally they went through the main materials and textures for Papervision3D as well as talking about the future release of Papervision3D.

P.S.: They are having a training session in LA on June 23-24 (hint, hint ).

AS2 to AS3
Stacy Mulcahy
http://www.bitchwhocodes.com
http://www.bitchwhocodes.com/fitc2007
http://del.icio.us/bitchwhocodes/as3

This presentation had a lot of info and she talks fast so my notes are kinda limited. Basically she talked about the changes between AS2 and AS3. She didn’t go into depth about all the features of AS3 but gave a really good overview of the things we use everyday and how they changed. Just a couple of quick examples attachMovie is now addChild, properties no longer have underscores (_x becomes x) and alpha and scale values now range from 0 to 1 instead of 0 to 100.

This presentation was really great for introducing us to the little things that changed that are likely to trip us up as we migrate to AS3.

She will be posting her files on her blog so check them out.

North Kingdom Projects
Robert Lindstrom
Staffan Lamm
http://www.northkingdom.com
http://www.designchapel.com/
http://www.blaugallery.com

It’s always great to see the work from shops like NK. The funny thing is they started their presentation by saying they are a small agency in Sweden. Sure, they’re only 20 employees but look at the work they do and who would dare to qualify them as small.

They showed some of their work, most of which I think we already know. Stuff like Toyota Aygo with the car that comes with a magazine subscription through the door. This one the client liked so much they made it into a tv spot, which ties in nicely with their policy that clients need to rethink the way they do interactive to make it the central part of their campaign, something that’s being said by just about everyone these days I think. The other campaigns they showed were Cow Abduction, On Toyota’s Mind, and Get the Glass among others. For the Get the Glass campaign they showed the making of which was really interesting. The island in the game was actually built. The only CG parts being the characters, water, helicopter and sky. Pretty cool!

Anyway, anyone who doesn’t know NK, get to their site now.

Well there you have it. My three days of FITC. It was great as usual even with the internet connection problems that plagued the whole conference. Definitely makes for some interesting presentations when the whole presentation is based on an internet application.

Some last notes. FITC will have a dvd available with a lot of these presentations. Definitely worth looking into. Also, as I mentioned the web sucked here, so some of the links may not work, either because they haven’t posted the files or I made a mistake in the link. Either way, let me know and I’ll try and update the links. One last thing, I’m sure that CS3 will be installed on my computer when I get back…

Dynamic Skeletal Animation
Jim Armstrong
http://www.algorithmist.com/
http://algorithmist.wordpress.com/
http://algorithmist.wordpress.com/2007/03/22/as-3-biped-rig/
The presentation files

I have to admit this presentation was a little over my head. A lot of technical information to digest in such a short period. The presentation was interesting none the less. He talked about how skeletal animation worked and more importantly how that translates to flash. Gave definitions of bones, chains, connectors and Kinematics (both forward and backward). He is currently developing an AS3 library for creating skeletal animations which looks really interesting. I asked for his presentation so I could have a look at it at a more reasonable pace. I’ll post it here if he sends it. In the mean time, check out the links it has some of the material he covered.

Flashing in public
Anthony Eden
Scott Weeks
http://www.snepo.com/
http://www.arseiam.com/

These guys talked about kiosk development. They went through some of the dos and donts of kiosk development most of which seem fairly obvious although sometimes its the obvious stuff that gets overlooked. Basically they have some rule of thumbs to consider when developing kiosks. Attract, engage, develop with people watching the kiosk as well as using the kiosk in ming, consider fingers and the way the users will touch the screen, only event that matters is press and finally, including a time out event. They also mentioned some of the problems they had including hot computers, screen calibration and updating issues.

New Animation workflows in Flash CS3
Robert Penner
http://www.robertpenner.com/
http://www.robertpenner.com/presentations/

This presentation was really interesting as it showcased the possibilities with the new Timeline to AS3 feature of CS3. Although I still have some reservations as to the possibilities of this feature it does seem to present some interesting possibilities.

Copy/paste motion allows you to copy the motion from one layer to another. The motion is pasted relative to the new object and you can also choose which properties to keep and which to ditch. Motion guides are also copied. An important note here is that the motion is relative to the transformation point of the object not the registration point.

What’s happening behind the scenes is that a JSFL script runs through the frames and checks all the motion. It then creates an xml file that is put into the clipboard. This xml file can also be saved to the disk and then imported to any layer in any file.

Finally the motion can also be copied as a AS3 and then pasted on a frame and assigned to a different movieclip. The motion class can then be used to pause, play, stop, rewind the animation and events are also available (motion start, end, change…).

Some of the limitations are that it won’t copy shape tweens. The other more important limitation in my opinion is that it can only copy the motion of one object at a time. As the xml of the animation can get quite verbose, copying the animation of several layers in a complex animation could get huge. I’m also not sure how well this works with classes as all the examples he gave were directly on the timeline.

Side note. He showed the rectangle primitive which is really cool. It allows you to set rounded corners and even set individual corner sizes.

Component and AS3
Grant Skinner
http://www.gskinner.com/talks

When building the new V3 components, their main goal was to develop for the flash experience and less for application development. Their main concerns were for size and performance, ease of skinning and styling, extensibility and knowledge portability.

The new V3 components are 25-40% smaller than the V2 components and the base size (if you drag out just a button for example) is approximately 10k less. They are also alot more efficient cpu wise. Grant showed an example of the list component that had 1 000 000 items in it and it ran very smoothly.

Skinning has been made much simpler. To skin a component you only need to double click the component on the stage and change its elements. Styling texts is also fairly simple. Styles can be applied programmatically globally, to a type of component or to indiviual instance. The drawback to this type of skinning is that there is no live preview but I think this a small price to pay for easily skinnable components.

He talked alot about the list component and one of he interesting thing that came up is that data providers are now mandotory. However they are much easier to use. You can simply pass an array or xml document to a new data provider. Additem is still there but adds a lot of overhead as events are broadcast every time an item is added.

Couple of last points. There are no tree or accordion components, no css and no data bingings. And hopefully these components won’t have the same problems as the Metalliq/mCom components.

The Blind Sketch maker
Mario Klingemann
http://www.quasimondo.com

This presenter tried develop a program that would create art. he started by buidinlg a program that analysed images to classify them by art and not art. This was a very complex operation in which he looks at color, threshold, edges, lines. Once that was built, he created a program that generated images and then chose what was good and not good (or art and not art). What he ended up with were some pretty interesting images.

Swans on a train: Observations from the ordinary everyday
Brendan Dawes
http://www.brendandawes.com

The title of his presentation comes from an experience he had on the train home from work one night. He fell asleep on the way home and when he woke there was what appeared to be some trash on the seat in front of him. Upon closer inspection, he noticed that on the receipt the person had written “p.t.o.” (please turn over). Intrigued he turned over the receipt to find the message “please take the swans” . When he looked at the trash on the seat in front of him he noticed that the paper was actually origami swans. Now the important thing in this story was the little transition on the receipt. The fact that the person took the time to leave the message “p.t.o.” instead of just leaving the instructions added to the intrigue. And this is the point he wanted to drive home. Its those transitions that make the experience so much better. The simple flash of the element when you choose to delete something in Wordpress for example. Or the flash of an item added to a Basecamp to do list. According to him, and I have to agree, these simple transitions are what elevates the user experience.

Simplicity : What does it mean
John Meada
http://plw.media.mit.edu/people/maeda/
http://weblogs.media.mit.edu/SIMPLICITY/archives/cat_laws.html
http://www.lawsofsimplicity.com/

this talk is a little hard to describe. He talked about simplicity and what that means today. He contrasted simplicity with complexity and the way as humans we like when things are simple yet we also like when things are complex. For example he showed a picture of a beach at sunset in which he had mad the sky 50% gray. Which if we like simplicity would be the perfect sky. Yet the original sky with the clouds and colors is much more complex yet much more interesting to us. We need to define how simple it can be and how complex it has to be.

He talked about his various works (making butterflies out of cheese puffs for example).

He finished his talk with his ten laws of simplicity. I think there is a lot of wisdom in these laws. I recommend going over to his site and checking them out.