linkbizkits

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.