Day One

I think all the web-veteran-turned-flasher types at FlashForward were wiping bittersweet tears from their eyes today during the Macromedia team's keynote presentation. It looks like our baby has grown up.

The highlight of the day for everyone (who wasn't a beta tester) had to be the walk-thru of Flash 5 new features.

• First of all, ActionScript is now a scripting language you can respect. The big change is that AS will now follow the vocabulary, syntax, and conventions of JavaScript. That's great news for everyone, even those who know a lot of AS but no JS. Finally some math! Finally associative arrays!
• Another improvement is the actionscript window itself. First, you can resize the window - free at last! Next - this is a biggie - you can type your actionscript directly into the window, instead of rummaging thru that awful drop-down just to find "Stop".

  

• Flash will now support XML, using the Microsoft DOM. This makes me think that maybe XML has arrived, after all; and maybe I should finally get around to learning it.
• Say hello to open socket connections. No more two-frame looping.
• Are you getting the impression that Macromedia really listened to what people were bitching about and fixed every little thing?
• There is a cool debugging inspector that updates variables in real time - no more text fields riding along in your Flash project up to the publishing stage, cluttering and uglifying your work.
• After the release of Live Motion, it is not surprising to see floating palettes and a generally less dialogue-oriented app. The MM team was even bold enough to say that Flash 5 has an "Object Oriented Timeline", which is kinda true (it is easier to manipulate symbols on the stage according to the Director "Sprite" paradigm), but just smacks of hucksterism. MM: let a killer app be killer on its own merits!

The most intriguing demo during the MM keynote was a little 3D widget someone had put together in Director. As you may know, Director has supported a 3D engine (as opposed to just rendered 3D graphics) for some time. This guy had used models that were Flash sprites in a 3D scene in which you could manipulate perspective and every attribute of the animated sprites, (they were ducks or geese). Pretty slick. I don't know how relevant this is to the current 3D fad in Flash. Probably not very. I think right now Flashers are stumbling around the foothills of 3D animation; and it will be years before they are ready to take on that level of sophistication. We'll see.

Adobe also gave a keynote presentation. Unfortunately, they didn't seem to have much to show in the way of new features for Live Motion; and audio-visual glitches (not Adobe's fault) finished off the cold, dead silence they set up for themselves. I probably wasn't the only one who wished I had walked around downtown looking for a good bagel, instead of sitting thru customer testimonials.

What Adobe did show that was interesting was a demo of SVG done in Illustrator. I couldn't read how many people were interested. Maybe I'll ask around tomorrow.

Another highlight was the series of talks given by Josh Ulm in the Hammerstein ballroom to a packed house. He dished out the basics of his style of using movie clips as containers for reusable ActionScript. Josh showed how to construct a fader that would incrementally adjust the Alpha level of a movie clip - up or down - and put it all together in what he calls a "director script".

One embarrassing moment at the conference today:

• MM pitched Generator, its astronomically expensive middleware, with a brand of hucksterism rarely seen these days apart from from daytime television. I was upstairs in a ballroom where the keynote was being simulcast; and about a third of the audience got up and walked out at this point - in spite of the fact that there were no other events scheduled at this time. Bravo to them! Macromedia: Flashers are not stupid.
• Generator's only function that absolutely can't be achieved with competent scripting - as far as I have investigated (about 20 hours on Generator demo) - is real-time replacement of bitmap images in a Flash movie, (a task easily executed by shareware competitor Swift-Generator). Note: the only reason you would *need* to replace bitmaps in real time, (as opposed to importing them into .swf's or even movie clips - a modest addition to workflow for clients who could actually afford Generator), would be that the image is uploaded by the end user. Brilliant. I have remade a postcard application about a dozen times with different backends to see what is the best solution; and I decided it's easiest to just use scripting.
• To be fair, I should mention that Generator is a clever tool with a lot of features; and...
• it does fill a real niche for designers with deep-pockets-type clients. In my experience, I have come to the conclusion that IT managers in big companies see their chief responsibility as avoiding blame. Using vendors with astronomically expensive wares is one sure-fire way of avoiding blame - not only is it assumed that it is better, (because it is expensive), such a vendor provides a broad, sticky surface upon which to affix blame when the time comes. When you deal with this mentality, you might as well (a) use an expensive ware that provides tech support, or (b) take your time drawing up a very explicit maintenance contract for when an intern tries to improve your code.

Flash Forward 2000
Flash Forward 2000
3D - Dumb, Dumber, and Dumbest