Whew, the day two looked much better right from the beginning. There were two more tracks; Kevin Lynch started the day. Man, that guy looks young, but he's been over twenty years in the business, so I guess I have to take him seriously. Some main points from Kevin's talk: Breeze and Flashcom are going to continue as separate products; MM not super worried about Sparkle and Avalon (of course they have to say that), but there was some merit to the fact that it will only run on Windows and will be fairly performance-heavy; Flex completely based on ActionScript 2.0; lots of info, brief highlights on new products and a product timeline (something they've never done before); codename "Brady", an XML editor for form-based applications; looking at porting Flash authoring environment to Linux, but not sure yet, runs with Wine; Flash 7 for Linux coming.
After the opening keynote went to Kevin Lynch Q & A even though there would have been other interesting sessions going on at the same time. Apparently, MM has some kind of of Java to Flashcom integration working, but it's something that they've just hacked together, not meant to be released.
Before lunch I catched G. Skinner's "Applying ActionScript 2.0". He's the author gModeler, UML based modeling tool in Flash. Some interesting discussion there, but nothing really new. I'm not sure how I feel about Actionscript 2.0. I don't think it's necessarily the right way to go, though it certainly helps to manage the code and find bugs in bigger, more complex projects. Each language has their own advantages and disadvantages and Flash being a classless, prototype based language, it shouldn't be forced into a form of Java-like, strictly typed, class-based language. Well the argument is that ASv2 doesn't really force you to anything, because you can still use ASv1, but it's just that there isn't a bridge between the two styles. I would have liked so see better implementation of prototype based inheritation hierarchies and better dynamic error handling, instead of trying to hide the roots of ActionScript as a language. Yet, another thing is that ASv2 compiles down to ASv1, so there are a lot of things you can do run-time that you can't do compile-time (in ASv2), which opens possibilites to hacks and errors that might be difficult to track down.
After lunch I accidently went to "Interactive Impulse", which was absolutely great! Lots of physics modeling, which only true geeks like me can appreciate :)
The next session was Mike Lynda: ActionScript Performance Tricks. The presentation wasn't that interesting, but we had a lot of discussion both during and after the session. Especially for optimizing Actionscript the two old rules of thumb apply:
1) never optimize before you actually need to optimize
2) never optimize without measuring the performance, only based on your gut feeling
The next session was Samuel Wan's Q & A. He had a presentation "Scratching the Stream" where I didn't go to, because it seemed too basic. Anyway, some interesting information about load balancing Flashcom and streams came up. More on that later, need to do some testing first.
Oh yeah, that wireless was down again for the whole day. They got the router to work, but lost wireless. Can't figure out what exactly is so difficult in getting a wireless hub working.
In the evening there was FlashFilmFestival and after that a Festival party. So a pretty full day, I was at home after ten pm. Like yesterday, I've posted my raw notes below for those interested.
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Kevin Lynch:
- The current Interactive Media Trend is Rich Client Applications - Macromedia projects the trend to continue to at least 2008
- Flash moves outside the browser with Central
- Ubiquity of Flash reached by pushing the player to new devices
- Each new Flash player is adopted faster than the previous version (less than a year to over 90% penetration)
- Flash product timeline 2004:
- Macromedia Flex 2004 -
- MXML / SOAP with Java back-end
- Halo strongly related to Flex
- Drag & drop etc. standard GUI behavior built-in to the Halo component framework
- Brady - only code name for now - 2Q
- an XML editor - sounds interesting
- MM Flash MX 2004 update coming mid-year
- MM Central 4Q
- SDK enabling communication between Central and AOL / ICQ, available spring 2004
- "Totally exciting partnership... looking forward to it"
- "Best way to predict the future is to invent it"
- Design, continuing to raise the bar
- Patterns, we are starting to see more web patterns, hopefully de facto standard
- Experience, better, more enjoyable... beauty is needed for better usability???
- Customization
- Social networking
- Disposable Experience - development of disposable application becomes cheaper because of better frameworks, platforms
- markettrac.nyc.com
- www.who.org check out the app - life expectancy, GDP etc.
- Human Centered Experience
- Longer Term Plans
- New Generation of Flash Player
- Macromedia Central team workign closely with Flash Team
- Flex
- New Flash MX
- Brady - for form based applications, pattern-based applications
- Everything has to work cross-platform
- Looking at Linux, have a Flash player on it. No authoring tool yet, but might happen, maybe through Wine
- DEMO: Flash MX running on Redhat Linux through Wine
- Flash 7 native for LInux is coming
- The future of Flashcom versus Breeze:
- new Breeze version coming
- Breeze very exciting, fast adoption, one of the fastest growing MM products
- Securing Flash:
- critical data always on the server
- no obfuscation, no encryption coming
- Quizzies, SCORM compliancy coming in the new version
Kevin Lynch Q & A
- Breeze and Flashcom are going to continue as separate products
- Flash MX Pro was never meant for developers only - just looking a feature set
- Sparkle, not super worried about it. Avalon will be really cool, but will only run on high-performance machines and on Windows. They are driving machine adoption to sell new OS with it. They won't have the richness and reachness of Flash player
- Flex based on Actionscript 2.0 already. You can create MXML tags in Actionscript, some classes to help with that
- Talked to MM guy who answered the question about Java and Flashcom integration, said that the communication piece was just hacked together, didn't either know or didn't want to teel if it was socket, process or Flash player hack based. I asked if they will have XML DOM object support in the next version, didn't know, but said it's a good idea, depends on if customers are asking a lot about it
GSkinner, Applying Actionscript 2.0:
Interactive Impulse:
- Great 3D gravity models, isometric Flash games, inverse kinematic
Mike Lynda, ActionScript Performance Tricks:
- Assesment Development and Innovation Team
- also work with simulations
- http://oddhammer.com
Samuel Wan: Q & A
- www.samelwan.com/information (files uploaded soon ...)
- chattyfig.figleaf.com (flashcom mailing list info)
- www.macromedia.com/desdev/ (flashcom section)
- Flash Communication Server MX, by Kevin Towes, New Riders Press
- load balancing streams on Flashcom - there's a whitepaper on MM
- There's a load balancer built for Flashcom in MM, but not publicly available
- FCS servers connected to a SAN server
- SAN server acts only as FLV / sharedobject storage
- Teacher connected to the SAN server
- Change the framerate to almost zero for everybody to bring down Video bandwidth usage
- You can attach data into a stream!!! Try this at work
- stream_as.send("video", obj)???