Flash on the Beach 07 in Review

I’ve not updated for quite a number of weeks due to being stupidly busy, but now with a week off I thought it was about time I posted my review of FOTB 07. Better late than never!

Flash on the Beach was an excellent event. I’m so pleased that my employer recognised the benefits of sending myself a number of my colleagues down to Brighton. Here’s an overview of the sessions which stood out for me.

Monday

It was great to see Grant Skinner kick things off on Monday after the keynote. Although he didn’t include (or dropped) the topic of AVM2 garbage collection, overall I really enjoyed the pace and coverage of his session.

Mike Chambers did a good job introducing AIR. The talk was not very technical due to being geared towards entry level developers, but his perspective on the placement of AIR applications in the current RIA climate was insightful.

Niqui Merret’s session on accessibility was great. The pirate theme (Arrr) was fun and backed up with some very useful content. I may post more on this later as it generated a few interesting ideas.

Next up was Josh Davis. It’s safe to say he blew everyone away with his energy and passion and the pure quality of his work. What else can I say, you had to be there.

Tuesday

SWX! If you don’t know about it by now where have you been?! Seriously though, it’s a simple native data format for Flash remoting and if you work in the mobile space (shoot even if you don’t) it’s just too good to overlook.

Back to the SWX session, Aral had a pretty major issue with connectivity half way though his talk and this did cut out a good 15 minutes of live walkthroughs but even with this hurdle it was fun and informative.

Dave Yang’s Flash Lite session was one of the only disappointments. It felt like a calamity from start to finish and aside from the technical difficulties, and very late start, it just didn’t have any depth of content. I guess coming from a career in this sector my expectations may have been set too high. I do hope next year they have more emphasis on mobile platform development with some down and dirty technical sessions.

Robert Hodgin, wow. Simply inspirational work that made you wonder how such things can ever be created. I urge you if you haven’t already, to go and check out his work.

Wednesday

Carlo Blatz is a real funny guy. His talk on FDT3 was perhaps more a recovery session from the night before, but then again I think it was for most of the people in there :) It really didn’t matter though because the breadth of FDT3 features covered spoke for themselves. I also picked up quite a few tips which I have already integrated into my development workflow. If you haven’t already, go give FDT3 a try, oh and make sure to learn the shortcuts.

Jared Tarbell, wow for a third day in a row. His walkthough of computational art was quite inspiring. This was perhaps a more technical talk than the previous 4pm sessions, but it didn’t fail to blow everyone away once again.

A big thanks to John Davey and team for hosting a great event and I hope to be back again next year for more of the same.