Published on Sunday, April 25th, 2010 by Dominic Gelineau

Today was the first day of the Flash In The Can (FITC (@FITC) ) conference and I was pretty excited about it. With 5 presentations going on at the same time, the challenge of such a conference is all in the choices you make. To better understand which talks I chose, I think I should say a little bit about myself.

My name is Dominic Gelineau (@zedia), I am from Montreal and I currently work at B-Reel New York as a Flash Developer. I have been doing this for the past 4 years and I consider myself a mid to high level programmer. Because of this, I tend to choose more technical presentations.  Also, it’s a bit different for me this year (I have been going to the last two installments of this conference) because I am in nomination for an award (the trophy is a can opener in glass; who wouldn’t want that?) in the category Best Canadian Developer Website for my blog zedia.net, so I feel a bit more tension and excitement. Now that this is said, let’s move on to the presentations I have seen.

Open-Source Flash 3D by John Linquist

I had a big problem deciding what to see but I ended up on this one because of the presenter. I had seen John Lindquist (@johnlindquist) code, now I wanted to see him speak. His presentation was about 3D on the web; where it started and where it is going. John is a member of the Papervision3D team so he really knows what he is speaking about. In short, he explained how 3D in Flash all (mostly) began with Papervision3D. He told us about the highs and lows of the development of this library and how the development of the next version (3.0 available on github) is very slow. He pointed out to other libraries in the Flash world and indicated that Away3D (@away3d) might be the library to go to because they are still very focused and they just released a new version.

The rest of the presentation was focused on the new contenders in the game of 3D on the web; these being Unity and WebGL. WebGL is an open-source standard that is going to be included in the HTML5 specification. WebGL seems promising but is far from being finish and it won’t be included with Internet Explorer 9. Unity seems to be the good choice to make when you want to make a 3D game because of the quality of the 3D outputted and how advanced the development tool is. Two disadvantages of Unity is the low penetration rate for the plugin and the fact that it doesn’t support the webcam (so no augmented reality). What Flash lacks in front of these two is the hardware acceleration which limits what can be done. John finished by saying that Adobe should step up or for ever lose the 3D race for the true winner: Unity.

Lessons from the trenches: 10 habits of highly effective programmers by Ross Ladell

Ross Ladell is a lead programmer at Club Penguin (Disney Online Studios) and he gave a top level talk about tips for programmers. There wasn’t much code involved but it was mostly stuff you learn with experience in these domains: Estimating, Code, Leadership, Staying sane. Here are a couple of his tips:

Estimating

• - Granularity is the key
• - Run your estimates by another programmer
• - Do estimation templates

Code

• - Use a framework (like PureMVC or Robotlegs)
• - Write self describing code (code that kinda reads like English)
• - Remove noise from code (get rid of code that is not being used)
• - Be clear instead of clever
• - Use a framework (he puts big emphasis on this)
• - Optimize last

Leadership (mostly if you are a lead developer)

• - Assume the best about people
• - Praise in public, reprimand in private
• - Train people to replace you

Staying sane

• -Noise canceling headphones are a bliss (even if they cost a lot)

And he gave many others.

From Solo to CEO – Managing Growth – A panel with Simon Conlin, R Blank, Hoss Gifford, Robert Lindstrom, Paul Pattison and Grant Skinner

This panel had an impressive line-up and the insights they gave was invaluable. I eventually want to start my own business so there was no way I was missing this talk. It was mostly about what you should be aware when you become your own boss, but since it was a discussion, I’ll go with a bullet point format for this resume:

• - There seems to be 2 patterns, you either quit your job because you are fed up and open your business or you do freelance for a while and you team up with another freelancer to start a company.
• - Desire to stay small and have teams is shared by a lot
• - Find people to do your job so that you concentrate on growing you enterprise
• - Grant Skinner (@gskinner) likes to hire junior so that they can grow within the company, they also get a better feel of how the company works internally
• - Grant Skinner does not use freelancers for his core business (ActionScript development)
• - It is a general feeling that all employee should be in the same space, also open space seems preferable to cubicles to ease communications
• - Keep team members in the same city
• - A question you should ask yourself is do you want a job or not? if not start your thing
• - Be aware that for the 2.5 first years all you will do is work
• - Don’t be afraid of failure, it will not be an easy path

All in all it does not seem to be easy to start your business but all the panelist look like they are satisfied with doing so.

Adobe Keynote – Richard Galvan and Mark Anders

First let me say that I keep myself up to date on the Flash world so maybe that is why I was so disappointed by the Adobe keynote. When your biggest innovation is in Photoshop at a Flash conference, something is wrong. I am aware that the focus for Flash Player 10.1 was optimization but I would have liked something to play with.

Most of the new stuff is integration between the different Adobe offerings which is fine I guess and is a good thing that they start to do this the earliest but I couldn’t care less that InDesign can output Flash files, tighter integration with Photoshop, Illustrator and After Effects is more important for me (maybe they should have shown this at an InDesign conference?).

What I got instead is underline in Flash authoring tool and a new xml format for FLA files. Don’t get me wrong I like the fact that Flash will integrate better with source control, but it doesn’t give me new possibilities when building websites. I guess I expected too much, maybe they should have shown how you will be able, in the future, to export timeline animation to HTML5/Canvas. At least it would have given people something to talk about. I hope Flash Player 11 is not too far away…

North Kingdom - David Eriksson and Robert Lindstrom

It is pretty nice when you get to learn how a renown agency like North Kingdom (@NorthKingdom) is working. I had seen this presentation 2 years ago and they did a good job to give new content by presenting a new project Adidas Teamgeist. They walked us through the production of this project that was heavy on video, illustration and 3D.

What I got out of this is the extreme importance they give to storytelling and to detail. A story seem to be at the heart of everything they do be it the showreel or a client project. As for being anal for details it is hard to get further than these guys, but it shows up in the work. What they do is simply amazing. The have shown sketches and first draft of 3D rendering that seemed fine to me, but where rejected. That was the problem exactly they were just fine, somethings were off, they didn’t feel exactly like the rest of the site; back to the drawing board!

Well that was it for my first day, I will need some time to assimilate all of this, so let me go to the party and have some beers. I’ll be back tomorrow for the recap of my second day!

Another First Day At Flash In The Can, 4.0 out of 10 based on 1 rating

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