Published on Thursday, April 29th, 2010 by Dominic Gelineau

Now that Flash in the Can is over, and since I did a recap of everything of the two first days, I’m going to do the same for the third and final day (this past Tuesday, April 27).

Making Meaningful Data Meaningful by Wesley Grubbs

Wesley Grubbs gave a very good talk about data visualization, or how to take a huge amount of data and extract meaning out of it. As an example, he took the data for monetary contributions to the last American election campaigns and then showed the process he went through to make an amazing pie chart out of it (believe me, it was better than it sounds).

The Cool Shit Hour by Didier Brun, David Fasullo, Joa Ebert, Mikko Haapoja and Chris Allen

If you had seen the personal presentations of these guys, they were mostly showcasing some of the same work. Some did different things: Joa Ebert(@joa) did some live coding that didn’t go as planned and David Fasullo showed his tool Livebrush (previously published on the Wire here) that uses velocity and friction as parameters for a brush in a drawing tool.

Quick as a Flash by Grant Skinner

Grant is always great to see. He gave multiple tricks and strategies to optimize your Flash files and ActionScript so that your project runs faster. What was really nice is that his presentation already accounted for Flash Player 10.1, the version of Flash Player that isn’t even out yet. You can get a piece of his talk here: gskinner.com/talks/

Sixteen Colours by Peter Nitsch

Peter Nitsch(@peter_nitsch) is the dude behind Asciimeo. He took us on a trip through time to discover ASCII art, BBS and ASCII games. He explained how he brought all those to Flash with the help of Alchemy. Alchemy is the tool that lets you compile C/++ libraries to be used in a Flash project. There is not that much information around on Alchemy I really was listening to everything he was saying about it.

Eyes Can Hear, 5 Ways by Jared Ficklin

Jared’s (@jaredrawk) presentation was amazing; he is a great entertainer. I had started seeing his talk last year but I had to leave before it was done so I really didn’t want to miss this one. He showed us all the contraption he physically built in order to visualize sound. These contraptions ranged from putting corn starch on a speaker, to stitching a sub-woofer to a garbage bin, to building a table out of steal and propane, to giving RFID tags to 3000 people and making a data visualization out of it. This guy really likes what he does and his enthusiasm is contagious.

It Has To Be This by John Underkoffler

This MIT graduate was a science adviser on multiple movies like Minority Report, Aeon Flux and Iron Man. He started by speaking about his PhD project: the I/O bulb, a light bulb that can receive and send images. He also explained how he did research for how you would put a 280-acre region under a glass dome. Finally, he spoke about his current endeavor at Oblong Industries to create the well known Minority Report interface in real life. The talk was good but I felt like it missed something.

Well, as usual FITC was awesome. If you ever get the chance of going, it is well worth the money, you get so much inspiration and motivation out of it. Well that ends it for my collaboration with Applied Arts. I hope you enjoyed it, I sure did.

Dominic Gelineau is a Flash developer at B-Reel New York, you can follow him on his blog zedia.net or on Twitter @zedia.

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