Despite my previous post, the flights from SL to Toronto were very nice, iPod + a good book + good seat neighbor = easy travel.
I attended FITC two years ago and was sold on this conference with its focus on design and technology, the location (Toronto), top notch speakers with a great variety of sessions. I have attended Flash Forward three times, SXSW and other design conferences. These were all good for what they were, but FITC continues to be my favorite conference.
Below are a few points from sessions I attended that I felt were worth posting:
After Effects CS3
Beta is out now – final release later this year. From the presentation by the Adobe guy, wow, what an amazing upgrade for AE. Shape Layers, Fractal Noise Effects, and this Repeater tool that has much more control and options than the Particular plug-in.
There is this “puppet” tool that lets you set areas you want to manually animate “or puppeteer” then record these to the timeline for editing. Very fun.
The coolest new feature is the Brainstorm tool, this lets you compare and save randomized effects then save and further compare and narrow down the look or effect you are looking for. The opens up a fun way to quickly play around with an effect and stumble upon something unexpected and new.
Components in Flash CS3
Developed from the ground up by Grant Skinner, both the included components and the component extending system which is much faster and very easy to customize, all editable with code and at runtime. Now when you drop a component on the stage you can double click it and edit the design right there. Nice. Grand demoed a DataGrid with a million items and it ran super smooth, very good news for using Flash for application development.
Mario Klingemann
Mario showed off a system he’s developing in Flash to teach the computer to read an image, evaluate it so it can learn what is considered “good” design or photography or art. He talked about philosophical issues with what “art” and “Art” is. Then the system he’s building can create its own art in Flash, currently from vectors and eventually it will take the data it has “learned” and apply it to its own creations. Currently Mario has to tell the system what pieces are good, then it continually builds upon each selection.
John Maeda
I read his book “Simplicity” on the flight to the conference. His presentation was an extension of the great ideas and principles he discusses in this book. These apply to how we work and live as well as user interface design. A must read.
Marcos Weskamp
Off the charts good stuff, I’ve always been a fan of Marcos’ work. He built the recent re-launch of the Wieden+Kennedy site. He talked about that a bit as well as a few other amazing works in development. He talked about data visualizations and his process of Parse > Analyze > Visualize when designing ideas to represent data.
Papervision 3D
I’ve seen the demos and have been playing with the alpha classes for Papervision3D, but I had no idea how powerful and amazing this 3D engine for Flash is becoming. Carlos Ulloa’s presentaion was great as he talked about how this was build from the ground up for use in Flash.
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That is all for now. If you ever have the chance to attend FITC I highly recommend it. There also offer fantastic training sessions the day before the conference starts. This year they had Joshua Davis.
Cool!