Flash on the Beach opening number

Flash on the Beach opened this year with a musical number. Los Tres Mariachis took to the stage to welcome us to the conference with some rather lovely text based visuals to back them up. This may be a big old geek fest in some people’s eyes but it really is one of the cooler conferences I’ve been to.

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Joa Ebert’s live coding at Flash on the Beach

At the recent Flash on the Beach conference, Joa Ebert took to the stage as part of a line-up of speakers who each had 10 mins to talk. Instead of talking, Joa opted for some fast paced dance music and a spot of live coding. It’s quite hard to make out what is being written on this video but you get the gist. The guy must’ve been practising this for a while – this is some seriously fast code writing.

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Andre Michelle at FOTB 2009

YouTube – Andre Michelle at FOTB 2009.

Andre Michelle is just too crazy for words. He makes you feel incredibly small and stupid. An absolute legend in the field of flash audio. Check out this little video someone captured from the event.

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New York Times Air App

I saw this product demo for the New York Times whilst at Flash on the Beach and I was really blown away by the app’s interactivity. What a great way to view news content. It has the feel of browsing pages of a newspaper as you are able to scroll sideways and up/down through what looks like broadsheets of a paper. The use of Adobe AIR is perfect in that you are free from the constraints of the browser and you can make the application work like it is a native app to your system. It’s just a shame that the New York Times are struggling so badly at the moment. Let’s hope an app like this will help them learn to monetize their product (perhaps with micro-payments) for their content.

New York Times Reader AIR application from RefreshingApps on Vimeo.

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Flash on the Beach 2009

Lest it all get swallowed up into the Twitter-ether here are my tweets from Flash on the Beach. Lots of links and inspiration to follow over the next week or so.

In reverse order :

1. #fotb Joshua Davis final talk at Flash on the Beach http://twitpic.com/itwqoabout 17 hours ago from Echofon
2. #fotb The legend that is Mario Klingemann. Who needs twitpic anyway?about 20 hours ago from Echofon
3. @jenwell @sebleedelisle is totally legit – he really WILL pay that ticket for you!about 22 hours ago from Echofon
4. #fotb Wonderfully rambling musings on life the, the universe and everything by Craig Swann. Perfect inspiration session.3:26 PM Sep 22nd from Echofon
5. #fotb Mind well and truly blown by Jer Thorpe’s data visualisations6:36 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
6. #fotb lunch at Bill’s6:33 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
7. #fotb packed house for grant skinner’s code optimisation talk gskinner.com/talks3:11 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
8. #fotb ugh no more sales pitches PLEASE2:02 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
9. #fotb elevator pitches. Three minutes each. All novice speakers.1:25 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
10. #fotb latte on the beach http://twitpic.com/iojuo12:49 AM Sep 22nd from Echofon
11. #fotb heading to audio in Brighton12:48 PM Sep 21st from Echofon
12. #fotb finding the story in an image with hilman curtis8:46 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
13. #fotb finding the story in the image with hilman curtis8:45 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
14. #fotb definitely agree with Joshua hirsch from big spaceship with their no stock photography or video policy7:37 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
15. #fotb rather fascinating talk on the process of short movie making with Rob Chiu6:16 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
16. #FOTB keynote welcome http://bit.ly/3B8qAi6:16 AM Sep 21st from Tweetbots
17. #fotb really cool sound control demo with inverse kinematics4:28 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
18. #fotb loving The Bine tool and shape armatures in inverse kinematics with Flash CS44:14 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
19. #fotb Carlo Blatz talking about his modified version of SCRUM taking list of requirements vs complexity factor.3:06 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
20. #fotb wow new York times Air app is incredible.1:44 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
21. #FOTB http://twitpic.com/ik7q01:11 AM Sep 21st from Echofon
22. Is it bad to watch Derren Brown on 4OD.?I hope their support line is still open if I get stuck to my chair.10:16 AM Sep 20th from DestroyTwitter
23. Flash on the Beach #FOTB http://bit.ly/2fgqxJ9:05 AM Sep 20th from Tweetbots
24. Agreeing to pick up all 5 conference tickets was a mistake as they come with a laptop bag each #FOTB #fail8:32 AM Sep 20th from Echofon

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#FOTB keynote welcome

Flash on the beach keynote speech kicks off with the three Mariachis singing a comdy welcome, followed by a rather lovely film by Artillery. Next up an Adobe plug with Mark Anders & Richard Galvan.

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Flash on the Beach #FOTB

Just arrived in Brighton and picked up all five of the Lean Mean Fighting Machine Flash on the Beach passes. Bit of a nightmare in that each pass comes with a bag so I’m now crazy bag guy trapsing around the city.

Really looking forward to the conference as it’s the first time I’m able to go for the full three days. I know it’s going to be knackering but there will be loads of cool stuff to see and take in. Going to focus on more of the designer talks this year but will try and make it to all the guru speakers. Mario Klingeman’s talk sounds particularly good this year.

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David Lindsey Wade – Photography

Here’s another gimmicky way to interact with a website, here for David Lindsey Wade photography. You can either choose to navigate in a conventional mouse click kind of way. Or you can activate your webcam and use a wave of your hand left or right to scroll through the images of the site. It’s actually quite difficult to master this interaction and you need to sit bang on into the correct position for it to work. It also gets tiring quickly using this method to navigate. I know we all think that Minority Report looked cool. But I really can never see the day where we actually interact for long with sites in this way.

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Magic Socket

This portfolio site for Magic Socket is an FWA site of the day and rightly so. What a great way to get people to look at all your work. By creating a game that forces you to scroll through the entirety of the site. In this case it is Scalectrix. A full on game that challenges you to race around a track that snakes around the portfolio pieces of this company’s work. You might think you’d end up missing bits of work but those that catch your eye as you’re racing round you end up scrolling back after your game to have a proper look at.

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Eric Chan

Here’s an interesting website with a unique navigational style. Working solely on the newer MacBooks you can download an application that allows you to navigate the site with your hands by tilting your laptop. There’s a great demo video on the Eric Chan site. This works by tapping into the built in accelerometer that all new Apple laptops have. It’s  a device that is there to detect if your laptop suffers a sudden fall, say off a table and will kindly switch off your hard-drive to prevent serious damage to the data. But there is a way to tap into this architecture and detect some basic movement. By tilting your laptop left or right the site elements will move as if with gravity. When your laptop is on a table a firm tap of the table will shuffle the content and bring up a new piece of work. Ok this kind of thing is perfect for an interactive designer type portfolio but a gimmic none-the-less. It’s not a great way to navigate and seems to be more of an experiment into what is possible than a serious study in interactive design.

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