Postcard from #FATC New York

More pictures can be found on my Posterous blog.

We’re just back from New York where we attended the first FATC conference. FATC stands for ‘Flash And The City’ (for the uninitiated).

As they had some major issues with the dedicated WIFI connection at the event, I’m writing down my thoughts on this blog instead.

The event was put together by Elad Elrom and friends. These guys are developers by profession, so they deserve huge credit for pulling off such an amazing event.

They had the following vision for FATC:

They really delivered and I was so excited about this formula that I spoke briefly with Elad and told him that we should definitely collaborate on a franchise-type-of-thing for Europe. Imagine ‘Flash And The City’ – Stockholm! (Elad, if you’re reading this, expect a proper email explaining my ideas with a proposal soon

We landed at JFK from München, Germany at around 3 pm and although a bit tired from the long flight, we jumped on one of those “hop on, hop off” double decker tourist buses and got to see most of Manhattan’s main attractions. My favorite was all the LED display signs at Time Square. Apparently, Time Square has close to 9,000 square feet (836 square meter) of display space!

We stayed at the slick Millennium Hilton in lower Manhattan, near Wall Street, just opposite “Ground Zero”, 3 minutes walk from the event.

source: wirednewyork

Here are the sessions I enjoyed the most:

Day 1

After the introductory keynote, we saw some fun break dancing.

The first session was presented by Adobe’s Ryan Stewart.

Geolocation and Mapping with the Flash Platform

I’m familiar with Google Maps and Yahoo’s API, so was happy to find out about Ryan’s own work on the subject with other lesser known apis.

And even happier when I saw most of his work was shared through Github: http://github.com/ryanstewart/

Quick notes below, slides here.

ESRI
Google Maps
AIR 2.0 (multi-touch, gestures with GoogleMaps 3D API, overlay PaperVision3D)
Modest Maps Project (opensource, as2,as3) works with full Photoshop PSD on the Map, Zoomify
Dealing with Geodata
GPS data, KML (same as the one Google uses, ability to draw shapes (polygons etc)
GPXAS3# – http://github.com/ryanstewart/
GPSBabelOnAIR – An ActionScript 3 wrapper that exposes GPSBabel through the NativeProcess API in AIR 2
http://webkitchen.be/geolocation – demo

Package ‘flash.sensors.Geolocation’ (where the goodies’ at)

Reflex: The Future of Rich Internet Applications, Ben Stucki

Reflex is a neat framework that works with both As3, Flex and Air projects. Really flexible and with a size footprint of only 40 k(!). Definitely something to look into as it matures.

After lunch we walked to Battery Park and jumped on a ferry boat to Liberty Island and the Statue of Liberty

This is one of the reason, I think the FATC experience is difference from other conferences I’ve been to, where you normally just sit inside for 3 days and don’t get the chance to experience the city you’re in.

We had fun at the Liberty Island. Though we thought the Statue of Liberty was a lot bigger (don’t get me wrong, she was huge, but gives the impression of being a lot bigger in films and on TV).

In the afternoon, we attended a session on streaming video by Lisa Larson-Kelly, called FMS: Streaming and Beyond!

Later on that evening around 9 pm we attended the Bar Hop in the Meatpacking District Manhattan

They had a special 20 dollars deal for ‘all-you-can-drink’ for 1 hour and then move on to the next bar. As we had planned to get up early to attend Lee Brimelow’s session as well as plans to go partying the next evening in Williamsburg, we declined the offer.

Day 2

As mentioned, one of the reason we went to bed early was so we could get up early to attend “Touch Me Baby” presented by Lee Brimelow of Adobe.

As you’ve probably noticed multi touch is all the rage right now, and Lee’s session didn’t disappoint anyone. He went through the most important part of the Adobe AS3 API and showed some really cool examples. I was especially interested to learn the difference between “Gesture” driven touch and “Multi point” touch. The latter is more powerful and goes beyond just simple gestures.

The device pictured below is the sh*t when it comes to supporting gestures and multi touch points – Lee showcased it registering up to 60 points without breaking a sweat.

Go to my blog for more: http://johanlopes.posterous.com/3m-m2256pw-10-finger-multitouch-display-hands

Branden Hall and Joshua Davis are two old school ActionScript/Flash gurus. They wrote HYPE, the new As3 framework which aims to bring creativity and playfulness back to the Flash community.

HYPE: Combining Creativity & Code

Matter of fact, I’ll be introducing this framework to my lecture this fall at Broby Grafiska, College Of Cross Media.

In the evening we were taken on a cruise along Hudson river, which forms the border between New Jersey and New York. It was fantastic as we got to see the beautiful New York skyline during the night.

Day 3

Flex 4 Component Lifecycle Best Practices

I’ve seen Aaron Pedersen & James Polanco doing this presentation at Adobe Max in Milan. They’ve now updated this to include the Flex 4 Spark components. If you’re into Flex development make sure to grab their slides from here or even better grab any of their up coming books on the topic.

Getting Git by Simeon Bateman was really good. Thanks to this session, I’ve now got all the information I need to move from SVN to Git.

Day 4

Stacey Mulcah aka “BitchWhoCodes” Developing for the Social Media Douchebag – An introduction to Social Media APIs

Hilarious presentation which gave us a good laugh. Stacey is an amazingly entertaining speaker with natural comedy timing.

Between her jokes, she managed to give everyone some valid pointers on how to keep sanity while development for the fickle platform that is Facebook and Twitter.

Chris Allen of Red5 fame showcased some amazing work they’re doing with their latest collaborative platform for mobile gaming.  Brass Monkey, Seriously Fun Control. I want to get my hands on their platform. They haven’t taken a definitive decision on which licensing model to use yet.

Jobe Makar’s session Predictive Movement in Multiplayer Games was really cool, albeit the topic was a bit too complex to be tackled in a such a short session.

One would’ve wanted to him to delve a bit deeper, but I guess one can go through all of his material in one’s own pace as he’s just released a new book entitled “ActionScript for Multiplayer Games and Virtual Worlds” – btw it’s receiving rave reviews. His source code on the stripped down tank game he presented can be found here: http://www.electrotank.com/lab/FATC/Files.zip