flashPitt 2008 Recap
This past Friday I had the pleasure to attend the flashPitt conference in Pittsburgh. This is a smaller, regional Flash conference but I thought it was an amazing day of Flash training and inspiration. This was the first time that Val Head and Joe Kromer have run a conference, but you couldn’t tell as the whole day went off without a hitch. My job was to give the keynote first thing in the morning. The crowd seemed very excited about the new things coming in Flash Player 10 and Flash CS4. I talked to a lot of cool people throughout the day and also got to see a lot of sessions.
One of the things that Pittsburgh is famous for is Primanti Brothers. This restaurant serves up some of the biggest and most unusual sandwiches I’ve ever seen. The guys on the AIR tour raved about it when they stopped in Pittsburgh so I had to try it. After the event I headed out to Primantis with Ben Pritchard, Wayne Lincoln, Zander Brimijoin, Julian Dolce, and John Lindquist. The cheese steak is the most popular sandwich there so most of us went with that. The sandwich is unusual as it has coleslaw and french fries inside it, not on the side. Below is a quick video showing me killing it.
As I mentioned I got to see quite a few sessions during the event. Below are my notes from what I saw.
AS2 to AS3 Migration
This session was given by both Ben Pritchard and Wayne Lincoln, who run the Pittsburgh Flash User Group. They used an AS2 versus AS3 fight analogy to highlight the benefits of ActionScript 3.0 which was an interesting way to come at it. I think was really effective presentation and of course, ActionScript 3.0 scored a KO victory.
For Position Only
This session was delivered by Zander Brimijoin who is an art director at Big Spaceship. This was a really cool presentation as he dissected some of their coolest work including the Corona Papervision3D site. It was amazing to hear the lengths that they had to go to get things to look just right. The water is actually of the New Jersey shore and was color corrected to make it look tropical. Some of the waves had to be hand animated using PNG files. Due to the image distortion in Papervision, they had to compensate by distorting the original images the other way in Photoshop.
Papervision3D
This session was an introduction to the 3D engine by John Lindquist. He used some interesting methods to teach the crowd more about 3D space. Balloons were handed out to some in the audience to represent different positions on the X and Z axis. This was a unique and effective way of teaching this concept. The room was a little narrow and long but it went off well. And what would a presentation about a community 3D project be without getting in a few wacks at Adobe. It’s all good though 
.
Experience First Approach
Stacy “bitchwhocodes” Mulcahy delivered another really funny presentation about experience design. One of the main themes was designing for different devices. She talked about how her approach is to do different designs for each device rather than trying to come up with something that runs perfectly everywhere. I couldn’t agree with this more as the idea that you will somehow be able to leverage a single design across the web, desktop, and mobile is a little naive.
The Experience Layer
Dan Mall is an Interactive Director at HappyCog. This session was focused on usability and providing a graceful degradation for sites built with technologies like Flash. Dan is an excellent presenter and I really liked the things he had to say. This type of stuff isn’t thought about enough by a lot of people who develop Flash, myself included.
The Medium of Interaction
All I can say is wow. Golan Levin, who is a professor at Carnegie Mellon university, gave the final presentation of the day. I had never heard of Golan before but his work was simply amazing. He has been doing interactive experiments since the early 90’s using technologies ranging from Director, Java, and .NET. He showed a slew of awesome sound experiments that he created years ago that definitely inspired the crowd due to the fact that we can do the same types of things in Flash. Golan was an excellent presenter and the crowd definitely left on a high note.
I had a great time at flashPitt and I really hope they decide to hold it again next year. I would love to see more of these regional conferences pop up as there are scores of Flash developers out there who can’t get to one of the big, national conferences.
Lee
Sublime fans rejoice!!
damn lee, you’re a quick eater! got indigestion?!
Thanks for the great review, Lee. Glad to hear you had a good time in Pittsburgh!
I was quite shocked at the turnout! I had no idea there was so much appreciation for Flash in the Pittsburgh area. It was great to see!
I also enjoyed Julian’s session on physical computing. It gave a whole new perspective on how you can design an interface for using different inputs besides the mouse.
I’m glad to see you took a Primanti’s sandwich head on. Most people get intimidated and get the fries and slaw on the side :-/
Lee,
It was great to hear you speak and see you in person after watching your videos and reading you blog for so long. You greatly influence the direction by which I learn new things about flash.
Thanks again for answering all my questions at the conference.
David
As the guy sitting next to Lee in that video, you’ll notice I hadn’t even started on the second half my sandwich before the video was over. It was really quite impressive, although if I’d known that my hands/sandwich would have been on film I would’ve put up more of a fight.
As for the “wacks at Adobe”, there are very few people who understand where the speed increases for fp10 3d are coming from because you have know how a 3d engine works to know why the new fp10 features are so great. So bottom line, fp10 ten is a huge step forward for 3d, it’s just a different step than usually advertised.
@John Yeah we should of actually made it a competition. I’ve also been told that I didn’t get the full experience without a Yuengling.
Agreed, the conference was worth it. I traveled all the way from New York City to attend, and was a bit sad that I didn’t win the Wii or iPod, but whatever!
I like the setup of the conference, and how they divided the sessions into creative-inspirational and pure technical options, as we got a good mix of knowledge that will help us evolve.
I’m not sure if you were there for when one of the presenters, sorry I forgot my notes so I’m doing from the top of my head, touched on some cool ways to use Flash and extend it into a tool to collect real world data. Here is the link to the “phidgets” site: http://www.phidgets.com/
(They have a Flash API, so we can just plug-and-play with all their devices)
I work doing kiosks and that sort of thing with Flash for Pharma companies, and this presentation and information that was shared really made my trip worthy!
@John, can you perhaps explain to us how the FP10 is a huge step forward for 3D while using balloons to illustrate that concept? lol j/k, you guys were great!
Thanks for the kind words, Lee! Great to meet you, and sorry we ended up at the Primanti’s across town. Maybe next time, we’ll have a chow-down!
Good eating habit Lee!!! Did not waste any food. Really liked it!!! Really impressed.
Flashpitt was awesome…. I’d never been in anykind of web/design/development based conferences before… and to see and meet people that are GODS in this community .. was amazing… Got to say Hi to Lee, and Dan … met some awesome ppl…. won some awesome books… Definitely worth the early trip from Cleveland !