Had to leave Flash Forward NY early to finish some stuff at work, so I missed the last day of the conference. It was a memorable conference, and I got to meet a lot more people this time.
Got a phone call at the airport saying that 2Intro won Best Application from the Flash Film Festival, YESSS! Thanks to MixedGrill for getting me involved with that project.
As far as I know, my presentation went very well. After talking with attendees during the first two days, I realized that hardly anyone knew anything about FlashCom/ Rather than talking about deep FCS code, I scrapped the presentation and focused on concepts and strategies for using Flashcom, with a solid 20 minutes spent on how to use components to build your own Flashcom application. I demoed a wide range of FCS applications, including a non-linear video editing tool, a proximity-based chat application, and a robot-controlled webcam, to show that FlashCom is not just about chat rooms and av conferencing.
The Q/A was awesome too... once people saw the possibilities during my session, they came to the Q/A and asked really interesting questions. We jammed for over an hour to build weird prototypes with all kinds of undocumented and unknown FlashCom techniques.
Many, many thanks to Branden for his light sensor and rotation sensor. I broke the first sensor after trying to modify it to increase ambient light sensitivity. I'll send you replacement parts, dude :-)
Also, my robot's sensor accuracy, motor control, and structural design improved ten-fold after spending the whole night working with the guys from B-Line Express, especially Lucas. They turned out to be kick-ass developers (not just Flash), who used to work for NASA on the Hubble Space Telescope. Wow. We figured out a better gear reduction setup, more stable central rotation shaft alignment, and completely re-wrote the light-sensor algorithm in Java. I learned how to sample several light readings in order to offset any outlier sensor readings, and we ended up with an extremely stable control mechanism.
Too bad I had to miss Branden's presentation, which was today. Hopefully, he'll announce the project he's working on soon, so we can start having competitions with it :-) I also really wanted to see Chris Pelsor's presentation on Flash + PDAs, because my Toshiba e755 has become part of my lifestyle, and it would be so cool to develop custom software for those devices.
To answer everyone's question, yes, I will post the Treemap component soon. It only does squarified layout and simple layout right now, but it's neat :)
Posted by samuel at July 11, 2003 09:33 PM