I arrived in Austin on Sunday for FlashForward and had a great time presenting my Head Start Flex 2 workshop yesterday.
The FlashForward Austin Days 1 & 2 article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
Right now I'm sitting in on Kevin Lynch's keynote and they're showing a couple of firsts. Big Spaceship just demoed their latest site for Nike using the Flash 9 Player on Linux. The site contains heavy alpha channel video and animation and the player ran it without a glitch. I can't wait to get my hands on that baby. It's going to be great to be able to create Flex applications on Linux and run them in Flash Player 9 on Linux.
Mark Anders has taken the stage and he's currently creating a small Flickr-based application on Flex Builder 2 on OS X. Once this baby and CS3 are released, I don't think I'll have much to do in Windows under Parallels anymore and, as good as Parallels is, I did switch to a Mac to get away from Windows!
Now Mark's talking about Apollo. How it will support HTML, Flash and PDF and integrate them. You can build a Flash based application using Flash Professional or Flex and it gives you access to ActionScript and all of the capabilities of the Flash player. Beyond that you can integrate HTML and PDF into Flash. You can render HTML inside Flash. Or, you can approach it from an HTML perspective. You can build an HTML application that uses SWF and PDF. You have access to operating system APIs, cross-platform (Mac, Windows, Linux.)
Now he's showing, for the first time ever, how to build an application in Apollo on OS X. It's a very early build and it doesn't have all the integration with Flex Builder in the version that he's showing us.
He selects the Apollo Debug Launcher from the Web Browsers preference in Flex Builder 2. He is also changing the
They want to have a developer release this year with version 1.0 in 2007.
Kevin's returned to the stage and now he's inviting Justin Everett-Church and Mike Downey to the stage to talk about the Flash Authoring Tool. Justin is demoing the Flash 9 Public Alpha. He mentions the performance difference between AS2 and AS3 applications using a particle demo.
Now Mike's going to show us what they're working on next. A sneak preview of the next version of Flash (this is the first public presentation of the tool, codename Blaze.)
One of the new features is importing Photoshop PSD files. Import -> Import to stage. There is precise control over every layer. He chooses a PSD file and you can see all the layers, layer groups, layer comps and you can make choices about each layer separately. The options include "Make text editable" (so that text imported from PSD files is editable in Flash). He selects a Folder. And asks everything in that folder to be made into a MovieClip and he gives it an instance name and sets is registration point (the crowd loves it - claps!) They're also supporting layer modes -- drop shadows, blurs, etc. -- and covert them to the Flash format.
Also, Photoshop JPEG format looks better so they swapped out the compression engine in Flash to use the one in the next version of Photoshop.
You can convert layers to keyframes. You can set the Flash stage to the same size as your photoshop document window. (This is all still in the Photoshop import wizard.)
Looks like this is the first step towards much tighter integration with Photoshop.
He's going to show one other thing. An innovative feature. In a lot of Flash teams, there is a workflow where a designer will prototype the site on the timeline and then the developer would rip it all apart and then recreate the animations, etc., in ActionScript, optimize, etc. There is an inherent loss of fidelity as you go through the process. Breeding discontent between "designers" and "developers". Code-based animation. So they hired Robert Penner (who now works on the Flash team and he's working on the feature Mike's showing now.)
There is a traditional timeline animation of a bug moving around the stage, following a motion path, changing size, alpha, etc. So it's a complex timeline animation. Select any span of animation, right-click, Copy Motion as ActionScript 3. So the feature walks the timeline and converts the timeline-based animation into an XML structure using E4X and then copies it to the clipboard.
He creates a copy of the first movie clip and then adds the code. The timeline-based animation and the coded animation are identical.
You can also that this animation code into Flex Builder and it will work in Flex.
This is quite an amazing feature and they're still refining it and working on the interface.
The last thing he's going to mention is components. People want smaller components. And components that are very easy to skin. So they decided to build that and base it on the same architecture as Flex but very lightweight. Instead of Adobe building them, they hired Flash developers to build them. So they hired Metallic and Beau Amber and Grant Skinner. (Beau's going to give a sneak peek of the components.)
The FlashForward Austin Days 1 & 2 article by Aral Balkan, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 2.0 UK: England License.
[...] Update 2: Flashmagazine and Aral Balkan posted their recaps of the keynote as well! Many interesting details there that escaped me, so check them out. [...]
Great to hear whats going on over there Aral. I have been eagerly trawling through all the blogs to try and catch up.
Say hello to everyone for me. Glad your workshops went well. I will keep reading avidly!
John
That Photoshop integration is going to be huge. Hopefully the new components will be awesome.
I really enjoyed your session about Flex on Monday. Great stuff! Will you be making the presentation files available. I could really use another look as some of that code, especially reading RSS feeds for Flex. Thanks for the great presentation!
Linux player in action – a Flashforward sneak!…
It’s late in the day, so you’ve probably already caught wind of the first public showing of an early version of the Linux Flash Player 9 during the keynote at Flashforward Austin. Garrett Nantz of Big Spaceship showed off the……
Will the new components replace the Flex components and be available as a common set of components to both the Flash and Flex tools? Will that then mean we can use those components in FlashLite apps and be common across all three?
Yeah nice write up!
[...] Read more. [...]
The timeline export to AS is very exciting! The potential is….well, I just don’t have words for how much I’ve wanted this ability over the years. I even toyed around with extracting the position of timeline-tweened clips programatically, myself. I’m sure this new feature will be much better than my feeble attempts, and will open up even new possibilities that no one is dreaming of now.
Well done Penner!
Thanks, Kristin. I noticed a few weeks ago that you can asked for timeline export to AS on the Flash Team’s feature request blog:
http://weblogs.macromedia.com/flashteam/archives/2006/08/feature_request_1.cfm#comments
I had to bite my tongue, but am glad it’s public now!
hey aral, just wanted to stop in an say thanks for the great session at FF Austin of Flex2 Jumpstart.
I wanted to see if you could send me some info on how you had your Parallels app running so well in the presentation. I noticed you were switching between the two apps easily and also when you returned to osx the winxp vm was hidden. i just wanted to hear how you set up your setting to get this to run nice thanks again!
oh and your welcome for helping you remember to publish the child.swf in your supercharging flash 8 talk right now!
thanks! can’t wait to hear back!
[...] There’s some reviews and pictures up of the info from the Adobe Keynote, sounds like they showed some interesting things including Flash9 on linux.. wohoo! [...]
[...] If like me you hadn’t the luck to be at Austin for the Flashforward, you still can gather some informations ;) Don’t miss the Videocasts from the Flashforward blog (lot of resources). Other various resources : Rhjr, FlashMag, A.Balkan. [...]
I thoroughly enojoyed your sessions at FlashForward. Thanks for all the great stuff you’ve been releasing to the community. Cheers.
Hey cbaxter,
I’ve got it running with virtuedesktops. It lets me run Windows maximized on one screen and switch back and forth with a key combination.
Hey Justin, thanks, man! :)
Neues vom Flash Player 9…
Auf der Flashforward Conference in Austin hat Adobe eine frühe Vorversion des Flash Player 9 für Linux vorgestellt. Vorgeführt wurde dort die Website von Nike Air auf einem Firefox unter Ubuntu—und das trotz hoher Komplexität …
[...] Aral Balkan: Days 1 & 2, Apollo@Flashforward, Flex Workshop slides, Supercharging Flash 8 slides. [...]
[...] Oh well. Who cares? Oh wait. I do. And so does Aral Balkan. He cares more. He went there and started writing about it. [...]
[...] It was revealed at the keynote at FlashForward Austin that Grant Skinner is working with Metaliq to bring a version of his component set to Flash 9. The components that will be included in the next version of Flash are going to be based on the components that were originally called GLIC and are now known as the mCOM components. What’s great about them is that Grant built them to be lightweight and easily skinnable. Skinning the components is as easy as specifying movie clips from your library for the various parts of a component. In other words, it’s just as it should be. [...]
Hi!
Nice report.
Did anone say WHEN Flash 9 is come out?
bye!
dsfsdfsd sfgsf efgsf
hi..good site..by..
[...] Das ganze ausführlich in Arals Blog… Beitrag von Kai unter der Rubrik Flash / Actionscript [...]
Will the new components replace the Flex components and be available as a common set of components to both the Flash and Flex tools? Will that then mean we can use those components in FlashLite apps and be common across all three?