OK, so I only showed up for the afternoon sessions but it was fantastic none the less, despite the somewhat disappointing “OOP For The OOPless” from Hugh Elliot. On one hand it was a good overview of the OOP capabilities in Flash 9 but it was a snoozer of a presentation. I fully acknowledge that it’s a dry subject matter and what’s more I was seated too far from the front to read most of the text on the projector (but to be fair, I have very, very poor vision…).

After the break, Adobe’s Mike Downey (and friends) showed off the yummy Neapolitan treat that is AIR+Flash+Flex and some of the new tricks Flash 10 has picked up. One is the new timeline tween that is much more flexible and powerful than ever. You can now just make a new object, which doesn’t even need to be a movie clip initially, set a new motion tween from the menu, perform a transformation on the object, and watch Flash do the rest. The fancy part is how you can now open a new inspector tab and tweak all aspects of the animation, including the speed, easing, duration, rotation, and so on. You can also move and scale the animation like any old movie clip on the stage, and you can even modify the animation’s path using bezier curves. Very slick stuff.

Another nifty new animation trick was the addition of a “bones” tool which very quickly and easily allows movie clips to be anchored together with a skeletal structure which can then be immediately manipulated as separate, but joined, parts. Like an arm or a leg. Animators are going to love this and how much time they’re going to save.

Flex and AIR are also looking very strong — desktop application development is going to see some amazing innovations over the next couple of years because it’s going to bring the barrier of entry way down. In theory I can now build desktop applications, which is frankly something I’ve wanted to try for a long time. In one nifty demonstration, Mike built a very simple web browser with quite literally 3 lines of code and about one minute in the layout design window.

My personal highlight of the day, however, was Erik Natzke’s presentation entitled ‘Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Playing’ which was, apparently, his first full presentation focusing on his art and leaving the technical details out almost entirely. The short of it is that his work is procedurally generated based on criteria he can tweak to alter the output. For example, he utilizes assets such as particle generators, ribbons, concentric circles or any combination thereof to create some unique and stunning works of art. The bulk of the presentation was his journey exploring and exploiting the tools at his disposal to where he is today and my go in the future. Really good stuff.

The last event of the day was the Cut&Paste design showdown between two pairs of really skilled digital artists (the names of which I can’t track down at the moment…). It was basically a tag team Photoshop battle featuring teams from New York and Toronto, each given 15 minutes to hammer on a theme using any tools available to them. After time expires, the teams trade files and work on a second theme for another 15 minutes. This was officially just an exhibition, but the hometown favourites seemed to have the edge when it came to audience voting, natch.

Another full day of presentations tomorrow, but I’ve got a splitting headache and don’t even want to think about it right now. I’ve got a Coke to drink and wrestling to watch (and I suppose a couple chores to do) and then I’m looking forward to a good night’s sleep. See you tomorrow!

MocoLocal is a new service that aims to facilitate sharing and discovery of interesting stores, restaurants, and other such places in just about any North American city. A quick search for Toronto yields a lot of results, but unfortunately the relatively newness of the site means there aren’t many comments or votes to help distinguish one result from the next. Even so, it’s worth a bookmark because I think it will only get better. Via MocoLoco

To be completely fair I have not used any of the betas, but the majority of Gruber’s gripes apply to all previous releases. To have not installed anything past 2.x is in itself telling since my history with the browser goes way back to the pre-1.0 betas, and I love to give new applications a good going-over. However, since switching to the Mac about 4 years ago I’ve grown weary of the half-baked user experience.

Mozilla’s approach to Mac development isn’t so much lazy or a lack of qualified developers, I think, but a result of the organization’s over-arching approach to software design. The idea is to give a seamless experience across platforms so the Mac version looks and acts like its Windows and Linux counterparts. This is a nice theory, but I often find applications like this end up not feeling quite right anywhere, least of which on the Mac.

However, Firefox 3 is supposed to change all that, but the problem isn’t so much the look of the application, but its behaviour. This is the crux of John’s post and why I’ve stopped using Firefox. Skins can make Firefox look like anything, but if it doesn’t act like the OS it’s running on, that is ultimately the bigger problem.

Camino, Firefox’s OSX-native brother is a fantastic alternative (and my default browser), but lags behind in features and, most painfully, addon support. As a web developer this hurts most because for me Firefox is basically a platform on which to run Chris Pederick’s amazing Web Developer toolbar, among a few other notable addons. When Firefox 3 is released and my required addons are made compatible, I’ll upgrade, but until then, count me out.

Via Daring Fireball

I didn’t read my news feeds yesterday and now look what’s gone and happened… The worst part is I have to clear all those unread articles and I have this sick compulsion to at least skim them all, you know, just in case there’s a really interesting article I won’t come across elsewhere. I suppose RSS feeds are a lot like email that in a way, but do you read every email that reaches your inbox? Surely a certain amount of it is spam you can toss out immediately, or have transparently tossed out for you, but you can’t do that with RSS — at least I can’t — and it’s all there waiting to be looked at it.

I’ve read tips on how to reduce RSS clutter: assign “must-read” subscriptions to one folder and “like-to-read” subscriptions to another. The former you read as normal while the latter only if you have time, otherwise you just mark the whole mess as read and get back to whatever else there is to do on the internet. Porn, I suppose. That makes a lot of sense, and frankly a number of the feeds I read overlap and I see the same story several times over, but I just can’t bring myself to do it.

I like to think to myself that I weigh all my news feeds equally because I’m a guy with such a well-rounded tastes that I can’t simply cut stuff out without part of my equally well-rounded personality suffering somewhat. That could be it, but more likely it’s because I’m a completist nerd. I love it, but it sucks.

Recently the Intertron has been abuzz with news that representatives from the American music industry will be actively lobbying for the introduction of some sort of flat rate tax implemented by the ISPs. There is a cacophony of commentators explaining why this is a really bad idea and so I suppose I don’t really need to add my tiny voice, but I think that because I have a blog my ISP mandates that I do.

So, ya, it’s a really bad idea, and here are a few of the top of mind reasons why:

1. Government policy makers become (continue to be?) willing thugs who wring extortion money from the citizenry on behalf of their corporate keepers.
2. The money is a guaranteed income unattributed to performance. See above.
3. All internet users are convicted guilty of crimes perpetrated by only some.
4. The industry thus far has a poor record in fairly allocating money. Case in point: money earned from suing Napster, Sharman Networks, et al.
   Odd little side note: the image used by the NY Post features Billy Joe Armstrong of Green Day who, in concert with Pepsi, produced the infamous Superbowl FUD ad.
5. Assuming the copyright holders do loosen the purse strings and pay artists it will be their artists. Independent artists or those not willing or able to sidle up to the money trough will be left out.
6. I’m speculating, but there’s no way this tax would be the end of it. There will be a catch. Say, you’ll be able to download all the major label music you want, but you’ll still be on the hook for anything else.

Closer to home, a similar approach was taken on recordable media whereby CDs, DVDs, etc. were subject to an additional levy determined by their relative capacity. Although struck down in late 2003 it’s bloated corpse poked it’s decayed hand through the soil last year, but the courts once again struck the levy down. I hope similar conclusions would be reached should this copyright levy ever be tabled.

In other news, the MPAA would like to just have ISPs police every bit carried on their networks.

Is it just me, or does all this seem like the desperate stomping of ground by a dying mammoth?