Flash Camp – Birmingham
Today I attended the Flash Camp Birmingham event, with some key presenters from Adobe, TweetDeck, Yay! Media and RIM along with some other amazing speakers such as Niqui Merret, Neil Nand, and Seb Lee-Delisle.
The weather was amazing in Birmingham, and the day started with me being late and missing the keynote, however I was greeted with some free Adobe goodies and off I went in to James Whittaker’s (TweetDeck) talk, instantly gripped by the mobile theme of the talk it was enjoyable and really informative.
Next up was Mike Jones (Adobe) talking about games which took me back to my school days of playing on my SNES and Megadrive, it just shows how far games have come from being on a console to being in the browser as blazing performance.
Niqui Merret’s talk was about bugs, and went over sniffing bugs out, the talk was really interesting for something so infuriating that affects all developers, however annoying they are though we all get that amazing feeling when we squash them and make our code flawless and robust.
Wowza Media Server is something I always grazed over when looking at Media Server Platforms, but how I wish I didn’t. This thing is amazing as Demonstrated by Steve Carpenter, if you haven’t checked it out I suggest you do. You can see his code examples here: http://blog.yaymedia.net/2011/03/wowza-and-flash-builder-demo-files-from-flash-camp-midlands/
Unfortunately Mark Doherty from Adobe couldn’t make it to the conference, which was a shame I was looking forward to watching his presentation on Air for TV. The time was filled by Neil Nand, an incredibly talented Flash Developer who had only been in the UK for 15 days since coming over from Australia. Neil is obsessed with Flash and SEO and created a CMS that allows users to build rich Flash websites that also fall back to HTML, the CMS was impressive. Unfortunately there was nothing available to download to allow users to test the CMS but he’s hoping to get something available soon.
The next talk was something nearly everybody was waiting for, the BlackBerry Playbook, Sanyu Kiruluta from RIM came to talk about developing for the new tablet and even had one to demo it’s capabilities. This is a really smart device, and it looks like RIM are pulling out all the stops to try and make this thing succeed. I’m impressed by the size of the device, and it looks incredibly sturdy. As much as I’m not sold on the whole swipe gestures at the moment, I’m sure they’ll iron them out before release.
The final talk of the day was given by Seb Lee-Delisle, I’ve seen Seb a few times now from Flash on the Beach and also following DotBrighton when it was streaming and on Vimeo. Seb is a massive figure in the Flash community and caused a little stir when he presented What the Flux at FOTB last year, if you haven’t seen his presentation I suggest you check it out as soon as it becomes available on the FOTB Vimeo page: http://vimeo.com/channels/flashonthebeach. This talk was a follow up to What the Flux, and I think it was clear even from the reaction from everyone in the talk that a lot of community, both Flash and Javascript is / has moved on from the anger we were facing over a year a go. It’s time to embrace new technologies, Flash will become a niche technology, it won’t die and Adobe will continue to evolve the platform as they have done before. Seb also conducted a Family Fortunes style game called Flashy Fortunes at the end, but we wont talk about that lalala…
Overall the day was amazing, I met some new people and got some free gifts. The organisation of the event was top quality and I hope to be able to attend the next event.
Below is a set of links for you to delve in to:
http://www.flashmidlands.com/
James Whittaker – TweetDeck
Mike Jones – Adobe
Niqui Merret – Jade Hopper
Steven Carpenter – Yay! Media
Neil Nand
Seb Lee-Delisle – Plug-in Media