I attended Flash Camp this past weekend at Adobe San Francisco, with three other frogs (Ming-En Cho, Jose Hernando, & Rod Graves). The four of us formed a team and started playing with some of the new features in Flash 10. We had a lot of ideas ranging from 3D visualizations that where dynamically driven by music to interactive sound using your webcam. Finally we settled on the latter as the direction for our hackathon project. Shortly later we were able to rope in an old coleague/friend of mine, Justin Patrin to join our team. Together we built Flash Tones (named by Rod Graves), which ended up winning “Best Audio”.

Flash Tones lets you create ‘music’ by moving around in front of your webcam. Movement on the X axis controls pitch, and the Y axis controls volume. When movement occurs the difference in pixels is calculated, which is used to drive the pitch and volume. The color of those pixels represent the location of the movement along the x axis. The white blurred squares also show the location of the movement by changing their z depth based on how close they are to the center of the movement.

Created by: Greg Arroyo, Ming-En Cho, Jose Hernando, Rod Graves & Justin Patrin.

Source: Flash Tones
Requires Flash Player 10

Justin Patrin was nice enough to clean up the code and create a project on Google Code.  Check it out, play with it, extend it, and share it.

Flashforward was a success. Although it appeared to be about a fourth the size of the 2006 conference in Seattle (my first Flashforward) and condensed into a single track with very very little hands on opportunities to learn any new skills, I still walked away feeling satisfied.

The theme of Flashforward 2008 was Passion, and with that Beau Amber and his team at Metaliq picked out some great speakers to really help drive that home. Of course there were a few speakers I could have done without, but I’d rather call out those who left me with something and inspired me to continue perusing my passions.

As someone who loves the visual arts, and the mix of audio and abstract design through code I was very excited to see Robert Hodgin of Flight404 and Erik Natzke of Natzke Design speak and share their work and experiences. On a similar note, Jared Ficklin of frog design presented his take on sound visualizations along with a few experiments with fire.

At the Adobe Keynote we got a sneak peak into Flash 10. Without getting into details, they have changed up the animation model and have greatly improved the experience and flexibly of tweening. Flash 10 is all about the designers and animators. Although I have pretty much moved to FlexBuilder, leaving Flash behind, I’m pretty excited to play with the new tools coming out.

A few other names I’d like to mention that showed up and kept things interesting are Branden Hall, David Carson, Grant Skinner, Luke Bayes, Michael Kemper, Paul Ortchanian, Scott McCloud, Stacey Mulcahy, and Todd Rosenberg.

Although this year is not quite what I expected, I am glad that I went and am happy to be one of the grand prize raffle winners of tckets to next years Flashforward. : )

Here’s a little bit of what I learned at the 360 Flex conference.

Below are a few applications (Gumbo, Astro, Thermo, Share, Pacifica, and CoCoMo) Adobe is working on that should be available over the next 2 years (hopefully). I added descriptions for each that are a mix of my notes from the conference and info that I found through a quick Google search. Below that are a few more applications (Degrafa , Ribbit , Yahoo Maps AS3, Merapi , and Flex Authority Magazine) that were covered at the conference and are available now or in the very near future.

More will be added once all the presenters have submitted their presentations and a zip file has been made available by the people who run the conference.

Gumbo: Flex 4 (Release 2009)

• Designers in mind
• Accelerated development
• Horizontal Platform Improvements
• MXML-G - XML based graphics
• Mobile Device Support

Astro: Flash Player 10

• Vellum: New AS3 compiler, new text engine
• Hydra & AIF – Custom pixel shader’s for flash - http://drawlogic.com/2007/10/02/flash-10-hydra-and-aif-adobe-image-foundation-and-hardware-rendering/
• 3D Effects API
• Better MXML Compiler Performance
• Vector mono-typed arrays

Thermo - http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

“Thermo” is an upcoming Adobe product that makes it easy for designers to create rich Internet application UIs. Thermo allows designers to build on familiar workflows to visually create working applications that easily flow into production and development.

Features:

• Use drawing tools to create original graphics, wireframe an application design, or manipulate artwork imported from Adobe Creative Suite tools.
• Turn artwork from Adobe Photoshop, Illustrator, or Fireworks directly into functional components that use the original artwork as a “skin”.
• Define and wire up interactive behavior, such as what to do when a user clicks on something, without having to write code.
• Easily design UIs that work with dynamic data, such as a list of contacts or product information, without having access to the actual data source. Design-time sample data can be used as a realistic placeholder when laying out an application, testing interactivity, and choreographing motion.

Applications created in Thermo are Flex applications that can be loaded directly into Flex Builder, providing a great roundtrip workflow for designers collaborating with developers. The designer’s work can be incorporated directly into the production application with no loss of fidelity, and designers can continue to refine the design throughout the iterative development process.

Architecture:

• Built on Eclipse
• Shared code base with Flex 4
• UI built in Flex

Share - http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/share/

Share is a free web-based service that allows you to easily share, publish and organize your documents. With Share you can:

• Send documents without email attachments.
• Access your documents from anywhere.
• View all the documents you have shared or received in one place.
• Post a link to your document on a wiki or blog.
• Embed a Flash® preview of your document on any website.
• Limit access to a document to a list of recipients.

Pacifica

Pacifica is a service that will allow developers to integrate voice, messaging and user presence information into applications built using Flex, AIR or Flash.

CoCoMo

CoCoMo will be the next-generation framework for the Adobe Connect Web conferencing service, which will enable developers to take certain parts of Connect’s functionality and integrate them into other applications. Basically, the company is turning Connect into components for its Flex development environment so developers can build and host collaborative applications on Connect, said Adobe’s Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch.

Degrafa - http://degrafa.com/

Degrafa is a Declarative Graphics Framework that allows you to develop graphics in Flex using MXML rather than Actionscript.

You can find some cool samples at http://samples.degrafa.com/

Ribbit - http://www.ribbit.com/

The Ribbit Developer Platform gives developers the ability to make and receive calls, record, send and receive voice messages, as well as add and organize contacts.

I’ve posted the three sample Ribbit apps on my server. You can take a look at them, but if you would like to actually test them, you will need to come to my desk since they require a user name and password.

• http://dreamlifemedia.com/ribbit/SimpleRibbitMessages.html
• http://dreamlifemedia.com/ribbit/SimpleRibbitPhone.html
• http://dreamlifemedia.com/ribbit/SimpleRibbitShoutwEqualizer.html

Or you can checkout what kind of applications have already been developed at http://developer.ribbit.com/.

Yahoo Maps - http://developer.yahoo.com/flash/maps/

The new Yahoo! Maps API is now entirely built in ActionScript 3.0. The Maps API now gives you an incredibly powerful map engine and the ability to create custom components, overlays and markers while consuming different web services provided by Yahoo!, or your own. The YahooMap component is distributed as a SWC, to get started you need to include it into your build path using Flex Builder.

The Maps API contains a core set of widgets, markers, overlays and web services to enable you to interact with the map in every way.

Merapi - http://adamflater.blogspot.com/2008/02/meet-merapi.html

Merapi is a new project that is a framework for connecting AIR to java at the desktop. It will be built as freeware until the team is happy with the stability. It will then be moved it to Google Code and will become open source. There will be more to come but for now, Merapi will pick up where Artemis left off with the goals of making it easier to implement using the framework, providing a good mechanism of deployment, and solving some security concerns.

Flex Authority - http://www.blogoffusion.com/index.cfm/2008/2/11/flex-authority-is-not-in-the-building

Flex Authority is a new magazine available in June, produced by the same people who did Fusion Authority.