Rants and Ramblings: random commentary about culture, media, politics, technology and whatnot.

ff05: day two

Day two of the Flash Forward conference in New York.

The first session of the morning was the Macromedia keynote, which featured a stunning demo of the new Flash 8 Player and authoring environment. Lots of cool video and image effects coming in the new version. None of the news seemed particularly “new” — my coworkers described a similar presentation at the San Francisco Flash Forward convention in March. Still, it was exciting to actually see the demo in person.

Other interesting stuff covered in the keynote:

• “Open source” Flash: Sharing your Flash source code for others to learn from / experiment with.
• A cursory look at AJAX and Flash. (There’s a session tomorrow that will cover this topic in greater detail.)
• A sweet Flash-based online banking interface that Macromedia is working on for an unnamed major bank.
• A demo of the still-in-beta podcasting site Odeo, where people can browse existing podcasts and record their own.

I’ve just finished the session “Effective Flash Navigation.” Presenter Guy Watson offered some commonsense rules for designing a site navigation — rules applicable to probably any Web site, but which Flash designers in particular tend to be especially guilty of breaking — then did some live user testing with audience volunteers of some particularly difficult-to-navigate Flash sites. He ended the presentation with a demo of his solution for getting Flash and the browser “back” button to talk to each other, involving a hidden frame with a SWF file, PHP, and a bit of Flash code to get the hidden SWF and the main SWF to talk to each other. He said he would post the source code to his site later today.

On my schedule for the rest of the day:

• “ActionScript 2: A Visual Introduction for Right-Brainers”
• “Motion, Time + Stories”
• Debating between the Macromedia Town Meeting and “Colors”
• Flash Film Festival