zedia flash blog

I came back this week from FITC Toronto and I can say this; I am tired as hell (well a bit less now since I slept 14 hours last night).

I will start with the bad stuff I have to say and end up with the good stuff. I think I had too big expectation before going to the conference. I thougth I would come back changed, I thougth it would revolutionalize the way I program. Well it did that a bit but on a much smaller scale. I keep myself pretty informed about what is going on in the Flash community so the conference might have more effects on someone who doesn’t. Also I think I did wrong choices in the presentations I went to see at first so I’ll share guide lines when doing such choices.

First since the presentations are only one hour, don’t go see something on a topic you already know about. They are going to introduce it so you will loose half of the presentation on something you already know. Choose something you are completely unaware of over something you already know. Second designer are way better speakers than programmers; keep that in mind.

The good stuff: FITC is a very well organized conference, everything is on time, good speakers and great parties. Here is a list of things I want to check further:

• Haxe programming language
• AS3C
• Hydra
• Saffron

The new stuff: A lot of presenter worked at Adobe so we got sneak peek of new features that will be present in the next version of Flash. First the way you do timeline animations will be changed a lot. The interface to modify tweens will look a lot like the interface in After Effects. You will be able to assigned a different easing function to different properties being modified in one tween. Bones for animation will also be available(you must already know this). Since the last update, the flash player uses multicores to render a frame. You won’t have the possibility to do threads or parralele programming in the next versionof flash, but you will be able to send computations to Hydra(pixel shader language) which will be run on either multicores or GPU. I also caught I glimpse that maybe we will get the profiler in the FLash IDE also. I really hope the last one will come true.

Well that is it, I really hope I will get to go back there next year.

I am very excited about this because this will be the first time I will be participating in such an event. In a month from now, I will be in a train, destination: FITC Toronto. As I said I have never been in a conference of this size and I look forward to it. I have also never been in Toronto even if it is somewhat close from Montreal. Here is how I will be spending my time there:

Saturday April 19

• Papervision3D workshop

Sunday April 20

•  Rich Media for Rebels
• Challenging Imagination
•  ActionScript 4?? or Flash’s Turn at Turn-based Games
• The Circle

Monday April 21

•  The Pixel Whisperer
•  Project Management from the Developers Perspective
•  AIR Conditioning
• Building AIR Applications with Adobe Flash CS3 Professional
• How Buck Goes About MakingCommercials and Stuff or GMUNKICKDOWN 08

Tuesday April 22

• Flash Now and in the Future
• What Clients Won’t Buy or Aspects of Practical Pornography
• How to Create Ads That Will Actually Run (I wish I could go My Favorite Things by Grant Skinner)
• Flash 2D & 3D Effects
• Fairground-Art

I have to go to all ad related presentations because that was kinda my selling point for me to get my company to send me there, so I might have to miss the presentation by Grant Skinner, but if that’s the only price I have to pay to get there, I’ll pay it with a smile on my face. Can’t wait to be there.

I didn’t write a lot these past weeks because first it’s the holidays and second because I worked pretty late on making the Twist Image holiday eCard. Basically, it’s a collection of videos that have marked the year 2007 submitted by friends of the Twist Image president Mitch Joel. I had the chance to watch these videos a lot of time and I can say they are all pretty good.

What is nice with this microsite is that I used a lot of new technologies. First and foremost it’s done using flash 9 and ActionScript 3. I also used SWFObject 2.0 and SWFAddress 2.0. You can see the deep linking in action when you go to a URL like this: http://www.twistimage.com/share2007/#/Seth-Godin/.By using SWFAddress it also enabled the use of Google Analytic. Finally I also used Tweener. I wanted to use TweenLite for my preloader but I fad a problem with it and the answer came when the site was already launched. For the snow I used the code from Galaxy Goo.

All in all this was a pretty good project, I wish I would have had more time to perfect it, like making rollover for the scrollbar and adding some sound effects but this was not a client project so it didn’t have priority in the company. Well now I am back working in ActionScript 2 and I can’t wait to get another AS3 project.

I have been thinking lately about what impacts will Silverlight have on me as a Flash Programmer. I came to the conclusion that it wasn’t really threatening. It could have been threatening in the sense that it could have made Flash obsolete and make me loose future jobs at the same time. But the thing is, Flash is such a good technology, it’s been around for a long time, the community supporting it is amazing and Adobe has big plan for it, Silverlight would have to be packed with a lot of feature in order to shake Flash’s position in the market. I don’t think it has just that.

It’s true that videos in Silverlight look good, but now with the moviestar release of the Flash Player, I don’t think one is better than the other on that characteristic. It’s nice for programmers who know .net, they can just jump right in and start programming Silverlight applications (maybe with a small learning curve). Good for them, .net programmers are already in demand, now they are going to be even more in demand, their salary is going to increase, so does the cost of building a Silverlight application.

One of the thing that Flash as always suffered was the penetration rate of the Flash Player, as a proof, website using flash 9 are now starting to emerge even if its been more than 6 month since it’s been release. Silverlight will suffer even more as people are not willing to download anything anymore. Flash as the chance to be adopted by huge website like Youtube and Facebook and has been around for way longer, people trust the Flash brand.

A big advantage Flash has over Silverlight is all the documentation lying around the web. If you want to know how to do something in Flash, just Google it, it’s that easy. Also open source projects like papervision3d and Tweener are just amazing.

For all these reasons, I don’t think Flash programmers have to be afraid for their jobs because of Silverlight and that for at least five years. I actually think Silverlight is a good thing; a little competition never hurt anyone, Adobe will have to keep improving Flash which is very good for us.

I’ve been thinking about this post for a long time now. The thing is, when I write my name (Dominic Gelineau) in Google, it doesn’t return zedia.net since I have started this blog. This is problematic in the sense that it would be good for my career that when people or future employer search my name in Google they find this blog. In not looking for a job right now, but I think that this blog is a very positive thing in proving my knowledge of ActionScript 3. So here it is, Dominic Gelineau is zedia.net.

I thought I could also talk a bit about my professional background and my education. Well first of all I am French Canadian and I think Montreal is one of the best city in the world to live in. I’ve traveled a bit in my life and I’ve never really found another city I’d be comfortable to live in maybe except Amsterdam.

I have to bachelor’s degrees; one in Computer Sciences that I finished at McGill in 2003 and one in Communication that I finished at UQAM in 2006. I am pretty happy with the mix of these two domains. I think Flash and Internet are really the just middle.

I have worked for one year for Blue Communications, a small web agency, where I was a web programmer. That’s where I really started doing Flash. Now I work at TwistImage where I do ActionScript programming 100% of the time and it’s really great.

When you write Dominic Gelineau there is actually one result that is related to me It is this a paper about simulated decorative mosaics. Well now that this post is out there I hope that zedia.net will show up as a result for Dominic Gelineau.

zedia.net used to be the website for a company I had with two friends. We did good for a while made some websites, learned the ropes, made some money but when we finished school, we all went our way. Still it took us so much time to find a name that we all liked for the company and the web address that I didn’t want to just throw it away. So I’m going to use it for my blog. I didn’t think I would ever make a blog, but recently I have been looking around for questions about Adobe Flash and I have had a hard time finding the answer I wanted. So mostly this blog will be about my research in the ActionScript domain and mostly everything I find interesting.

For now I will use the wordPress platform to blog until I find something better. for now it serves all my needs. Also several changes will appear on the page as I tweak the interface. I don’t know how often I will update this blog, but I guess we will see…