All of this feed my reflexions, I mean I have tried a lot of technologies (all things in perspective, I am still at the start of my career, so I humbly say so). I have tried Java, PHP, MySQL, C, Flash, ActionScript 2 and 3, HTML/JavaScript/Css, Ajax, Asp, C#, Python. And you know what? There is nothing I like better than doing ActionScript 3. I mean the tools help a lot; FDT (yes I said it, I now like FDT) or FlashDevelop for code and Flash CS5 for visual assets. I like the workflow, I like making PSDs alive, I really like using TweenLite to make stuff move, I like figuring out how to build my applications so that they minimize load time and CPU usage (I also like maximizing CPU but don’t tell HTML5 fanatics, they know jack shit about pushing limits, yet, but they will know what I mean when they taste it, which will happen for sure). All of that I can’t get from any other technology to the extent that Flash does it right now.

It’s been 2 months that I am at B-Reel right now. I really love it, but the project that I am doing right now mostly doesn’t involve Flash ( I managed to stick a bit of Robotlegs in there) and is mainly Javascript/Html/Css. I really look forward to doing a Flash project. I really don’t want to do html ever again. I don’t have fun doing it (well I am just speaking about the technology, the project itself is amazing). Also, I feel the world of Flash is so deep and there is so much you can do to get better that if you learn all of the other technologies you can never get truly as good on the Flash Platform as one could be. For all of these reasons, that is why I am Flash Developer, that is my title and I am not ashamed or feel diminished by it. It really defines me.

With that being said, it gives me security. I think I am not alone in this situation. I think Flash gives a mean to express themselves to a lot of people and because of that, you can be sure that these people will produce tons of cool shit with it. And other people will want to see that cool shit. That gives a reason for Flash to be. Someday there will be Flash on the iOs. You can be sure of that (I mean Steve Jobs has an expiration date, right?)

Flash and the City

What I think they can improve on next year is the venue; the 3 legged dog was too small to hold this kind of event. I would suggest changing for a new place. What I really liked: that the speakers where different from the speakers on the other conferences roasters (seems like it’s all the same people speaking from conferences to conferences) so I got to see people I had not seen yet.

The realisation

I consider myself a developer and FATC was really more aimed towards developers, so I should have been very happy there. The thing is, I wasn’t; it didn’t have the same impact as FITC did on me, which is weird. I don’t know, maybe it is because I follow a lot what is happening in the Flash community and I am well informed on the new possibilities the platform has technically. Because of that, the presentations didn’t marvel me as much as a creative presentations where everything is mostly new. Maybe I am not so much a developer after all.

Best of show

Anyway there was still some presentations that I found really amazing. The best one that I saw really was Gaia Flash Framework by Jesse Warden. He spoke about using Gaia and Robotlegs together. I mostly knew what he was speaking about but it still was awesome. I wish I could see it again in slow motion because there are so many words that come out of Jesse’s mouth. What is the major point of interest is Jesse’s views on the industry and the way he express them. If you get the chance to see him speak don’t miss it. Well, he started doing some video capsules, so you should go watch those. I used to make the new guys watch them when they had nothing to do (when is the next one coming out Mr Warden? I want more!). Aside from this Jesse, it was also good to see that Jesse Freeman is a very well spoken, nice , intelligent and professional dude. It clashes from his Twitter personality where all he does is wine about Adobe (well he seems to like Adobe now that he is working with Flash on Android). I really enjoy his articles on InsideRIA but sometimes I want to unfollow him on Twitter because all his bitchin is impacting on my moral. It was nice to see him in person, it gives me a new (good) perspective on the guy. Also another interesting thing I learned was that searching for Flash Bum (Jesse’s username on Twitter is theflashbum) on Google images yields unexpected results.

All in all it was a great week-end, I wish good luck to the Flash and the City team for next year.

Flash In The Can

Storytelling and the attention to details

One thing that stood out was the importance of storytelling. From North Kingdom putting stories even in their preloaders to Alex McDowell that writes an entire biography for a house in Fight Club, storytelling should be at the hearth of everything we do. Which bring me to the other point: attention to details. No elements in a production should be there for nothing, everything should have a purpose, a story. At no point in a project should you start rounding corners, if you do, it will show up in the finished product. It is hard when you are working on it, but you should keep this in mind, stay focused.

Making your tools

There was supposed to be a presentation by the president of firstborn Dan LaCivita, but unfortunately he couldn’t make it to the conference. So instead we got Mathieu Badimon (creator of FIVe3D) and Eric Decker showing how, when they encountered repetitive tasks in projects, they would build tools to help them. That advantages for doing this are pretty obvious; if the client wants to change something, you just make the change in the tool and reexport the data, plus you learn a ton while building the tool. These tools ranged from handwriting animation font creators to character path tools. Those tools where amazing and we saw that they reused some parts from tool to tool (like path drawing). This was a common thing through out the conference. People were making tools that would export them usable assets for the Flash projects. So I thought this isn’t a bad idea, the next time I encounter a problem that has repetitive task to it, instead of solving it by brute force, I am going to build a tool for it.

Best of show

I couldn’t do a recap without speaking about the best presentations I have seen. Jason Theodor and is talk about Creativity and Chaos was really inspiring and was the best I have seen this year. He generously gives his slides on slideshare, so I suggest you see them, it won’t be as good as seeing him talk but it is still pretty good. Jared Ficklin also gave a great presentation; he is a great entertainer and his curiosity is contagious. Finally I really enjoyed the Brendan Dawes’ talk about the grammar of interaction design.

A little extra

Last year I stopped by the booth of the creative group and took a leaflet to be well surprised by the quality of it. The best part of it was that it was a salary guide and it covered most of the employes of a digital agency. So this year, I went to the booth wanting my updated salary guide for 2010 and it took the form of a calendar. While browsing through it, I saw that they went a step further this year by making an online tool (click salary calculator on the right) where you can enter your fonction and where you live and it will give you a salary range. I think this is pretty awesome and very useful. I just moved to New York from Montreal and had no idea a all what salary  I should ask; I would have killed to have this tool like at that moment. So now you know, go check if you are paid enough.

It was the third year that I went to that conference and as the last years I came back from it fully motivated and with plenty of new ideas for blog post. Stay tuned for more

Anyway like I did for the last two years I am going to write down what I wanna go see:

Sunday April 25

• Set your Code on Fire
• The Importance of Whiskey While Working (and other work flow tips, too!)
• From Solo to CEO – Managing Growth – Panel
• Adobe Keynote
• North Kingdom: An Inside View (saw that one already)

Monday April 26

• Analog Designer in a Digital World
• Creativity and Chaos
• UnitZeroOne: Skunkworks (here I am divided but Ralph is so good)
• Whats New with Flash Professional
• Terraforming Narrative
• The Grammar of Interaction Design

Tuesday April 27

• Flex Data Binding Pitfalls 10 Common Misuse Mistakes ( I wanna see Elad Elrom)
• The Cool Shit Hour
• Quick as a Flash ( Grant Skinner FTW)
• Sixteen Colours ( I wanna see Peter speak too)
• Eyes Can Hear, 5 ways (missed his session last year)
• It Has To Be This

Well, I’m not saying I’ll stick to this, but this is what I’ll consider when I look again.

Where I am going

Well I found a job as Senior Flash Developer at B-Reel in New York. I have never been to New York so it’s a pretty big change for me. B-Reel as always been in my top choices for a workplace so this is like a dream come true. I will be starting in a week or so and I am pretty excited about can’t wait to be in New York, can’t wait to start working.

So to finish I leave you this Jay-Z video, I could have put Empire State of Mind but I felt On to the next one to be more appropriate.

Go see my new portfolio here : http://www.zedia.net/portfolio2010/

Now I am not a designer, so I did my best in that domain and I think I managed pretty well but you know, a designer would still have done better. There are still some tweaks I want to do: add sounds, individual urls for projects, analytics, loading indicators, add dates to projects, etc. I will continue to work on it but I thought it was good enough to show.

I built it using FlashDevelop and compiled using the Flex compiler version 4. I used Flash to make the visuals and exported those as swc to import them in my ActionScript project. I used PureMVC as my framework.

Since this is my project I can do what I always wanted to do and share the sources for it. I tried to comment it a bit and I am not saying that this is how one should code, but I have found that you can learn a great deal by looking at someone else’s code. That is what I am offering to you. You can reuse my code for whatever you want I don’t care, just don’t reuse my logo.

Here are the files:

Portfolio.rar

It took so much time for a library of analytics to be made for Flash, I thought there might be a chance that nobody did anything like this for mobiles. So we got all excited (like so many other time), we started thinking how we would build this. But today I searched on the web and found Flurry a company that has an analytics division that does exactly this. Well not exactly how I would do it but about 85% the same. So my bubbles is a bit busted.

Flurry does it mostly right but their interface is a bit complicated and they didn’t make their analytics that specific to mobiles. There are plenty of concepts that exist in the mobile world that are new: what people do in their first and last run of the application, the number of tap (click with fingers) by session, the accelerometer, etc. And they don’t track that, yet. Also they provide an  API for events, but not for navigation (pageViews in the GA world). I think navigation still has an important role in the analytics of an application than in the analytics of a website. You want to know what the users did in a certain section of your app (how many taps in the help section for example).

So all of that could be implemented and would give a better service than what Flurry is offering. The problem is that their platform is already built and even if there is not much competition (they seem to be the only ones doing this), it would still be hard to beat their momentum.

So what do you think? Should I invest time in this project knowing these risks, or should I let this go and wait for another idea?

If Flash was to go away tomorrow, I’d find myself without a job. Well, I’d need time to learn another language and then I’d find another job but it wouldn’t be the same thing. I am really glad I found Flash and ActionScript 3. This is what I want to do for at least the next 5-10 years. What I like about it is that it speaks to both my programmer and creative side. It is also fast-paced; in the web agency world, you move from projects to projects really fast and you have to keep up with technology at the same time. It might seems weird but I really like that; no time to get bored. If it wasn’t for Flash, I don’t think think I would love my job as much as I do.

After the iPad announcement I found myself a bit confused and stressed about my future. The future of Flash seemed uncertain so my future seemed uncertain to. Not uncertain because of the evolution of technology (like HTML5) but because a company decided what the outcome should be. If all Apple products stop supporting Flash, this is not good news to me. What possibilities I had would lessen. Some would say that I shouldn’t tie myself to a technology, I know, and if I have too I will learn something knew, but as I said before I really like Flash. That made me think that it’s not only companies that can choose who gets to live or to fade (technology wise). Us, as developers, can put our weight in the balance too. As long as there will be people producing get content for the Flash platform, it will continue to thrive. If I like Flash that much, I must not be alone and from reading all those article that take Flash’s defense, I think I am right. So I feel more at ease now. The future is still uncertain but certainly less gloomy.

One last thing about the iPad. Zeldman in his post states that the computer of tomorrow is a computer that is dead simple but that in return doesn’t give all powers over it for the sake of usability, like the iPhone and the iPad do. I think that a portion of the population in fact wants that. Right now this portion might be big, but I think it will shrink because it doesn’t consider that the children that are raised right now have never seen the time when there was no computers. These will be way more computer literate than my parents lets say. For that I think a device like the iPad is closer to a toy than to a tool. If it wanted to dominate the netbook market, than it will fail. We don’t really know what is the role the netbook is going to take, but by making one that is limited in its usage, you also reduce your chance of getting it right.

Well that’s all I had to say.

In numbers, I got to write 62 posts ( a bit less than once a week) and got 478 comments since September 2008. As for traffic, I am now getting 25 000 visitors a month, this is 10k less than the goal I set myself a year ago, but I don’t think it is so bad; my traffic is still growing steadily month after month. I did not write another article for InsideRIA like I wanted to, but I wrote 2  that got printed in FFDMag ( one of those I intended for InsideRIA but someone wrote on Google Analytics for Flash before me). What I am really proud of is that I got to give 2 presentations; one online and one in person at the Montreal Flash User Group. This is something I want to do more in 2010, 3 or 4 speaking engagements would be really nice. I already got an article nearly done so if I could get 1 or 2 more I would be happy. Lastly, I my traffic could increase to 35k visitors a month I think that would be enough for me. While we are at this, if I could be part of writing a book on ActionScript, that would just be the craziest.

Anyway, what I wish for the coming year is that I keep doing what I am doing. If I keep up the good work, good things will come my way, as simple as that, it worked fine in the past and I am pretty sure it will stay that way, naïvely.  Blogging is all about keeping doing it.

May 2010 be as good for all of us as 2009  was good for me. Happy new year!