The first day of the Flashforum Conference (FFK08) started with a keynote of Adobe platform evangelist Serge Jespers. The keynote mainly focused on Adobes new technical innovations, above all the current development of Flash Player 10 already available as beta version. The probably most significant element out of it is the new programming language Pixel Bender used to define visual filters for images and videos.
Another important part in the keynote was Adobe’s recently started Open Screen Project. The project intends to create a consistent runtime environment for all types of media be it online, offline or even mobile. The two platforms Flash and AIR form the foundation to put this into practice. But the implementation for mobile devices is still a moot question. The currently used Flash Player Lite is obviously not sufficient enough. More likely is therefore a mobile version of the AIR platform.
Furthermore the keynote gave an outlook on Adobe’s VoIP project Pacifica, the collaborative web service CoCoMo and the upcoming new Flash Version CS4, which contains several improvements. One is the tighter coupling of symbols and the timeline which shall enhance the creation of animations and their reusability. The introduction of the in 3D tools already well known “Bone Structures” is heading in the same direction. Shortly mentioned was also a new motion editor to easily edit animations. Another nice feature are the new 3D effects. They can be applied for all symbols and open up manifold scopes for design.
The keynote kicked off a long conference day with numerous presentations, of whom I visited the ones listed below:
- H.264 – der neue Videocodec in Flash (Florian Plag)
- Maximale Performance mit Flash Lite (Thomas Wagner)
- Pure Coding Comfort mit Eclipse FDT 3.0 (Malte Beyer)
- Aufbruch in neue interaktive Welten (Jens Franke)
- Evolve Flash Audio – Adobe, Wake up! (André Michelle)
- The Rest of the Iceberg (Hoss Gifford)
