Eclectic Brain Salad

This conference had been a long time coming, and I was sure looking forward to it, so I'm glad it didn't disappoint! It was great to see some old friends again; the Phlash5 band performance rocked, and I used the conference to do some valuable research into how Flash folk choose browsers. It's a pity I always have to get up so early for these things - I can't survive on 4 hours sleep a night like I used to!

Sunday

I arrived at LAX at about 2.30, and got to the hotel at 3.30 - upon arriving I was immediately greeted by Shawn, the main organizer of FiTC, and the rest of the FiTC crew, including Dave, Erin and Naomi. It was nice to see them all.

I then caught up with my Phlash5 band mates - Aral, John, Chris, Craig, Sam, Jared and Seb. We rehearsed for about 4 hours on the Sunday night, and got all our material sorted for the next day! I also caught up with Lena, R, and some poker dudes! Oh, and a few light ales were drunk.

I dread to think what time I got to bed.

Monday

Ouch.

Chris Charlton and Omar Gonzales - Motion XML

It was great to see Chris and Omar present. Motion XML is a new feature of Flash CS3, which allows you to output tweened animations as classes and XML files. You can then modify the XML to do all sorts of cool things. Check out motionxml.com for more on this subject.

Craig Swann: Perceptive Interactions and Alternative Interfaces

Craig's talk was all about ideas, imagination, creativity etc, more so than it was about Flash. It was cool to get an insight into how his mind works.

He talked about how you should love your work and do stuff that makes you happy, then looked at using APIs, and how he got sick of hearing it because it was just reusing someone else's ideas, but once he added an H (HAPI), it made much more sense to him.

Listen.Watch.Touch.Sense - computers can do all of these, and this is important to remember when designing interactive applications.

For example, Microphone capabilities allow Flash to react to sounds - he showed a cool voice graph readout application and an audio kaleidoscope.

Listen and watch - his video canvas was amazing - it projects images on to the screen from the camera when he raises his voice above a certain volume. He showed many more amazing examples - his visual memory stuff was cool too. I need to show this stuff to my son!

He was also showing how he could use his camera motion capturing system to pick up gestures and do actions on screen like flip through a navigation system - gesture-based interfaces.

Next up was an onscreen piano that you manipulate using movements, then a way to remix music tracks by moving blocks closer to and further away from a target in the centre of the screen. Last up was some colour recognition interfaces - you can perform different tasks depending on what colour the computer sees. An example use is in museums - you could give the attendees different coloured badges depending on what language they need information presented to them in. Craig kept suggesting real world uses for his interfaces because it is potentially easy to just write them off as useless toys, but they are far from that. Awesome, inspirational stuff. See the Crash!Media site for more cool stuff.

Lunch was good

I had a burger with Lena, John, and another cool guy called John. It was fun!

John Grden - Papervision3D CS3 Component

John presented their totally awesome new P3D component for Flash CS3, which allows you to build up and manipulate P3D content using the Flash IDE, so it is more usable by designers. John rocks! Check out the component here.

Evening: The night of the gig!

There was a lot of anticipation surrounding our band's performance, so fortunately it went well, despite our lack of practice opportunities. The venue was great - BB King's in Universal City - and it had a nice big stage and a great sound engineer. Craig's visualization stuff was killer, and the crowd loved it! The only bad thing for me was being so tired that I almost fell asleep towards the end of the last song. I went straight back to the hotel ASAP afterwards, and fell asleep.

Tuesday

Tuesday was entertaining because there were so few people around in the morning - the last couple of days partying had obviously taken their toll on the FiTC attendees!

Seb Lee-Delisle - Kaboom! Flash Pyrotechnics

This was a very cool talk - Seb has a great talent of turning fairly simple reusable code into really cool effects (see here to download the examples from this talk.) The camera object effect was great - showing himself being shot by his Macbook pro camera, and all the white on the page lighting up with his particle effects. He also showed a load of explosion effects, which were very nice.

Myself, Aral Balkan, Seb Lee-Delisle, Craig Swann, Jared Sims, Chris Allen and Sam Agesilas - WTF is Phlash 5?

Our talk went pretty well, considering how little we had prepared for it (the whole point was the music, and we had done that the night before!) We sat down and talked the audience about:

• How we formed the band: We started talking about doing a band over the Web using Red5 to stream it all and practice together in real time, but we eventually worked out that this would be too time consuming to build, and virtually impossible even using the UDP protocol (thanks for pointing out our futility Seb ;-)
  
• What our musical influences are: Very diverse, which is why our music sounds like some kind of bizarre jazz-rock hybrid
  
• The whole fun of it: It is really cool doing a band despite all the obvious barriers we have, such as time and geography
  
• How we wrote songs: We used e-mail and then a Wiki and CVS to share ideas, lyrics and MP3s, and kept putting the MP3s through Garageband to build up layers on tracks, ie adding vocal lines etc
  
• The Flash side of things - Craig went through how his amazing Midi synth guitar + Camera contraption worked, and how he took the video into Flash using the Camera object and then messed with it using all kinds of filters and animation effects
  
• How it became called Phlash5 - we chose the name just to make fun of how over-protective Adobe is about the Flash name ;-)
  

It was a shame that John Grden couldn't have been here for the talk, but he had to catch a flight back home at about 8am.

R Blank - Making money: Pricing and Contracts

R is a good presenter, and his message was very clear - how to get contracts, and negotiate them sensibly etc.

To start with he gave great advice on not charging too much, but making sure you charge what you are worth. He gave some figures on average hourly rates. You can increase your hourly rate by increasing your skillset, but also choosing a focus - become known for something, and people will remember you and recommend you for jobs. Grow a portfolio. Get some exposure through user group meetings, Adobe forums, winning programming or design competitions, writing articles and books. Act professionally - use proper English in all forms of communication, only have a one-page resume, with obvious contact info and portfolio link. Use consistent formatting and tenses. Spell check, and distribute it in PDF, not Word! It's uneditable, not prone to viruses, and there are no worries about your fonts not being available on the recipient's machine.

Hint - write specific resumes for specific jobs.

Next part - bidding (Excel rocks - spreadsheets - use spreadsheets.) Hourly rates and fixed rates. Hourly rate is less risky, as you can leave at any time, and don't have to plan your time as carefully. Fixed fee is a lot more risk, but you get a lot more discretion in what work you choose, more variety, room for growth, and when done right it leads to a lot more money and career development. You need to guess how long the work will take - break it down as granular as possible.

Know your BATNA - best alternative to a negotiated agreement.

Contracts are powerful, and quite easy with a bit of experience. They are very powerful tools for shaping your client relationship. You just need to be very specific, and very comprehensive. Leave no loose ends. It is a set of legally enforceable promises, and it gives you a license to sue. You need to include good dispute resolution.

Non-compete clauses aren't legally enforceable in California - this is interesting, as I didn't realise this at all. It makes me think of all the publishing companies I have worked for, and the non-competes in their contracts ;-)

Does the contract exist? An offer and positive response is needed for the contract to officially exist...(at this point my laptop ran out of power, but you can lear more about his course at the Rich Media Institute site.)

The last evening

The last evening of my stay in LA was nothing short of awesome, although it was a shame to miss the last party of the event! After saying my goodbyes, I went to meet up with my old friend Morgan from university days, and we went out to a really cool vegan café/bar, hung out with a load of awesome cycle punks and drank a pint of every beer they had on tap - a dangerous thing to do, but a testament to rock and roll and the great micro breweries of America. I have slight gaps in my recollection of the evening, and then woke up the next day on a couch in a bicycle repair shop! At least my plane home wasn't till the afternoon of the next day, and I still managed to find time to sit down, edit about 5 articles, and wade through some e-mail.

I'd like to say thanks to Shawn, Naomi, Dave, Erin, and the rest of the FiTC crowd for another awesome conference, and all my friends in the Flash community for all the great conversation.