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Flashforward in Austin

This year, the second Flashforward of the year moves from NYC to Austin, Texas and it looks to be great with new speakers and the addition of seminars covering PhotoShop, Illustrator and After Effects.

Starting off the first day is a Keynote by Lynda Weinman. She talked a little bit about the first Flash Forward conference with a video on the Flash 10 year anniversary site. She went to talk about some of the new things at this Flash Forward including Meeting Point, a social networking software with forums and the ability to find like-minded people attending the conference as well as the job fair with many big companies including Yahoo! and Disney. After that was a look at the Flash Forward blog, and if you haven't seen it definately check out the video podcasts from the conference. Finishing up was a look at the schedule of all the amazing speakers this week (many of whom have podcast interviews), it's shame you have to pick and choose which sessions to go to. And finally, Lynda announced a mini Flash Forward conference to be held at MacWorld Jan 9-10th and a new kind of conference called DX3 (Design - Develop - Deploy), which will be a conference focusing on the next generation of interactive development on the web.

Then the workshops started, and the first one I went to was the first part of Head Start: Flex 2 - Introducing Flex 2 by Aral Balkan. He showed off a few apps built in flex including the FC64 emulator, a video mixer and the Home Locator application. Showing the Home Locator app, he talked about how easily Flex works with open API's to build mashups. He went on to talk about what Flex is and how the new Flash Player 9 has a new Advanced Virtual Machine (AVM) for ActionScript 3, but still has full support for older versions of ActionScript because the original AVM is still included in the player. He also mentioned some free alternatives to server side services inclusing openAMF, AMFPHP and Red5. Going back to Flex, Aral talked about how styling Flex components is very simple and showed an app built in Flex that shows different stylings. He finished up the first session by showing the inner workings of Flex, how to setup your own keyboard shortcuts (because to test a Flex app is an odd shortcut) and built a "Hello World" example from scratch.

The day finished up when back at the final session on Flex and Aral did some very cool examples of Flex absorbing RSS feeds and webservices from flickr and then took a few questions from the audience.