The homepage of Carlos Ulloa has the coolest banner of any page on the web. And it should because he is the father of Papervision3D. Or so he was introduced by John Grden at MAX07.

You should take his site for a spin. Literally.  Note: if you get lost you can click on the banner again to reset.

MAX was awesome. I got to join Kieth Peters and John Grden for lunch which was a real treat for me. I’m a big fan of Kieth and his Bit-101.com site. Then there are his books Making Things Move ( AS2 version / AS3 version ) that are incredible. If you’re a designer just wading into Actionscript then I highly recommend them as a starting place.

After Grant Skinner’s session I walked with him across the convention hall the next session and had a nice discussion along the way. I had to miss most of a session that I wanted to attend but it was worth it.

All of the sessions were recorded and it has been said that they will all be available as a channel on the Adobe Media Player. We just have to wait for a little while.

My favorite session was the Flash Player Internals with Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason. They did a great tag-team job of presenting. Getting a tour under the hood of the Flash player by the guys who work on it everyday was awesome.

A few notes from Flash Player Internals

• Astro may add fading and masking of device fonts without the cashAsBitmap hack.
• Astro may add chaining to embedded fonts.
• Avoid the scope chain to get the best performance out of your code. If you’re not really sure about the scope chain then read this article.
• Suppose you are creating a game or something that is extremely code intensive. If you would like to gauge the performance of each client machine and then tune your code appropriately then apply a blur filter to a video and render that to a Bitmap. Then see what sort of performance that client is getting. You could do something like that during the preload so that when the main code begins to run you can tune the code to run smoothly on that machine. Kind of a slow, medium, fast toggle for your code.
• A question was asked, “Have you written any code to explore giving authors access to multi threading?” The answer was, “No Comment” with a grin. Can you say Flash player 11 feature? :-)

A few notes from AS3 best practises:

• If it’s a constant then make it of type const.
• If you need to iterate over an ArrayCollection then use a for-each loop. It’s faster.
• Use weak reference listeners unless you’re doing something like loading content or creating a timer.
• If you remove a loaded image from the display list then UNLOAD it.
• null out references to get them garbage collected.

The Lego Vagina Award

Scott Petersen’s C/C++ interpreter for Actionscript wins this award hands down. When he showed Quake 2 running in Actionscript my friends just about fell out of their seats.

If there were such a thing as a lego booby award - second place to the lego Vagina - then it would go to Shai Avidan on “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing”. That shit was amazing.

Random Links

Hydra:

• Download the toolkit on Adobe Labs
• Kaourantin has a nice technical overview

Videos

• Peter Elst has a nice video overview of the sneaks session broken up by nicely so that you can watch just the sneaks your interested in. I’m sitting just to the left of Peter so when he pans to the left screen you can see my head in the way. Sorry. That’s also me adding narration, such as “You’ve got to be frakking kidding me” during Scott Petersen’s presentation about the C/C++ interpreter.
• Lee Brimelow has a nice interview with Justin Everett-Church about the Flash player 10

Peter deHaan has the play-by-play of MAX.

• Blogging from Adobe MAX 2007 - North America
• Adobe MAX 2007 Keynote (Day 2 Edition)
• Rough notes from the Adobe MAX 2007 North America Sneak Peeks

Geeks of the world unite

Doug McCune has a great shot of geeks in 3D glasses

Movement has meaning

I can’t remember where that quote came from. It just ended up in my notepad but it really strikes a chord. For years Flash has been dissed for people using it to create sites with poor usability. But Flash is only a tool and it took some time for the community to really learn how to take advantage of the capabilities to create more usable sites than can be created from a more static approach.

With the upgrades to text rendering and 3D coming in Flash player 10 there is really no limit to the sort of interface that we can create in Flash. The limit is now our imagination. Not the tool.

ColdFusion speakers rock

I attended two sessions about ColdFusion: Mike Nimer’s and Simeon Bateman’s. Both are just amazing presenters. I think it the secret is in the code. There must be some undocumented CFperfectPresentation tag that they know about.

There are a slue of reasons to attend a conference like MAX.

• It’s geek fun to the Nth degree ( I was going to say, “to the max”, but no.)
• You can learn a great deal about your field
• You get a good cross pollination of ideas. Designers hanging out with developers and visa-versa.

But I find the best reason to attend conferences is the connections that are formed. Here’s an example.

On Tuesday at MAX I ran into a friend of mine, Chris Hughes, that I originally met at the 360Flex conference in San Jose. I didn’t know that Chris was going to be there or I would have made a point to hook up with him earlier.

While we were catching up he mentioned that he would like to be involved in getting a volunteer group together in the Los Angeles area to do some coding for one of the local charities.

I told him that a group at the 360Flex event in Seattle had done something like that and he should look them up.

Ali Daniali is the Flex Users Group leader here in Seattle. He and I have meet only a few times locally and planned on meeting up at MAX. We were both distracted during the conference and never called the other to set up a time/place to meet.

On the final day of the conference we bumped into each other in the sponsors room. He was on his way to get some presents for his kids and didn’t have much time to hang out. So we planned on getting together later in Seattle.

As he was leaving I remembered what Chris had told me about doing some charity work. I ran after Ali and brought him over to meet Chris. The two talked for 5-10 minutes and then Ali took off.

Chris told me that they were going to talk more later but essentially Ali was going to help him set up a charity code jam at a conference in Los Angeles next summer. Just as Ali had done at 360Flex in Seattle.

The timing was near perfect because they were in the room together at the same time. I introduced them and as a result they will work together to help feed the needy in the Los Angeles area.

You never know who you’ll meet and what will become of it. A chance conversation in the hallway could lead to a startup being born, or charity work, whatever.

I made some predictions about what Adobe would be announcing at MAX about two weeks ago. I’m both happy and sad. On the one hand I only missed on one prediction. Unfortunately the one prediction I missed is the one I wanted the most: client side encoding options for video within an AIR app.

Adobe Office [ hit ]
Adobe has the first, and most important leg, of the office suite with Buzzword. Now the guys have to get busy with getting Buzzword out of beta and get to work on a spreadsheet.

Beyond that they only need to either purchase SlideRocket or build they own presentation app.

VoIP on AIR/Flash [ hit ]
No idea how this is actually going to be implemented but it’s going to be there for us developers to play with. Adobe did say that they have no intention of becoming a service provider. They only want to give us the tools to create the services ourselves.

Public access to transcoding video into FLV and possibly other formats. [ miss ]
For now it’s a no go but I talked to a lot of the Adobe staff about this and got a lot of, “it will be there soon” sort of responses. Perhaps it will be an intermediate upgrade to AIR after 1.0 comes out.

AIR2AIR [ hit ]
Going into MAX I had no idea what P2P capabilities inside of AIR or the Flash player would be like. And after MAX I still have no idea. But they did put it up on a slide for us to see at the Keynote. So they are doing something with this.

Authoring Flash 3D [ hit ]
I wonder if this is the most requested feature ever for Flash? Well, at least we don’t have to ask anymore. I can’t wait to give it a whirl.

I talked to some of the Adobe Flash engineers about Flash3D and Papervision3D and they said that this isn’t a competing approach. In fact they engineers are helping the Papervision3D effort to smooth out some of the issues and make it as good as it can be. These guys are awesome.

Always on Hardware Acceleration [ hit ]
Adobe was a little vague on this subject although it was hinted at. My feeling is that there will be hardware acceleration for the Flash player beyond just the fullscreen video that we already know about. But the engineers are still working on it so it’s not known what we’ll get.

Text going the other way [ hit ]
This one I already knew about going into MAX. It was announced it at 360Flex in Seattle back in August.

Next year MAX is going to be in San Fransisco. They are going to want to make some whopper announcements. I’m going to have fun guessing at what those might be. My long range radar says that it will revolve around partnerships and services. Maybe some Google/Adobe action? A full office suite? It will be fun no matter what. I can’t wait.