A bullet-point recap from the Flashforward conference in Austin, presented by Adobe’s Kevin Lynch:

Kevin shows off the Flash Tenth Anniversary micro-site on Adobe.com

Small bottles of Flash wine given to everyone to celebrate the anniversary (though everyone is probably far too tired or hung over to start drinking yet)

Hilarious cartoon from the makers of HomeStarRunner

Flash Player 7 hit 80% penetration in one year; FP8 hit 85% in 9 months; projected that FP9 will hit 50% in 3 months

Garret Nantz from Big Spaceship demos Nike Air using FP9 on Linux

Kevin discusses new features in FP9 (new Virtual Machine, fast compiler, AS3, etc)

Mark Anders from the Flex team breaks down the Flex family of technologies and discusses its background

FlexBuilder demo on a Mac! (sneak preview - builds a Flickr photo display app)

Talks about Apollo - use HTML, Flash, and PDF to create desktop apps (including Javascript for Ajax elements)

Demos building an Apollo app on a Mac!

Use FlexBuilder to build Apollo apps

Justin Everett Church and Mike Downey talk about AS3 in Flash 9 public alpha

Sneak preview of Flash 9 - includes tabbed panels (finally) that slide in/out like VisualStudio (if you want)

Importer for PSD files into Flash 9 that maintains all the layers and layer groups and comps, allows import as MovieClips, allows you to assign instance names during import instead of going back into it later, set compression settings, etc. This example is for a button - the states were created in PhotoShop and imported as keyframes as an instant button.

Much, much better layout and panel management (at last!). Toolbar is a single column now, panels tuck away on the right, timelines hides away, a Workspace dropdown is available to switch to different views as needed, etc.

“Copy motion as ActionScript 3″ option converts timeline animation into AS3 (wow!) (Robert Penner did this as a new employee of Adobe). This can also be copied into Flex to create animated transitions and such there.

Gran Skinner and Beau Ambur are working on a component set to ship with Flash that is lght and fast and easy to skin

… then questions and answers with all the presenters.

Gotta run - my session starts in 30 minutes!

Posted by Robert on September 12th, 2006

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