Category: Flash

February 19-21, 2001 was the occasion for one of the early FlashForward conferences in San Francisco, the fourth such event if my own decade-old article can be believed.

I took a number of photos at the event and published some of them at the time, but in the interests of the Digitized Decade project, here are a few people from the past.

People who made their big names in Director before Flash was around: independent developer Phillip Kerman, Macromedia stalwart John Dowdell, and Marvyn Hortman who ran an early Director file-sharing site.

Flash is smashing!: Flash’s creator Jon Gay is flanked by Glenn Thomas and Andreas Heim of Smashing Ideas.

Manuel Clement waits for a session to begin before moving on to big, big things.

Sam Wan give a talk back when he was still a college boy. Those monitors look so futuristic!

For those of you using Flash in the mobile dev world, here’s an entertaining snippet from my write-up of the event:

Flash is extending its tentacles into new platforms with the release of a player and development kit for the Pocket PC platform.

The Digitized Decade is a look back at the first year of our entry into consumer digital photography.

Far be it for me to rank on the lucrative world of HTML5 development but the monomaniacal intensity needed to produce graphics in Canvas seems like such a step back to, like, the ’80s.

I thought the whole idea of programs like Illustrator and Freehand was so that people could create graphics intuitively. I mean, I could have been writing PostScript code all those years, drawing stars or whatever, and certainly there were times when it was advantageous to create graphics programmatically, but from nigh on the beginning of the vector graphics era there were tools to speed the process that don’t seem to have any equivalent in today’s online world.

Paul Burnett, formerly of Macromedia in Australia but now a Technical Solutions Manager for Pacific Adobe Systems, has a nice blog entry with some old-time multimedia references going back a dozen years, including this shot of the two of us taken by Phillip Kerman at FlashForward 2000. I didn’t have any much grey in my beard, and he still had hair (his words, not mine!)

By chance I happened to check in on Erica (The iPhone Developer’s Cookbook) Sadun’s iPhone SDK Google Group yesterday when she was trolling for someone with “modest success or struggles” to round out an online chat about iPhone development and the App Store. I don’t check in on the list every day, but I made a silly remark about having lost the struggle and Erica wrote back to invite me onto the panel.

Sometimes I think that I’m overblown in my own self-promotion — although the sales and downloads of Bedeviled might point that I haven’t actually been doing enough — but I certainly missed this opportunity, because I didn’t even think of mentioning the chat anywhere until the hour was almost over.

Anyway, if you’re interested in hearing what several successful developers (and me!) had to say about the current state of iPhone development, you can find the archive through TUAW: The Unofficial Apple Weblog.

I wasn’t able to go to the MAX show this year — again — but as I mentioned the other day I was making a recorded appearance there via Phillip Kerman’s burgeoning video sarcasm business. Adobe hired him to produce some pieces, including the segue from the MAX Awards to the Sneak Peeks session (part of which was captured in a series of photos by Kendall Whitehouse on Flickr).

I knew this was going to be the case, but it wasn’t until I was flicking through Kendall’s photos that it was really driven home: My voice-over for Phillip’s video was coming out of the speakers on the LA Convention Center stage right after Mark “Luke Skywalker” Hamill had been up there, and I absolutely, completely missed it.

[UPDATE] This is what happens when you only get reports second-hand. Phillip’s piece (and my voice!) weren’t played after Mark Hamill was done. The end of this video shows Hamill and Adobe’s Ted Patrick still on the stage in front of the opening screen of the video, as the lights go down after Patrick introduces the “prepared legal statement.”

 

Phillip Kerman‘s the go-to guy these days for companies and conferences who want someone to roast the products they produce or used by their attendees. I helped out with some writing and voice work on a few of his pieces, including a couple of pieces for his Flash in the Can award show presentation this spring, and his Simpsons-inspired take on the renaming of SE 39th Avenue. For MAX, I’ve supplied some vocal work for his intro to the Sneak Peeks.

I’ve also entered the contest Phillip is judging — which closes in less than half an hour — for a conference pass to MAX, on the theme: “Is Adobe MAX for developers or designers?”

does anyone remember if FLA and SWF were introduced in Flash 1.0 or 2.0? I think it was 2.0 but want to verify.

— Mike Downey (@mdowney) May 27, 2009

Mike Downey was asking on Twitter yesterday if anyone could confirm his memory that the FLA and SWF formats were introduced in Flash 2, which was the first version released under the Macromedia imprint (“Flash 1” was just stickers plastered on the box for FutureSplash Animator). I answered late (I remember Peter’s FutureSplash box around the old Alder Street office) but it did prompt a peek into the folder where I keep versions of older applications, since my old dual-PPC desktop Mac will still run OS9, and sometimes I’ve needed to open old source files for one reason or another.

Phillip Kerman hosted the Flash In the Can awards show last weekend in Toronto. I was last there (along with Phillip), speaking at the newMedia ’98 conference. Not the final conference I was ever invited to speak at but it’s been a while.

Phillip got the gig because he’s been producing a lot of geek-funny videos. He bounced ideas off of me for the past couple of months while he was working material up for the show, I helped write and edit a couple of pieces, and did main voiceover on the piece above.

He also got a lot of people to do cameos. Some were quite involved, but he also had a few Flash “personalities” in brief expressions of cluelessness about the conference and the awards show. I take all credit for my portrayal in this video, which didn’t actually stray too far from the truth:

I curse the day that I ever let Macromedia sucker me into signing up for DevNet.

I’m trying to install CS3 Studio on a new Mac laptop and I can’t find my printout of the DevNet serial numbers for the individual applications, and Adobe’s customer service is telling me that DevNet isn’t an acceptable upgrade path to CS3, even though the applications available through DevNet were all MX2004 apps, although I somehow managed to get them working on my desktop machine.

A combined 32 years of buying and upgrading Adobe and Macromedia products and it comes down to waiting on hold with some horrible pop tune repeating endlessly in my ear waiting for tech support to probably tell me they can’t help me. [I take that back. It took a while, but I finally managed to convince them that DevNet included access to MX2004 apps and got an unlock code. I’ll probably find that folder tomorrow.]

Filing 2008’s royalty statements from my 2001 book Special Edition Using Macromedia Flash 5, I see that the Total Earnings (after the meagre advance) have gone from -$742.60 to -$705.47 over the past year. Only another 19 or 20 years at that rate and my most recent venture into computer book writing should start paying off!