FITC Amsterdam

Recently I attended the FITC conference in Amsterdam for the second year running.
The more conferences I go to, the more I see the same people talking about the same things! This year there wasn't too much new.

The two main things I went for were:
1. A CS4/Flash 10 workshop to get me up to speed on new things in Flash 10.
2. An iPhone development session.

The CS4 workshop was by Lee Brimlow who is a pretty good presenter. Sadly CS4 is possibly worse than CS3 and holds nothing new for programmers. It's as if they have gone out of their way to add features that do not benefit programmers in any way, thus creating a workflow in which we need to buy Flex, Flash and Photoshop. Having spent an afternoon playing around with the new Sound capabilites, I can honestly say that I don't see anyone buying Flash CS4 anytime soon. It's slow and crashes soo often. I only use Flash these days to label assets anyway, so I think CS3 is going to stay for a while longer.

The iPhone developer session was useful in as much as it put me off wanting to develop for the iPhone. Sure, it looks good to have Objective C on your CV at the moment but the hassle of being able to commercially develop (registering with Apple as a developer for instance, which costs money and takes months, buying an Apple computer as they don't have and SDK for PC, and the SDK which is so feature poor it makes Flash look like the best bit of software ever written.

Apart from that there were the usual band of speakers.

Carlos and others talking about Papervision as usual. His new site looks great! He explained how he put it together. Papervision is becoming so complicated now-a-days and constantly being updated (such is OS code) that unless you're constantly doing projects with it, it's hard to keep up. Then again, isn't everyone just using if for carousels now, replacing 'page flipping over' as the current client-must-have.

A number of people were banging on about AIR still, same as last year. I have seen a couple of AIR apps, but most the places I work haven't embraced it like I think Adobe would have hoped. I saw a cool site recently which has just come out which allows people to make cash distributing their AIR apps which may get more people to come up with cool apps.

Andre Michelle is still developing his music application, under the auspicious title of AudioTool. I saw it last year and it is even better now. I would go as far as to say it's one of the 'best' Flash applications I've seen to date. Where does he find the time??? I struggle to keep this blog up-to-date!

Thats it!