FlashForward Bridges Chasm between Designers and Programmers

FlashForward NYC 2002 had another successful (sold-out) show in the Big Apple. First of all, let me say that Lynda Weinman looked AbFab with her spiky bleached blonde hair and trademark glasses (move over Ashleigh Banfield). Lynda introduced many of the speaker sessions, which added a really nice personal touch to the conference. It is the third year I've attended, and the crowd remains friendly, enthusiastic, and creative.



The highlight of the last day was Eric Natzke's session showing his evolution from flunkie to Flasher. He shared some painful animation stories that preceded learning how to code in ActionScript (Flash's scripting language). He then demostrated some really nice usage of text animation and graphic masking. See natzke.com for lots of eye candy. I'm not the eye-candy type, but Eric's good-natured enthusiasm was contagious. He had the entire audience playing the game of life ("You are my movie clips"). Eric epitomizes the transition of Flashers from design and animation to programming.



For the more serious coders in the house, Mike Chambers, Macromedia Flash Community Manager gave a highly technical session on Flash Remoting (interfacing Flash with remote web services provided by, say, ColdFusion). See Mike's blog entries circa of July 10-13 covering FlashForward.



Look for the next edition of FlashForward in the first quarter of 2003 in San Francisco. I'm told the San Francisco crowd is more into programming than the NYC crowd, and I'm sure the new Flash MX features will encourage more designers to learn ActionScript and more coders to learn Flash. Hopefully by early 2003 we'll see a wave of new rich internet applications developed in Flash, like the Broadmoor Hotel Reservation system.



For those interested in developing similar applications, look for the Flash MX revision of ActionScript: The Definitive Guide before the end of 2002, and look for "Flash Remoting: The Definitive Guide" in the new year.

Do you like or hate Flash?