Report from FlashForward NYC 2005 - Wed July 6th. Day 1
FlashForward kicked off today. I caught only the tail end of the keynote by Ze Frank, but learned the new term "Authorship Society."
To quote the blurb: "The transition to an authorship society brings with it massive amounts of content to consume, but it also brings a new relationship between our society and the notion of creativity. Frank will explore the notion of real-time creativity and how it affects the way we think about teaching and learning."
The well-known ActionScript developer gave a talk on the issues (forces) in deploying Flash for different platforms and devices. I was familiar with most of it but did pick up a few tidbits. Most notably, Flash 7.2 includes a new ActionScript class, Delegate , that lets you execute a script within a certain scope/context. This makes it much easier to write callback handlers that are scoped to another class instead of the callback object itself. See the Flash MX 2004 online help or Macromedia.com's LiveDocs for details.
Peter Hall showed his Ripple framework for creating HTML-driven Flash pages. Why would you want to do that? Well, if you structure it right, you get two-for-one, both a Flash site and HTML site for not too much extra work. And, it makes it much easier to make your Flash site indexable by Google and other serach engines. And it lets you add HTML hyperlinks to or from any Flash page in your presentation automatically. And it includes a history object, with support for back/forward (and future integration with the browser's back/forward buttons). In short, if you have clients with one foot still in the HTML world, or you want to create HTML (or XML) driven Flash sites, give Ripple a look.
I spent the next hour learning about Processing, a very nifty little programming tool that exports to Java. Amit Pitaru demonstrated how to create a drawing program with a color picker in just a few lines of code. Very easy to use. I'll definitely try my hand at programming some ideas I've had for a while that aren't very easy to implement in Director or Flash.
Tom Igoe gave an interesting talk on Physical Computing. He demonstrated using a stuff monkey (monskey) with flex inputs attached to its arem to control two pong paddles. He also covered some basics on the hardware available for creating your own projects with inputs from the physical world. Very cool stuff and prices for hardware have come down considerably. And the software is improving too. He demonstrated stuff with Processing, but you can use other environments as well.
Well, that is my report on Day 1 from the field. Unfortunately, I won't be able to attend the second and third day, but I'm sure others will blog it. This morning there was a keynote by Kevin Lynch with more excitement to come, undoubtedly.
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Read More Entries by Bruce A. Epstein.
I was away at the hospital for the past week with my mother and when I got back last Monday my ebay store was closed down. They had no reason the closed me down and I cannot even call them to know why they closed me down I spend 2 hour last night trying to talk to anyone from LIVE HELP. They left me hanging on line for 2 hour then closed my window. Ebay did not give me any reason yet. I have invested over $60.000.00 and 5 years of my live into this ebay and they just closed me down WOW I am lost. I was told that Ebay have problems but this is ridiculous CAN SOME ONE HELP. I have two employees one full time and one part time I had to ask them to take time off on Monday until I get this work out. I work my Ebay from an Apartment that I rent just for Ebay. I also needed to rent a large storage out of town to put all my ebay stuff in it and I also work from home. All I have done in the last 5 years as all do to with ebay. I have purchase a going out of business store just to sell on ebay .the only income that I have been making in the last 3 to 4 years was only from Ebay. And on Monday, they close me down. I had about 2400 pieces in my store and now there are all gone. Each piece cost me a minimum of $3.00 to $6.00 to put in my store. Ebay send me an email telling me that I could realist 800 or so of them. Apparently, I cannot realist the rest and all the work is gone .This week I will have to give notice to vacate my apartment because Ebay close me down for at least 1 month. I cannot wait that long I need $100.00 a day to pay my bill. My sell on Ebay where almost daily. Why did they close me HELPPPPPPPPPPP . Ebay was all I had. My feedback is at 96.7%, most of my Negative is because of the post office, and because Ebay change there, feedback program .all my Neutral turn to Negative. I got a call from Ebay about 3 weeks ago to congratulate me on being a Silver Member ship instead of thanking her I give her Grap for the next hour. Telling her, (I don’t remember her name) but anyhow I told here what was wrong with Ebay and Paypal I complaints and told her where to improve in there Ebay and Paypal site. The lady did not sound too happy to talk to me. At the end of what seen to be 1 hour she told me that she would direct my complaints to the right department. Since then I went from Silver to Nothing. I got an email from ebay about 3 weeks ago telling me that my Sale where down and my feedback was low so they where limiting me on how many pieces I could list par week. I make some complaints and 2 weeks after that I got an email from Ebay apologize and telling me that my feedback was more then Average so they where giving me back my Ebay site 100.% . 5 or 6 days after that they close me down completely. Well there much more to my story. it goes back some time ago when Paypal rip me off more then once but I never made a complaint to anyone but to Paypal .they never did anything but make me lose about 1000.00 and more and yes I have proof and email for most of my complaints. Can some one help me . Can I do anything? I am really up over my head in this ebay and now my house is on the line. I really cannot afford to be off ebay for a month. Any help from anyone would be more then welcome. Sorry about my spelling I’m French thanks you