Swinging with the London Flash Platform User Group

Announcements, Events, Flash, Wii,
7/25/07

Word comes from across the pond that Swing is going to be shown at tomorrow’s London Flash Platform User Group meeting.  At a one-hour session called “Fwii Style” (all these Wii puns remind me of the early days of the Macintosh, when all software had to have “Mac” in the title) Adam Robertson of Dusty Pixels will hold forth on the wonders of Wii and Flash:

Forget your PS3’s and 360’s, the Wii is officially the coolest console ever, all thanks to its innovative Wiimote controller. And now you can get in on the motion sensing goodness using Flash.

In this session we’ll take a quick look inside the Wiimote to learn a bit about how it works, then discover how you can use it to control your own Flash projects, both through the official Wii browser (with the Wiicade API) and on your desktop (with FWiidom & WiiFlash). Much arm waving guaranteed.

The followup session, called “Make Things Physical” and taught by Leif Lovgreen, sounds pretty great too:

An introduction to physical interaction. Adobe Flash, the Make Controller Kit from MakingThings and a handful of analogue sensors. This session covers the basics of getting started with analogue input as an interface to Flash.

Expect strange things like ice cubes, food, flashlights and a boxing ball to be natural ingredients in this session.

Interaction with analog sensors was something I thought was still beyond the capabilities of Flash; glad to hear this barrier’s coming down.

Those in London environs, take note; sounds like an interesting evening.

 

LAFlashapaloozastock 2, the revenge

Events, Flash, LA Flash, Miscellaneous,
7/16/07

I spent Saturday in Venice at LAFlashapaloozastock 2, a combination seminar/schmoozefest/job fair put on by the wonderful folks at LA Flash.  If you’re in the LA area, have any interest in Flash and haven’t hooked up with this group yet, you’re missing out on a great community.

My introduction to LA Flash came last year, when I managed to snag a presenter slot at JobStock ‘06, a networking event where local Flash talent did three-minute presentations of their work alongside presentations from studios seeking flashers. I was immediately struck by the warmth of the community and especially its openness to people with a wide range of skill sets.  Flash by nature has an extremely diverse user base in terms of expertise, and it’s a great to see a community that does such a good job catering to newbies as well as to more experienced folks.

The highlights of the day for me were presentations by Sam Rivello on building a custom blitting engine in Flash, and a talk by Aaron Simpson of Cold Hard Flash on the history of Flash character animation, including his Flash Animation 10, a survey of the most influential online Flash shorts and a welcome bit of cultural perspective.

At the end of the presentations they raffled off a Wii, an Apple TV, and a bunch of other good stuff…

...and the tacos were delicious!

[ image from ccharlton on flickr ]

 

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