What I took away from FITC Toronto

I’ve just returned from the premiere Canadian new media trade show known as Flash in the Can. My head is now full of hope and inspiration for the future of rich media, and dynamic desktop applications.

There were so many wonderful things worth mentioning, and I fear I’ll only be able to only scratch the surface in a single article, so consider this a brief overview.

Let me start by discussing the potential for Adobe’s new product Air, which is a platform allowing flash developers to create dedicated desktop applications using all the same scripting and abilities of Flash CS3.

Before attending FITC I didn’t really appreciate the usefulness of a new platform to host Flash based applications. But now that I’m aware of its easy-to-use built-in SQL database, and the potential to access dynamic data both locally, online, and the possibility of syncing the offline with the online I’m eager to dive far deeper into this new dev platform. I’m thinking this would make an excellent platform for an Intranet, among other incredibly useful apps.

A few major websites such as PayPal, EBay, Google Analytics, FaceBook, and others have already built or are developing desktop versions of their huge and complicated sites to allow users a faster and more feature-rich experience then was ever possible before. In many cases it will allow their sites to operate offline which is a pretty major ability both for the company and their users.

Here is Adobe’s current Air app showcase site.

One other thing I took away from FITC was the incredible work being done by a few people in the realm of code generated artwork.

Flash has long been a favorite tool among groundbreaking designers to avoid the limitations of old-fashioned HTML/CSS styles, allowing the sites to be presented in ways that are near-impossible in most other traditional ways.

I strongly recommend viewing the work being done by Joshua Davis, Erik Natzke, and my personal favorite Grant Skinner. Skinner has managed to create some beautiful, natural looking trees and grass, entirely with code. It would take many pages to get into the details of how this is possible, but it essentially amounts to porn for Flash coders.

Anywho, it was a fantastic conference that will forever influence the way I approach my work.

FITC Toronto 2008

Break it. Break your tools. Break your patterns. Break the norm. Break the standards. Break it.

FITC is a Canadian company that produces engaging design and technology events that inspire, educate and challenge the best new media designers and developers from around the globe.

Established in 2002 by new media guru and entrepreneur Shawn Pucknell, the company has held successful events across both Canada and the United States and is expanding overseas. According to FITC’s founder, the first step to producing a successful event is choosing a host city with a passion for the interactive arts. FITC has left its mark in the following geographies:

Canada: Montreal, Ottawa, Toronto, Vancouver, Winnipeg
USA: Chicago, Hollywood


The FITC name was derived from the first show that was produced in 2002 called ‘Flash in the Can’ -- a reference to Adobe’s (previously Macromedia’s) Flash software, and CAN taken from Canada. This inaugural event focused strictly on Flash, but the scope of future events has broadened with the explosion of interactive media to include all platforms including mobile, installations, motion graphics and games.


A few of us will be attending this years Flash in the Can conference. That is Pete, John, our intern Matt, and myself. If anyone's going to be looking for us there, we'll be the really good-looking ones.

Jersey Day Polaroid Gallery

This Flash implementation takes a series of photos (either by a Flickr RSS feed or an xml file with the list of photos) and then randomly spreads them out on a surface like a stack of Polaroid photos. The photos have captions, as if they were written on the bottom of the Polaroids. You can drag the pictures around, and double-click on them to open them in a larger view. You can also cycle through the pictures by clicking on the right and left arrows.

These photos are from a recent theme day we had at BSL; Jersey Day. The cool thing about this gallery is that you don't have to know anything about working with Flash. It's incredibly easy to add your own photos and post it to your server. It took me about 5 minutes.

Click the image above to see the gallery.
You can download everything (including source .fla if you want to see how it was made) here.

YouTube VS. Virb

I had heard about the quality of Virb compared to YouTube, but never actually tried it for myself. So I thought I'd post the same AVI file to both websites and see how the results turn out. This is some footage of a recent BSL excursion to Adventure Laflèche. If you didn't know about Virb before; now you do :)

iPhone isn't as flashy as I'd hoped

Coming out of WWDC are reports that Apple has officially admitted that the Apple iPhone will not support Adobe's Flash plug-in in Safari.

Flash support has been a long unanswered question about the Apple iPhone. Steve Jobs had made comments early on that we might see Flash in iPhone according to David Pogue:

Markoff: “Flash [in the iPhone]?”
Jobs: “Well, you might see that.”

Of note, Jobs did say that Youtube support would be in the iPhone... but by sidestepping Flash altogether:

Jobs: “Yeah, YouTube—of course. But you don’t need to have Flash to show YouTube. All you need to do is deal with YouTube. And plus, we could get ‘em to up their video resolution at the same time, by using h.264 instead of the old codec.”

Funny; this ad tells us that the iPhone version of Safari provides "the real internet" and not a "watered down" version. For me, that includes a Flash plugin....MX at least.

Source: Mac Rumors