I’ve just got back from Flash In The Can 2012, whoa, sorry I meant Future, Innovation, Technology, Creativity, 2012, in the lovely city of Amsterdam. I thought I’d do a quick brain dump of some interesting bits and pieces that I took away from the conference.

Adobe and the future of the Flash runtimes

Something I was interested to see was the way that Adobe handled themselves in response to recent ill-conceived communication decisions they’ve taken in regards to the future of the flash platform. On the whole I think they did very well, they offered a frank apology and backed this up with more information on the roadmap white paper they published on the 22nd of Feb 2012. Its worth a read, but in summary Adobe have selected two main directions they will be taking the flash platform in: gaming and premium video. They decided that the platform was growing in too many directions and being used in too many inapropriate places. I think its a good decision, the focussed approach should lead to more stable releases and more interesting features for us to play with! The release of Flash Player 11.2 and AIR 3.2 support this new direction with inclusion of mouse lock (for gaming and infinite scrolling), middle and right mouse click events (meaning the context menu can finally be overridden) and Stage3D for iOS and Android. Adobe also stressed that although these are the areas that they will be focussing on, the improvements in performance will benefit everyone. For example proper multi-threading will be introduced and I could use that right now in a project I’m working on instead of having to manually spread a complex process over multiple frames

Create JS

Grant Skinner did some interesting talks about his HTML5 tool suite CreateJS and his company’s transition to doing more HMTL5 work. CreateJS looks like a great starting point for flash developers who want to dip their toes in the JS/CSS3/HTML5 sea! He also mentioned that his favourite JS IDE was WebStorm for what its worth!

ASFEAT

I, along with the rest of the room, was totally blown away by the amazing work Eugene Zatepyakin has been doing with his ASFEAT tools. For a taste of what he’s up to check out his Vimeo channel because, lets face it, looking at demos is fun! I’ve embedded one that is especially mind blowing, he uses the light from the room he’s in to create a light map for his AR 3D content. The result is that the 3D content appears to be lit in the same way as the rest of the room. Genius!

ASFEAT | real world light system for AR from Eugene Zatepyakin on Vimeo.

Stage 3D

Some of the most exciting stuff I saw was built using Stage3D, both for desktop and mobile (using AIR 3.2) the performance issues that have plagued Flash apps on mobile devices have been largely done away with now that AIR can leverage the power of the hardware’s GPU. We saw some stunning game demos for both mobile and desktop, my favourite was probably BlackSun firstly because it looks amazing and secondly because I love twin stick shooters! It is built by Aerys using their Minko framework.

Monocle

I almost forgot about Monocle (WIP name) an amazing new profiling tool from Adobe (you may have seen at Max 2011). It runs as a stand alone app and will profile any running swf. The interesting thing is that you don’t need to be running the (slow) debugger version of Flash Player to be able to use it. The up-coming versions of the player will automatically expose profile data. Thibault showed a demo where he stepped through each triangle draw of a Stage3D render to build up the scene in the profiler. Monocle looks ace and seems to expose a lot more data than the FDT profiler (sorry guys).

See you next year Amsterdam!