Sven Dens

Saturday, May 26 2007, 5AM: the Boulevart crowd gathering to drive off to Paris

It should be illegal to get up at 4AM…
Read the rest of this entry »

Yesterday evening I got home after 2 days in Paris for the WFF 07.

In retrospect, I must say that it hasn’t been what I’d expected it to be. Although there were some really nice sessions (like that by Erik Natzke and Carlos Ulloa), the overall level was below-average in my opinion and I don’t think I’ll be attending next year.

Read the rest of this entry »

Last Saturday I saw Carlos Ulloa at WFF doing a talk on Papervision3D. Carlos is the founder of this amazing project, and it was very interesting to hear him talk about how it all started and where PPV3D is heading in the near future.

Carlos worked for many years at Sony in London as a game developer/designer. It wasn’t untill Spark Europe in Amsterdam in november 2005 where the idea arose that it would be cool to have a good 3D engine for Flash, and Papervision3D was born. The first one to join Carlos to kick off the project was Joost Korngold (better known as renascent), and on December 1st 2006, PPV3D was first published as Open Source on OSFLash under the MIT license.

Read the rest of this entry »

Just saw Erik’s session at the WFF in Paris. All I can say is WOW! So inspiring, so impressive, it rocked my world!

Must say that I’m glad I didn’t give up on the festival after the dissapointing kick-off this morning!
Erik showed the evolution of his own work, from the time he himself just started out ’till now. He started off by saying that he was originally a pure designer with no programming skills whatsoever. Animations he built in Flash were built using keyframes on the timeline, which led up to enormous FLA files using hundreds of keyframes to create his animations.

He then realized there had to be a better way of doing things, and started looking into ActionScript.

Read the rest of this entry »

Bonjour, chèrs spectateurs!

Don’t understand what’s written above? If you’ve read my other post on Aral’s session at MultiMania yesterday, you know what to do: use the web and all it’s great software to find the translation.

Currently, the Web Flash Festival is going on at the Centre Pompidou in Paris. We’re here with 11 guys from our company, so the ambience is great! Just watched a video of past contestors and winners in the Flash animation category, and I’m sorry to say, it sucked

I don’t like to bash people, and I do hope this event is going to be better as the day advances, but first impressions are far from great. There’s (almost) no one here (around 40 visitors for the moment I guess), there’s no “schwung”, just not a creative atmosphere, and the quality of the work displayed so far was far below expectation.

This afternoon, Eric Natzke is going to do a session, that almost can’t be bad… let’s hope so!
I’ll keep you posted!

Getting up at 4 in the morning… ouch! Does this ever not suck?

Well, today probably not as bad as any other day, since we’re going to the Web Flash Festival Paris at the Centre Pompidou. I’m expecting to see alot of nice creative work – web, video and audio – and of course to be having loads of fun with my colleagues Wim, Stefan, Jannes, Tom, Frederik and more guys you may not know yet, but should

And Paris, well… wouldn’t you go there even if there was no event at all? This city totally rocks!
Expect some live blogging coverage if I’ve got internet access there.

Bye for now (better start driving to get there in time )

Raf Vervink & Nicolas Lierman are doing a session on “Flex/Apollo RIA Goodness”.

They show us what is all possible with Flex & Apollo today.
The main point of interest in their session is Google Analytics.

Google Analytics hasn’t got a public API, so they wrote a GA ActionScript 3 API and a GA client in Flex running in Apollo, entitled “Google Analytics Reporting Suite“. With this Apollo app they want to bring Google Analytics to the desktop and provide powerful extra features the desktop has to offer.

The big deal about this is:

• 3+ million users will have instant access to GA from the desktop
• It will reduce Google’s bandwith cost
• It’s just too cool

They’ve shown us how to build a widget for the desktop with Flex and Apollo, using their GARS SWC component.
Which was pretty easy! And thus even cooler!
The widget will be available for download on their labs from tomorrow.

Nice work guys!

Dave is doing a session on “Designing with Sound”.

In design, there’s good design and bad design. Dave tries to teach us what to pay attention to to make sure that when it comes to sound design, yours is good.

There are 5 basic elements of sound design:

• Voice Over
• Sound Effects
• NavSounds
• Ambience
• Music

Read the rest of this entry »

Peter is doing a talk on OO in AS3.
Key points that will be discussed are:

• DisplayList API
• DOM3 Event Model
• E4X (ECMAScript for XML)

…and some others I wasn’t fast enough to copy from the screen

E4X must be one of the greatest additions to the language.
The ease of iterating through an XML document is a snap in AS3 in comparison to AS2!

This session was a quick drill-down of what AS3 is and how you’d best use it.
Peter briefly introduced some Design Patterns (Observer, Singleton, MVC, Decorator) and how you apply them in AS3.
For instance he demo’ed the implementation of the Singleton Pattern in AS3, which needs a workaround since AS3 doesn’t allow for private constructors. This clever workaround was conceived by the Big Mr. Grant Skinner.

Not many new things learned here I must say, but for those of you just getting to know your way around OOP and/or AS3, this is a nice and quick how-to to get you started.

Be sure to check out Peter’s blog from time to time, I’m pretty sure he’ll be posting his presentation there one of these days.

Mike Downey is talking about Apollo for Developers.

Apollo is a technology by Adobe that allows you to bring web applications to the desktop.
Web applications, as in HTML-pages, .NET webapps, but also Flex applications, using embedded Flash or not, or just 100% Flash apps that run entirely out of the browser and can access your local file system!

100% cross-platform, no more browser compatibility issues, no more hard work to make your app work on different OS’es.
As long as it can be shown in a browser, you can port it to the desktop in a snap using Apollo.

Currently, Apollo is available as an Aplha 1 release on Adobe Labs.

To render your app Apollo uses the WebKit browser rendering engine, so really that’s all you should check if you’re building your webapp. If it renders nicely in WebKit, you’re free from browser hassle!

A totally cool demo showing what you can do with Apollo is the Apollo Book.
You’re seeing live webpages HTML rendered in Flash, running in Apollo on your desktop.
100% interactive!
Did I hear you say WOW?

So, how do you start building your own Apollo apps?
Check out my other post: http://www.svendens.com/adobe-air/build-compile-as3-flex2-apollo-eclipse/

More on this day as it continues…