A few members of the production staff were lucky enough to attend the first Flash Camp to be held in Manchester.  All those attending, including Nicola, Paul and myself, were surprised and excited  to learn of a design/developer conference being held in the northwest, let alone in our very own back yard.

The afternoon kicked off with a key note speech from two guys, Mike Jones and Mark Doherty, from Adobe System.  Mike gave us a rather in depth overview of a new development tool from Adobe called Catalyst.  Now as an ActionScript 3 and many other languages coder I saw very little use in this application, but the designers with me could think of many a use for such a tool.  Then Mark took over, who had to do a smaller speech after Mike’s lengthy chat.  Mark gave us a rundown of Adobes stance on mobile development with further detail to follow in his main speech.

After a short break and the loaning of 50p to Nicola for a packet of crisps we were back in the lecture theatre for a presentation from Edwin van Rijkom who is part of the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) Team.

A quick overview of OSMF:

• Allows playback of any media from any source
• Can handle sequential and parallel playback of different media types
• Quick hooks into media controls to build custom playback UIs

Now as someone who has coded a media player (it is a pain in the neck) I found the idea behind this framework very interesting and cannot wait to put it into practice.

Another break later, we were back with Mike Jones and his demonstration of Catalyst...

Nic’s thoughts on catalyst: I think this is a very useful tool for smaller flash projects. Generally, as a designer, I create the graphics in illustrator, export to flash, turn everything to symbols and animate bits, then hand over to the developer to code or pull my hair out trying to get my head around AS3.
Now as anyone working in an agency might find, people often aren’t available when you need them. With Catalyst, I wouldn’t need a developers help, thus speeding up the process. I can open my illustrator file directly in Catalyst and with a few clicks, create buttons, tweens and transitions galore! Please note, Jon, who isn’t impressed with this Catalyst, and finds coding scroll bars a nuisance, made a squeal with delight at the ease of scroll bar creation that was demoed at the conference, so easy that I could do them and save him the trouble! P.S. The favour is returned - so he’s not getting the 50p back!

Michael Plank from PowerFlasher Solutions was next giving us a rundown of their development tool.  He did this by giving us an impressive demonstration of how quick it is to build an application.  With a few shortcut key presses and no use of the mouse, Michael was able to create function declarations based on the call lines, create classes based on interfaces and even create the interface itself.  Flash has been screaming out for an environment like this, even more so since ActionScript3 and its nice object approach.

Next on the agenda was The Current State of Mobile UX present by Anthony & Jerome Ribot.  They both presented a very eye opening talk.  They Outlined design considerations and best practices to remember when designing for a handheld/mobile devices.  They covered far too much to be discuss in a single blog, so please check out the presentation slides.

Yet another break and we are back with Mark Doherty giving us a demo of Flash Player 10.1 on mobile devices along with AIR 2.  The introduction of AIR 2 to mobile devices was news to me and I was very impressed with the idea of Flash AIR application being allowed on device marketplaces.

Final to cap off the day we had Seb Lee-Delisle, who I’ve never had the pleasure of seeing present.  All that can be said is that it was the perfect end to the evening.  Seb demoed some of his work and it’s all very impressive, it made me rather jealous from a developer point of view.  Check it all out at http://sebleedelisle.com/.

All in all it was a first class event which has left me wanting for more.  We all hope to see future events taking place in the northwest.

Thank you to Flash Midlands and all the sponsors.