boostworthyisryantaylor

I originally wanted to do a big post each day about all the announcements, what sessions I went to, etc., but yeah… that hasn’t been happening. So to catch everyone up on the best parts, below are some summaries, links, and photos.

First and foremost, we got to see some Flash Player 10 (codenamed ‘Astro’) in action. The big three additions to the player that they demonstrated for us were simple 3D support, advanced text layout, and support for writing our own filters and effects using a new image processing language called ‘Hydra’. The AIF Toolkit for writing and testing Hydra code is now available on labs for download. That thing is going to be owning a lot of my time in the weeks to come.

Next we got to see a new application that is in the works, codenamed ‘Thermo’.

In a nutshell, Thermo allows you to import design comps (such as a PSD file) and then select pieces of the design and automatically convert them into Flex UI components and mxml. The photos below do not do the app justice, you really must see a demo for yourself.

As if this weren’t already enough, we then got to see some demonstrations of Flash CS4. Demonstrations included a much more powerful timeline tweening engine, support for inverse kinematics, and the ability to preview content (such as video files) on the stage without publishing.

Last, but not least, wow…this one really knocked us off our feet. There is some R&D going on for building Flash files using C/C++. Yes, you read that correctly. Amazing. As cool as that may sound, it didn’t really hit us just how insane this was until we saw the game ‘Quake’ running as a SWF file. AMAZING.

I’ll write up some much more thorough posts about this stuff whenever I can.

This conference is truely amazing. The size of it, the amount of people here, everything is just awesome. More to come soon.