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Great run of presentations to wrap up the last day of #FITC, which i may have neglected to mention stands for “Flash in the Can” Can being Canada. Originated in Canada they hold Conferences nearly Monthly across the globe. This being the 9th year for #FITC in Toronto the week was packed full of amazing presentations.

The word for today in my opinion. “prototyping” True Research and Development. I started off today with 2 guys from CPB. Follow them @mrayinteractive and @bskahan They try to follow a 80/20 rule. 20% of their time is spent doing anything.. experiment, prototype and make stuff. Some of their most successful endeavors contain thinking and interactivity spawned from being innovative for fun.

Next up was Stacey Mulcahy on twitter as @bitchwhocodes a self proclaimed addict of twitter, and be forewarned if you do follow her, she will tell you “those are all quality links” . We had an hour presentation on Social Media focusing on Twitter and Facebook API’s. Her highest recommendation is to switch everything your doing to OAuth (Open Authorization) as your basic authorization is being tanked by twitter.

“Quick as a Flash” Presented by Grant Skinner @gskinner was the last technical session of the day for me. He went into great detail on best practices and approaches to optimizing flash. He made a great point over the fact that all those arguments over not using flash because it doesn’t perform well or takes too long to load is not Flash’s fault, its the user creating the flash movie. And in my personal opinion, the same goes for inexperienced Javascript or Jquery developers. Everyone who wants to argue those are better… can have the same faults as inexperienced flash developers.

We then got a great presentation from Jared Ficklin from Frog Studios. If you have seen this guy present before then you know he brings all sorts of crazy sound visualization through flash to the physical world. Whether it be crazy Fire tables or Smoke cannons its a very entertaining presentation. We also got the chance to see his new stuff.

We got too see the inner workings and though process behind the creation of the Minority Report’s Pre-cops computer, and shown how they made it reality… No seriously. They made a real working version. it was insane.

g-speak overview 1828121108 from john underkoffler on Vimeo.

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To start off the day I attended “Flashier Rich Media Advertising” What i got was a demo of some of the coolest interactive banner ads I have ever seen, along with a lot of best practices when doing Rich media Advertising. I like to think I already knew a lot of that, However the way it was presented made me take a different spin on how we can use it within my own place(s) of business.

The Sessions the rest of the day were stellar. Lets start off with this one. “Creativity and Chaos” with Jason Theodor who you can follow via Twitter @jted and who was also gracious enough to already have his slide deck up on the web for us here: http://www.slideshare.net/jted/chaos-and-creativity You have take the time to go through his 241 slides, good for you.. but i would say you would have had to have been there. This guy may border a little crazy… However all us creative folk are. He gave a great session on Creativity, being creative and how to pull that creativity out. My favorite line from his presentation was:

Create Something that critics will Criticize

Go Crazy when brain storming a new project.. Nothing is wrong with that. Then scale it back to meet the needs of the client and reality.

The biggest thing i took from the next session with Ralph Hauwert who you can follow via twitter @unitzeroone is this whole “Skunkworks” concept:

The designation “skunk works”, or “skunkworks”, is widely used in business, engineering, and technical fields to describe a group within an organization given a high degree of autonomy and unhampered by bureaucracy, tasked with working on advanced or secret projects.

Great concept, This will be something DigitalOctane will always run with moving forward.

The last session of the day was with Colin Moock. Showing off a TON of code and officially announcing during his session at #fitc that Union will have a Free Standard license for up to 1000 Concurrent users. This is something our team is defiantly going to be playing with over the next couple months. As we have another upcoming project which we will write about later next week.

Writing is hard.

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I started off day 1 with “Open Source Flash 3D” with John Lindquist from the Papervision 3D team. Who you can follow on Twitter via @johnlindquist . John Talked about the Past, Present and Wild Assumptions on the future of 3D on the Web. He also spoke in length comparing the big 3 players out there right now. Flash, Unity3d and WebGL.  WebGL is the low, unheard of player in this game, However one thing to note with WebGL is its not plugin required. You can View Source on this.. HTML5.

We all know Flash, as John said in his presentation “Some say Adobe missed the 3d Boat”. Maybe… However Adobe still has several benefits that Unity3d is yet to bring which includes Webcam and audio support.

Unity 3d is another plugin install. With a Very low saturation rate… You may be hard pressed to get a user to install something they most likely have not heard of before. However Unity3d’s quality far surpasses Flash & Paper vision.  If your building a game for the web or mobile, Unity3d may be worth a look.

Second Session of the Day I attended ( Keep in mind there are 5 sessions running at a time. So make your picks Wisely) Now i don’t know what went on in the other 4 sessions.. But I definately made the right choice going for “The Importance of Whiskey While Working… (And other work flow tips too!)” Presented by Jamie Kosoy from bigspaceship . You can follow him via Twitter @jkosoy . If you can take 1 word from his presentation its “Collaboration”. Your typical company operates in what would be called a “WaterFall” System. Sales, Design, Production and Launch. Everyone has their part… everyone washes their hand at the end. this is as Jamie put it “Bad”. At Big Space Ship the system goes Sideways. Strategy, Production, Design and Development. They all have their input from beginning to end. They work in Project Teams. Each different discipline is represented for each project. Devs and Designers are in the same meeting as the strategists putting out ideas and setting accurate time lines, Jamie says to “Dream Big” in these sessions… and scale back depending on time-line and client budget.

I think one of the most encouraging things Jamie brought up was the humble beginnings of Big Space Ship, back in the day landing a Movie Website for a Romantic Comedy. Doing a great job, they got pinned as the best “Romantic Comedy Website Company” and signed themselves another few Romantic Comedy websites. Finally getting themselves a Horror film… and it blew up from there. Jamie defiantly did a much better job telling that story and im not doing it justice.

The Adobe Keynote was alright, and The last session of the day was an inside view of North Kingdom here is their most recent demo reel:

North Kingdom Showreel 2009 from Designchapel on Vimeo.

We got a great insight into the creative process and techniques and display the many challenges they face from clients, users and the business in general.

To wrap the day up I will leave you with 1 tip from Jamie at Bigspaceship. I dont have it word for word so I am going to ad lib here a bit:

Spend the time to come up with a consistent naming convention for the site to ensure everyone is talking about the same thing, and give this naming convention to the client to make sure when they are talking, everyone knows what is being talked about.

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DigitalOctane is on site at Flash in the Can Toronto. Being held in this city is special to #FITC, Could it be because this is where they started 9 years ago? or maybe because its there largest with over 1100 Designers and Developers from around the world.

Each year we choose a different theme for our Toronto event. This year it’s Playground. Inspired by fond childhood memories, where tinkering and painting and playing and swinging was the norm, and how as we age these simple pleasures seem to be pushed aside by the world, by work and life itself. We feel it’s time to rekindle some of those simpler times. Play is Good! … we all need some playtime to get energized and to connect to our creative side.

As i review the schedule for the next 3 days.. They are running 5 sessions at a time for each time block. This is HUGE and Terribly frustrating… Which one should i go to for each session.  The Morning sessions until lunch break are up in the air, the only 1 i have already decided on his the first session after lunch. “From Solo to CEO” 6 presenters including Grant Skinner.

I will make a strong effort to write up a Day recap for each day… No promises.

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We were fortunate enough to spend a few days at the #FITC Conference in Edmonton Alberta. Canada. The speaker list included some familiar faces to the Flash Community: Grant Skinner, Lee Brimelow, Stacey Mulcahy, Erik Natzke, Mike Chambers, Mario Klingemann, Ralph Hauwert and James Paterson. If you do not know who these people are… i suggest you get to “google” and look them up. These People are Amazing at what they do and dedicated to the Flash Community.

We Arrived in Edmonton around 5pm local time on the 15th of October. We came in Thursday night because we were going to be attending the Optional Papervision3d Workshop hosted by Ralph Hauwert . This was to be his final “Papervision3d” workshop or speaking about Papervision3d again. He has recently left the Papervision3d team to pursue his own interests.

We were with Ralph from 10am till around 5:30pm, teaching approximately 40 #Flashers the in’s and out’s of Papervision3d using both Adobe CS4 and Flex. By the end of the day we were all left with “on export” planet earth rotating and a moon orbiting the planet in Papervision3d.

The Conference.
FITC is a smaller conference then lets say Flash Forward. This allows for way more opportunity to speak with some of the presenters if you were so inclined. We saw some great presentation on both days. We had a chance to have some one on one time with Stacey Mulcahy talking to her about a variety of things including process and “deselopers”. If you follow her Twitter account @bitchwhocodes You might think we were insane to approach her. Believe it or not She was very nice and helpful. Sorry to blow your cover Stacey.

I think the one important thing to take back from this conference overall is that in our experience attending previous flash conferences; Its easy to feel like your not good enough after seeing some of the things these guys have made. The Good thing about #FITC is that we had a chance to see people like Erik, Ralph and James beginnings. Seeing that they are in fact Human and that they started where you started. If you take the time like they did… you’ll be up there speaking.

Follow FITC . Look up these other guys and subscribe to RSS or Follow on Twitter.

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One thing Digital Octane has been very fortunate with is client referrals. Our best sales team are our current and past clients. This positive side effect of good customer service has really impacted how much time we taken to effectively market ourselves. Outside of a dismal business card printing, as a company we, haven’t taken much time to invest in a solid website or even an effective “coming soon”

While we start putting the pieces in place for a new digitaloctane.com; it’s a small start and a much needed shove in the right direction. Let us know what you think.

First off, if you work on the web you should familiarize yourself with HTTP Headers.

HTTP Headers form the core of an HTTP request, and are very important in an HTTP response. They define various characteristics of the data that is requested or the data that has been provided. The headers are separated from the request or response body by a blank line. HTTP headers can be near-arbitrary strings, but only some are commonly understood. – wiki

Wow, What did that just say?

There are two add-ons to firefox which will significantly help you troubleshoot problems with your site especially if your making alot of calls for assets. You should have at least 1 of them, take your pick: Firebug or liveHTTPHeaders. Both will monitor HTTP Headers for you. I am sure there others, however these are the ones i have used and have had success with.

Now lets talk about how this can help you.

When you deal with Flash in the manner that i do. Your loading a base swf and XML. loading content in various swfs who’s content is loading XML, who’s XML has paths to images and assets. That can be a lot of data to look at, and when something doesn’t show up… Then what?

Personally, i turn to Firebug first. turn on headers and refresh the site. I then watch the headers, which is tracing every call I am making. With firebug you will quickly see red 404 show up with the file path that was called. This can very easily save you a TON of time digging through code… looking for some error only to discover you made a typo in the file name you called.

This very simple add on and change to your troubleshooting process can save you time and your sanity.

Firebug does not stop there, Firebug offers some Robust features for Inspecting elements which i will talk about at a later time. You should Install Now, And start using these great features.

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Well now that Mack and I have launched the blog we have been actively looking for contributors. We have some very talented people that have agreed to start writing for vectorlab.net.  Stay tuned as we finalize our list of contributors once everything is said and done, we’ll be posting a more about our new contributors soon.

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Ok, I may be over exaggerating a bit by saying version control saving your life. But it can certainly save you large amounts of frustration. Picture if you will, you’re working on a tight deadline; you have just about finished with your project and it’s the 11th hour. You’ve done a bunch of work but you only  have 1 copy on our laptop. Your laptop overheats and will not turn on! Now that the stage is set, you may be asking “What the Fruit is version control and how can it help me with this problem?” Basically version control is a way for you and your design/development team to work on the same project and even the same files with out having to manually make copies as you make changes. As you make edits to any file within the repo older “copies” (I use copies loosely in this description because it’s a bit more complicated than that behind the scenes) will be saved. File version control is really the tip of the iceberg regarding projects like Subversion which have project “branching”, file merging and more robust features. Check this out Wikipedia for more info on Version Control http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revision_control.

You may notice that some open source projects such as Tweener, swfobject and PaperVision 3D are all on code.google. Each project has a repo accessible through a UI such as tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac). This makes it a lot easier to make sure your files are up to date with out having to download zips and manage the files yourself.

So which one should I use?

At Digital Octane we utilize both a Subversion Repository along with a Dropbox account(s). This isn’t a comparison between any syncing / version control apps. Each have their own benefits and it really depends on how you plan on utilizing your files when choosing one.

Dropbox

If you are a small boutique shop like we are, Dropbox is extremely useful for syncing/sharing files between our team, clients and freelancers. It’s a very simple client side installation for any user sign up is a snap. Once the install is complete the user will have a series of Dropbox folders added to their Documents folder.docs-dropbox

Making file sharing a breeze for non tech savvy clients. For those of you that are used to another method for version control you may feel a bit hindered by the lack of file/folder controls. If this is your first jump into remote file syncing or version control for your files. You wont really know what you are missing. Just knowing that if you accidentally lost a file or need to access your file from the web you can.

Subversion: The 30 second breakdown

Subversion’s overall controls are more robust compared to the abilities of Dropbox, but there comes a bit of  administration with Subversion and a little bit of know how (Which I will not get into here) to get things up and running. If you choose to go the Subversion route. You will be greatly rewarded for your hard work.

Here are a list of features within subversion

Some things to keep in mind about subversion

  1. You will need to install subversion on a dedicated server/machine that you can access locally and/or remotely.
  2. It’s in your best interest to install client side controls such has tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac) to make it easier on your users.
  3. Read up on project trunks and branching. If you have a good process for branching your code base. It can make deploying code to dev, staging and production servers much easier.
  4. Subversion has pretty good integration with task management systems such as Jira (using a plugin) I am sure others are out there as well.
  5. The Subversion project is quite large and community is very active.

So what did we cover?

In this article I talked about Subversion and Dropbox but there are a ton of other projects out there and Adobe has actually started shipping their own version control within their Creative Suite. Regardless of which product you choose. It’s a good idea to start implementing version control today if you haven’t already.

Oh and if you are interested in using Dropbox how about using this link (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTUxNDA4ODk) so we get a referal bonus?

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Well after a boat load of delays, we finally launched our blog today. Even with the rock times with the economy this is a very exciting time for Digital Octane. We are becoming more active within the community not only vocally through this blog but also through example.

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting some of the techniques Mack and I utilized to create this blog along with our own Website (which is still in development).

These are not only programming and design techniques but also production and process tips that have really helped us through out our careers.

I’d really like to take a moment to thank every one who has given us constructive feed back! It is much appreciated.

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