We will be leaving for the airport in a few minutes, but I figured I could get one more blog in.  Our flight leaves here at 12:30pm and we will be getting back in Harrisburg at 10:30 pm.

This has been a great experience and I know both Anthony and I appreciated being able to come and participate.  We were inspired and awed and look forward to channeling some of that energy and insight into new projects.

Farewell San Fran.

I could’ve quite possibly just saw the most inspirational speaker there was this afternoon. His name is Erik Natzke, and for once, I don’t think you can really classify him as a Flash designer or developer, yet more of a Flash Artist. To be openly honest, what I saw I cannot explain in words. Instead, I took a few video clips using my camera and felt the need to share with everyone who wasn’t lucky enough to be a part of it. I’ll apologize now for the low quality, this was shot using a camera and not being able to balance it.. Without wasting more words, here they are:

Hope you enjoyed those as much as I did..

Tinic Uro – Let’s Fix This!

Marty and I took a quick shopping trip down to Chinatown to get a few expensive, quality items

Along the way, we took some cool pics of the layout of SanFran.  Here are a few pics:

A shot from the rooftop of our hotel

Another rooftop shot..

And yet, another shot of the hill we’ve seem to have walked 100 times, BOTH WAYS!

Workin on the leg muscles..

Today I am getting a little time to blog during lunch, so I thought I’d quickly throw up what I heard this morning and what I liked.. So I’m STOKED about Flash CS4 coming out, as well as Flash Player 10 and the new Device Central.

The new flash is going to be great. There are new 3d engines built in to adjust the z-coordinates, as well as a new tweening engine that looks amazing. Other features they talked about were pixel bender which will allow you to create your own bitmap filters, the ability to read/write to local files much easier and a brand new text engine that will allow for better looking text, as well as multiple languages within a single text box.

These features alone have me pumped, but there were many others they said we would have to wait on. The other products coming out sound great as well. After hearing how Adobe itself views AIR, I think I might have to start dabbling into that a little more on my free time.

Overall, great to hear about the new products coming out and how they will change what we know now. Thankfully, they told us there is no plan on creating Actionscript 4 in the near future.. Thank God!

Few Images from today…

A quick snapshot of the new Flash CS4

The Adobe team

Two reps from Disney are walking us through the features of their website.  So far there isn’t anything in depth, but it is impressive the amount of content that they manage and maintain.  Interesting how they handle the marketing to kids with ‘my backpack’, social media dance vid contest, and chat areas.

Four speakers from Adobe discussed the new features in upcoming release of CS4. The new Flash Player (10) will now have native 3D support which will allow it to run real-time. There will now be x, y, & z coordinates to work in.

In Flash there will be a new text engine that will render better online. The team from InDesign was brought in to help work with these improvements. Also the traditional way of tweening has been redone. You will be able to click and drag, resize the tweening path, and add 3D effects on the fly…all without having to work with frames.

AIR was also discussed and it seems like it will be very important moving forward as you work on multiscreen experiences. Many examples, but a few really cool ones were:

Tweet Deck – This program (in Beta) helps you track Twitter chats and manage your account
Destroy Flickr – Very cool way to organize your photos

After the sessions and a quick dinner, Anthony and I headed over to the conference sponsored bowling event. Having not donned ye old bowling shoes for awhile, we were understandably pensive. But fear not, the strikes and spares were flying my friends…along with a few gutterballs, but all in all the damage was light.

Looking forward to a new day of great sessions. Off to breakfast.

Bowling at Yerba Buena

Anthony and Nabil (Estee Lauder)

Yerba Buena Center - http://www.ybca.org/

So, the day starts with me walking into the conference hall, turning on the good ol’ Dell laptop to find every single network connection will not work.. I figure a restart will solve all issues – WRONG.  This leads me to find out my battery has pooped out and a restart has killed all the battery life I previously had.  So, instead of being able to type and blog while I’m there, I’m forced to use the historic pen/pad method, and blog later.  So, I start off with saying I LOVE MY MAC’s AND HATE MY PC’s.

The sessions today were good, the key to this conference this year is Passion.  As we saw, all of our speakers were very passionate about their presentations.  A few things I took from the early sessions were that passion drives what we do, work or personal wise.  Here are some good quotes:

“If you are passionate, never stop questioning everything, including yourself.”

“Rome wasn’t built in a day.. Nor was Rome built by one person.”

and my favorite, which I think I shall incorporate into my life is “Embrace the unknown – Fear is opportunity”

The sessions for today are over, and we will now be testing our rubber legs to see how much more walking we can do at a 90 degree angle.  I personally, am starting to feel the burn!  I will have more photos next post, as we finally got batteries for my camera (since my iPhone is too bashed to take pictures – thanks Fahrenheit).