It’s almost that time of year again, when a large contingency of the Flash designer and developer community descend on Brighton for three or four days of learning, networking and a bit of a jolly at Flash on the Beach (20th-23rd September).
This is the fourth installment of the conference and it will be my third visit. The first time I went, I was an isolated flash developer and still fairly wet behind the ears. The experience proved both inspiring and very educational. I’d like to think my skills as a developer have improved immensely since that time but I still look forward to learning from the masters of the medium.
I haven’t decided my exact schedule yet but here are a few of my must sees:
- Keith Peters – Casual Game Architecture – his Actionscript Animation books have helped me out on more than one occasion and I find his sessions provide clear and straightforward explanations of fairly complicated subjects. Also great to get some further insight into casual games development.
- Joa Ebert – Leaving the Sandbox – Joa is one of those rare flash developers who really understand compilers and bytecode and, from his recent blog entries, it seems he’s been working on some tools that could really help make actionscript code faster and better.
- Mario Klingemann – Connecting the Dots – Mario never fails to astound with his brilliance at solving problems and the artistic output that he turns his skills toward. I always come away from his sessions with new ideas and a renewed enthusiasm.
- Craig Swann – Choose Your Own Adventure – I saw Craig’s session at the first Flash on the Beach and it opened my mind to the possibilities of combining Flash, and the kind of visual output it is capable of, with physical world input via cameras, microphones and electronic detectors (a task made easier by the Arduino kit).
- Seb Lee Delisle – Work/Play – I’ve enjoyed several of his past sessions and really like some of the work coming out of Plugin Media (see, for example, Big and Small) so look forward to what should be an entertaining session about putting fun and play back into the digital.
I’ll post my impressions of how the event went sometime after September 23rd.