This week I seem to be getting an eyeopener on how ‘news’ on the internet works and how much of the so called hype factor is involved. Where reporters used to check their sources, nowadays it seems that everybody is copy pasting away.

I am talking about the latest news hype about Adobe’s flash player on the iPhone (long awaited it seems). I was there during the session on Flash On The Beach when Paul Betlem was talking about this. A question from the audience about them supporting it got the answer that they can and will, as long as it is allowed by Apple (actually, that seemed to be the only thing holding them back).

The funny part (for me) is in the fact that I was looking at how this story evolved. I believe the session was on tuesdag, people (was it flashmagazine.com?) were informing other visitors of Flash On The Beach by using Twiter. They also posted about it on flashmagazine.

Soon others were quoting the message on twitter, other sites took over the blog post and before I knew it and came back in Holland (wednesday night), the news was all over the place. Now all these other (major!) news sites have no way of knowing what has been said other than if they had some people they know over there (could be, but doubtfull since there were only like 80 people in the session). So the only conclusion I can make is that most newssites are just looking at what other sites have to report, and take that as input, using them as sources and therefor place them in the ‘facts’ categories.

How easy it is for someone to just make stuff up, do a little bit to spark a fire and let the lazyness of other news sites do the rest.

Just for clearity. The article on flashmagazine.com is absolutely true, nothing wrong with this particular story. It was just an eyeopener for me on how these stories develop.

I’m lucky enough to be able to visit Flash on the Beach in Brighton this year. The conference is starting briljant. Very nice amosphere and already had a great Session of Carlos Ullua. Now sitting in for the next on by Brandon Hall… Let’s see what he has to say ;)

small note: THIS is one of the reasons why people don’t like webapps….. typing for half an hour on the most briljant post ever and then hitting some sort of magic hidden key combo that navigates away from the page, losing all your work in the process…. jeez…

Brandon Hall
Although it took some time for me to warm up, I am starting to like this session. Brandon has the talent to explain complicated concepts in development in a really straightforward manner. I like the way he approaches things in a very pragmatic manner. Just looking at the problem and writing a couple of classes managing a lot of things at once, briljant.

Brandon talks about using a custom class which extends Sprite to be able to use some way of scaffolding in Animation/transitions. By extending the default properties of things like x,y and alpha and re-routing these setters to private internal variants, we can instantly make things animate in a pretty and easy way. Great stuff. I would like to investigate this with using Physics for an animation engine as well.

A small thing which i found very nice to hear is Brandon mentioning the scaffolding advantages of the GAIA Framework. I’ve been looking into the gaia framework myself recently, but hearing it actually being used by others is a great stimulant to dig into it sooner and deeper.

Mike Anders
Session about Flex 4 and Thermo. Note to self, check out the new .fxg file format. It looks like the workflow between flex and graphical tools is finally being solved. Besides this, a lot of info for first timers with flex 4 and Thermo, but nothing new for me unfortunately.

Carlos Ullua
Inspiring session from Carlos where he talks about the design proces of his upcoming site. In this projec he took the idea from his original rally car on his personal blog and wanted to take it to the next level. Amazing to see the amount of detail he and his team are putting into this thing. I also really like the view Carlos had on design processes in general. According to him it’s not a good idea to let designers think about the concept, design and throw it across the wall to developers. Instead he proposes a cooperative designer/developer concepting study after which the developers directly start building prototypes and figure out what is possible and how much further things can go concept wise. After all the prototyping is done, the designers can then fill it in with their design magic.

Stephen Downs
I absolutely loved this sessioon. Stephen talks, amongst other things, about his classes for tweening/effecting in Flex without being limited to animating inside containers. I’ve been thinking about how annoying this limitation is for a long time and was really surprised to see a briljant and working solution to this problem. Will go into it asap :)

After the first day I should say that the atmosphere at FOTB’08 is very nice. It’s different than Adobe’s Max where things tend to get a bit more formal. E.g. the inspired sessions in the evening took on forever and everybody loved it. If it wasn’t for the people of Brighton’s Dome needing to get home, I figure things would have gone on for hours :)