Heh! here is finally the post, it's quite late, 4:13am, I've just arrived home, but I still have some energies for writing this..

So, today was in fact my first day in the place. Went there just first time in the morning. I went by tube, and I realized that there are new kind of trains (more futuristic) in barcelona (just some), cool! Once there I went directly to the CDMON to complain about the crash of the server yesterday!! hehehe, just kidding, just went there to speak a bit with Marc Palau which gave me two t-shirts.. a CDMON one and a promsite one. After that, I checked the other stands (which were upstairs this year), bought the last Icons book "Web design: Flash sites" at the Loren Art stand and meanwhile had a super fast chat with Sergi of niubc.

So after that I went to the roots room to hear the conferences.To be honest I don't remember too much about some of them... The decoration this time was much cheaper than previous years (IKEA).. Anyway, let's say something about the  guys doing the conferences...
 
WIG-01 (web)
I didn't see too much from them, I just arrived when they were almost finishing, however the motions they where showing were pretty cool. Also, they looked like two young english guys with a nice attitude.

Waskman (web)
I had a personal problem with these guys. I tried to contact them in order to do some work together but after trying to contact them in some different ways they didn't get back to me. Having said that, I had to admit that some of the project they did were quite interesting, reminds me a bit of what my brother tried to do as a company, but heh.. these guys look more succesfull than my brother.

Then, it was lunch break, so I went to the restaurant we went the last year where I had very nice food for cheap prizes. I also did the mistake of all those british foreigners, asking for a 1liter sangria as it was very cheap. After drinking all of it, I had to go to rest a bit in some of the kinds-of-beds that they had in the same level of the stants. I was veery drunk :S!

Folkert Gorter (web)
I was still drunk, but I was still able to listen what the people said to me ;) IIt was very interesting to see one of the guys which is behing the super succesful newstoday.com. However, the guy was quite stressed because the public and had some troubles meanwhile speaking.. However, the stuff he was showing was quite interesting, a little bit too conceptual and weird sometimes but interesting..

Chuck Anderson (web)
I'd seen some illustrations from this guy before. And I'm sure you did too. Somehow he was able to create a nice style for images just adding some shines, particles and colours on the top of grey in the images. Pretty similar to the work I did for Stargazer but with better results. Pretty fun and relaxed guy being very honest and also doing a good speech, showing mainly his work.

Supperstudio (web)
Ok, these ones are spanish ones, and as spaniards, they had to do something rude and with lack of respect. They had these chocolate tablets with they were going to give to the audience. At the beginning they were putting them on piles on the front, but then somehow they started to throw them very violently to the audience. It was pretty scare cos you didn't want one of those chocolate tablets hitting in your eye or something. However, the speech was interesting, they mainly do work for the supermarket EROSKI. Packaging, posters, motiongraphics.. everything with a nice end result.  They also mentioned some interesting tips of the sector like people using body cream instead of a soup to make the picture for the packaging of a soup, just because the texture of the body cream looks better than the real soup. Weird.

Ze Frank (web)
Oh! That one was one of my favourites. he don't know too much about design. He don't know too much about programming (well, he actually knows quite a bit..). Well, he knows a bit of all but it's not the best he can do. He is just a show-man, and he does great shows, it was a 1hour show were I didn't stop laughting. Some themes he was talking about were a little bit mixed, but in general was a great show. You should check his stuff.

Hi-Res (web) + Nanika (web)
Hi-Res! Finally I saw them! I always wanted to see them in live. Very nice guys again showing the works they did recently. One of the interesting things of Hi-Res is that usually the final "product" is quite ugly, but it does have a lot of meaning and the ideas on it are that good that the design doesn't really matter. The most impressive thing was when Andreas Muller showed his piece For All Seasons rendered in realtime in a webcam image, where he was showing a paper with a pattern on it. The engine detected the pattern, then detected the perspective of it, and rendered the worlds there, just fitting in the "real world". Nice!!

Kyle Cooper (web)
The last one was the idol of masses Kile Cooper. My first impression was that was just and old guy that was just blabling about endless stories losing the topic totally and after 20min of blabling stopping and thinking, what I was talking about?! nevermind, just put that video. Also I felt like he was still living about the credits he did for se7en. He showed some other credits he did, and the only ones that I quite liked where Wimbledon ones. Which I liked a lot the first time I saw them but didn't know that Kile did them. As some of the previous guys he was talking saying (or atleast the poor oldie guy was trying to)  "don't let the software define the result". I think that is a very interesting statement.

Once that one was finished I went to say hi to Vent'daval & co. Then we went to have some dinner and ended up at Fonfone where some guy was playing very good techno sometimes.

Well, 5:00 now, time to sleep! :D

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Ok, I'm still at home. I think my plane will arrive at 21:00 more or less. That means that I won't see anything!!

Things that I won't be able to see and I really wanted to:
Bradley Grosh (GMUNK)
WeWorkForThem
Scott Hansen (ISO 50)
Rob Chiu (The Ronin)
insert-coint.tv

:'(

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In no more than two hours I'll depart once again to BCN. Yeah I know "why you didn't say it earlier?", my mother said the same ;)

I'm going mainly for the OFFF festival where I did an speech the last year. I wanted to do an installation this year, but I didn't have time+motivation to produce it. Luckily, Spring Digital will pay me the flight+entrance thanks to the interesting "May: Make yourself more interesting" approach.

I'll try to do a little bit of report of the festival just in case I think it worth it :)

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I think this is cool enough to have a post here...

As some of you may know, Macromedia (fuck Adobe!) is already working on the next version of Flash (Flash 9) which will introduce ActionScript 3. The way of coding in ActionScript3 is totally different from ActionScript1, so I'll probably jump directly to ActionScript3. I'm right now still trying to move to program with Classes and stuff.

Anyway, you may think, so what's the new stuff in Flash9? Usually the people think that in each version they don't do too much.. Well, they do quite a lot, but mainly for Actionscript (which it what it needs). Now is turning to something similar to JAVA, which is cool. There is a lot of new functions and things you can do, but one of the coolest one is that with AS3 you'll be able to read binary files, parse them and stuff like that. So, don't be surprised if I tell you that people already did a C64 emulator.



(You will need Flash 9 player beta in order to see it.)

I wonder how my demoscene effects may look when moving to AS3.

Btw, If you want to read more about that C64 emulator done in flash, check out this blog.

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Hehehehe!!

Following the demoscene oldschool effects in Actionscript saga.. Here we go with the Tunnel! This time I had to render at 40x40 in order to reach atleast 23fps..



However, this time, in case you got a super machine as desktop, you got a "hi-res" (100x100) version too!



The texture used in this effect was done by a friend of mine (trace), which you can also download from here

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And here it's! the plasma effect!
Unfortunatelly I'm not able to optimize it, so I'm still rendering at 50x50.



VIEW EFFECT (fast with IE)
DOWNLOAD SOURCE

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For some reason, I was trying to code a plasma effect yesterday with Actionscript. I never tried to code an effect like that, and never know that it was a very basic code which really need optimizations in order to make it work fast. However, I liked better the interfere function, so I used that one by now..

I didn't do any optimizations to the code yet (so it's just a 50 x 50), but managed to do my own colour palette, and also added a Convolution Matrix to give it a little bit of bump effect.


See it in action! :D

Surprise! this time the source file is available ;)

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Ok, 2:56am, time to go to sleep. But before that I'll spam you with my latest experimental work. I called it doobscii. These days I had to do an illustration done just with types for Spring. At some point, I had the idea that instead of just doing the illustration with Illustrator (er), it was going to be much more interesting doing it with Actionscript and Flash8. I still don't know how i'm going to export the render to a vector file (maybe exporting to .ps as it's an easy format (and fun!!)), however sole mentioned something about exporting the flash to .pdf, but i don't know if it will export as a vector.

Anyway, the firsts tests I did ended up quite well imho, so I did an small gallery with all them, hope you like it!





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Looks like if you have a code like this in flash:
getURL("?section="+section);

I'll work in every browser as expected, like going to index.php?section=about, for example..

However, looks like in Safari, it appends the string in the URL, so it will look something like that:
index.php?section=about?section=products

Nice, isn't it?

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After spending half of the day trying to understand all the code of FCKeditor, modifying it a lot, doing thousands of tests (in order to change the color of the links in the editor) I decided to stop using it and trying with TinyMCE. The funny thing was that reading the editor_content.css file I found out this part:

/* Important is needed in Gecko browsers inorder to style links */
a { color: green !important; }

So if you have the same problem, just add a new style for the <a> tag in the file fck_editorarea.css with the !important thing in the end.

More about the !important rule here

ARFF!!

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