#AdobeMAX 2011, Day 2: Sessions & Sneak Peeks
Today, Flash gets physical with Arduino, Developing High Performance 2D Mobile Games With Adobe AIR, Max Sneak Peeks, and Max Bash.
Developing High Performance 2D Mobile Games With Adobe AIR
In this lab session,Lee Brimelow demonstrate by the example about best practices for mobile games & GPU rendering. It starts with the usual: reuse objects, create and destroy them as less as you can. Use Vector instead of Array.
In GPU rendering, you have to use cacheAsBitmap and cacheAsBitmapMatrix on all visual objects. Rendering as vectors is not going to use GPU rendering.
Flash Gets Physical: Connecting with Game Controllers, Arduino and Sensors
Starting a session by giving to every attendee a battery and a LED to illustrate was a brilliant idea. The other very good idea was to show a bicycle wheel which, coupled to an Arduino board and a few LEDs, display messages on the wheel using the old retinian persistence trick.
Despite the fact that Arduino is not officially pushed by Adobe, it seems that the whole open-source-hardware thing gets more and more interest from the Flash community. It makes sense when you consider the long history of Flash, following Director in kiosks and installations.
The session was unfortunately too short to explore things on the technical side, but long enough to expose the different ways to connect Arduino to the Flash Player.
Max Sneak Peeks
I won’t talk a lot about those, all the videos are here if you want to see the demos. So the Sneak Peeks are a classic from MAX, showing what Adobe engineers are working on. I divided them into 2 categories:
Gadgets (really cool, or just part of the usual Adobe stuff):
- Rubbadub
- Image deblurring
A very interesting demo about a very old problem: fixing blured images. The filter works by finding a blur shape (the black square on the right), then fix the blur pixel by pixel based on the shape. Might be integrated in later releases of Photoshop.
- Video Meshes
- GPU parallelism
- Local Layer Ordering
- Pixel Nuggets
- Automatic Synchronisation of Crowd Sourced Videos
- Reverse Debugging
- Monocle
- InDesign Liquid Layout
This is going to put many people working on content websites, such as magazines, newspapers, on the dole. Adobe completed the loop with their biggest clients, they now don’t need developers or third-party to make and maintain websites. InDesign will allow them to publish directly to all devices in HTML5, and the Creative Cloud will allow them to host the files. This is part of long trend which was a big part of that MAX, meaning linking print, mobile and web for good.
Max Bash
The Bash is a also a MAX tradition so it seems, it’s basically some kind of party. Good food, free beer and drinks, video games and… Weezer as the closing act.
Make it geekier: add a few projectors and game consoles.
The location offered nice views on Downtown LA.
