UCON 96
the macromedia users conference...
shocking your world?

/ front / Tues / Wed / Thur / Fri /

This evenings sneak previews had our heads swimming like the swirly animated logo for the confernence. More below.

In general, most of the presentation sessions have been mediocre to bad. You would think more presenters, especially professionals in a field of communicating ideas, would be able to do the basics of knowing (and adjusting to) the audience/client. Its disappointing to walk into a session advertised and have someone waste time with bullet slides reviewing what most of us know. It would be nice to just cut to the chase, which happens more frequently in the informal sessions. Kudos does go to the conferecens portions that left time for Q&A from the crowds.

I don't envy the task of trying to demo Lingo techniques to 500 people, but Tom McCrystal did a credible job of opening peoples minds, even if they were not in the mood to hear about hash tables. Says he, "never screw with existing code." In a large CD_ROM project, he had subject matter experts create screen story boards in Quark XPress, which then he had Lingo calling AppleScript routines to import the media and create the Lingo frames necessary for his title. When asked by an audience member how they could do AppleScript on Windows, Tom hesitated before growling, "Get a Mac" The crowd went wild, which happened several times in the conference. Tom also sheared a techniqe I liked when he spoke of using multiple castLibs- keep a castLib of handlers one uses to automate and batch editing inthe development process.

The morning keynotes gave the obligatory patronage to the coroporate future of the web. Yes, let us embrace with warmth the cable and phone companies that will call the shots. Johyn Doerr, who is some sort of venture capitalist wiz, did a credible job of being emcee. Marc Andreeson of Netscape was almost incomprehensible in his monotone double-speed voice. He looks more 42 than 24. Some wunderkid. Eric Schmidt of Sun was the most "clued-in" to the future and the tone of the audience. He said he "admits that Java is overhyped as there is no idea how to make money from Java. "except for the cool t-shirts!" like he was sporting. The best part of the session was the slick videotape "You Dont Know Web" with the young kids lip-synching "Online" to the old 60's tune "Downtown". It would have been better to have more video and less talking heads.

Look out;..the "corporate" and "commerce" web sounds like a one-way broadcast to us as users; just where is the interactivity in these environment? Why should we get excited about 10 Mbit cable modems that will trickle out to the world at 28.8?

Darrel Plant's video camera caught some Direct-L-ers at the Directo Directions session.

Ooops.. (not OOPs) I must admit falling asleep at the keyboard and waking up with a QWERTY face. That's why this is late 8-(

• Factories and XObjects
• the "use outdated Lingo" option (beter re-edit those old dir 3 files in the old version)
• XCMDs
• the when blah statement

It was mind blowing. Exciting. Almost depressing. No, make it exciting. Macromedia products are becoming incestuous. Director in Authorware. Authorware in Director. Java in Shockwave. Java in Director. Shockwave in Java. Dragging and dropping media from one app to the other. MOA and MMX and more. And more.

We saw some incredible organic modeling features for Extreme 3D. Blobs and globs and blobs and gobs with holes. All very easy to create. Lava-like logos.

The upcoming Macromedia video editing program ("KeyGrip"?) was shown with its ability to script (Lingo-like!) custom transition effects. When prompted by a question from thr audience, the big guns agreeed that such a feature might be useful in Director.

There still seems to be no sign of an ability to integrate 3D media into Director. Aaack... I was corrected; and had even seen a demo on Wednesday. "Macromedia will be releasing a QD3D Xtra in 1-6 weeks," sez David Mendels of Macromedia. "Shells Interactive showed 3D Dreams, a realtime 3D engine for Director that utilizes Direct-3D."

We saw streaming Shockwave. or "progressive play" i.e. starting to see the title before it is all downloaded. It's not clear how this will happen. Maybe it will be by careful preloading or perhaps the Afterburner will burn things in the best order. Might this mean we do not have to be lean and mean when we shock? Me thinks not. It still pays to be light in byte weight/wait.

There was something about streaming video over an intranet from an Oracle video server.

We saw a demo of Director being able to read in the labeled cue points of an audio file and some new Lingo functions so that we can better synch animation and sound. Simply by editing the cue poins in Sound Edit, one can alter the behavior of a Director movie, without ever editing in Director.

We saw Shockwave web page elements that could be dragged out of the browser onto the desktop, still fully interactive, still receiving net information. they called it "Pump Station" but the preferred name is "Drag Queen." It works when the browser is closed. i.e. a desktop shockwave player. It also can be saved and re-opened later, still fully functional (free us from the browsers!). Its doing this by some java shenanigans (?) maybe.

Speaking of Java... who realy wants to be a Java programer? A new Lingo Sripting applciation will be not only to create executable scripts for other Macromedia apps but also be able to write Lingo that can be saved as compiled Java classes.

We saw beautiful Shockwave web pages created in Freehand with anti-aliased text at multiple resolutions... and at files sizes like 12k for a full web page graphic.

There's more but the brain is overloaded.

Later, a contingent of Direct-l-ers assembled down Brennan Street for some billiards, courtesy of Terry Schussler of g/matter. The Australian national team of Dorian Dowse and Matt Craig trounced the American team of Marvyn Hortmann and Terry. This author scrathed horrribly. Also present was Gary Rosenzwieg, John Nyquist, Brian Gray, Darrel Plant, Glenn Picher, and Scott Flowers.

Even later yet a group mingled with Zav at the 1:00 AM hacker session to see some top secret Shockwave experiments and listen to Dorian Dowse's Waterdragon SWA music. Zav then showed off his shiny black steriod-pumped Beemer, and zoomed off at 110 mph through the dark streets of San Francisco....