Another surprisingly beautiful day in Brighton.

Started the day with the “Elevator Pitches” session – 20 speakers all talking for 3 minutes each. A few that stood out to me to delve into later: zenbullets.com, a generative art blog with source code for download; swingpants.com, where we saw Jon Howard make 3 games in 3 minutes using Away3D and an undisclosed physics engine. ASAXB looked like it may be a useful way to bind .xml to .as classes and was one of the funnier pitches. Andrew Fitzgerald (aka desuade) gave a nice look at the partigen particle engine (though not the best examples were shown). Perhaps the most surprising presentation (at least to me) was from  Bartek Drozdz of everydayflash. He showed how to build a 3D bowling game using Papervision3D and Jiglibflash physics engine. Sound familiar? Well, it was very reminiscent of this tutorial I did for the techlabs a couple months ago including using a timer to determine the end of each roll and the pin skin rotation to determine if they were down. Now, Drozdz is the genius who gave us as3dmod, so I’d really like to give the benefit of the doubt, but it’s a mighty big coincidence and I have to admit, I was more than a little ticked off during the pres [Just my own ego kicking in – check out the comments].

Next up was Grant Skinner’s presentation on code optimization. Of course Grant always has way too much good stuff to try to sum it up in a quick blog post, so keep an eye on gskinner.com/talks/ for all 100 slides of this fantastic session. Also be on the lookout for his performance testing framework and Chunker.as class for help with future apps.

From code optimization to bytecode optimization with Joa Ebert. Now, most of this talk went right over my head, but that didn’t make it any less amazing. Joa showed off some low level optimizing stuff he’s been experimenting with lately and blew us away when he showed a bitmap drawing app running at a respectable steady 60 frames per second to an optimized 510 FPS! For a finale he then whipped out his java and c# to .swf compilers. Freaking beautiful stuff.

Then came a great look at Pixel Bender from the Rubik Cube juggling Paul Burnett. Great tips and examples of not only image manipulation but sound and data massaging. He said he will post the source, so be sure to check out his blog for that useful material.

Finally came a presentation on (un)conventional web applications from Ireland’s own Contrast. I saw this presentation at FOWA in Dublin and it was pretty nice. At Flash on the Beach however, it seemed a little out of place. To say that the web is “moving towards multimedia” to a room full of Flash/Flex developers is a tad anachronistic. They did win over a few with the great quote “the html/javascript coders are bringing a knife and you guys are bringing a fucking flamethrower.”

Getting ready now for the inspirational session and really hoping tonight’s party is better than last night’s (where you couldn’t talk, move or breathe and I had to immediately drag my wife out)…