Belgium’s biggest web-development event (or how should I call it ;) ) is over again, and the countdown to next year’s edition has begun! And yes, that is just a screenshot from their site…

They had some big names this year, and some very good presentations. Starting out with Aral Balkan, who had lots of valid points and touched some interesting topics (such as the Google Apps engine). He also criticised the direction AS3 has taken – a Java wannabe – which is definately not something to be criticised in my eyes. Coming from a C/C++ background (granted, still in DOS-times), I always got annoyed with AS1 and 2 (I could give you plenty of reasons why) and when AS3 came out, I was finally relieved to have a real and logical OO-compliant language to work with. He also criticised frameworks such as PureMVC (actually, he reduced the whole concept of MVC to a buzzword), and showed us that you can seperate model, view and controller while still keeping a very clean and maintainable structure by just separating them in one source file and using comments… Of course, it was a single page example; I’d like to see a full-fledged application made in such a fashion, on which both several developers and designers are working… I’ve seen plenty of projects turned to rubble because of it. Nonetheless, it is true that the Flash platform has become less of a playground, and I’m hearing the complaint a lot from non-developers. In my eyes, it’s a sacrifice that needed to be made sooner or later. A programming language that invites crappy coding rather than discourages it (I’m sorry, but that’s how I feel about AS1+2), will eventually be less performant and buggy. Besides, a lot of the performance boost that AS3 got, is because of the change in language design (one of the most blatant examples: truly typed variables or classes are faster than generic objects). Then again, I guess the views on that evolution depend on who you are and what you want to do with a platform.
Anyway, enough of that rambling, back to MultiMania!

Wim Vanhenden, despite some technical difficulties, had a rather fun presentation, showing how Air can be used in combination with Flash rather than Flex, and how the Flash platform can be extended to do more interesting things. For example: communicating with Java-apps or DLL’s using socket connections, enabling us to do text-to-speech, use the Mac motion-sensor, and so on…

Stealing the show was Ralph Hauwert, who doesn’t seem to know the meaning of “impossible” ;) Pushing Flash to the limits, and then beyond with seemingly relative ease. His flying teapot was unbelievable! I could explain how it looked, but you’ll just have to see it; I hope he’ll have it on his blog sooner or later. Furthermore, he introduced his latest project called rePhlex. It looks like something to look forward to! In general, it was quite inspirational. The main lesson I got from it, was that there’s always a way and that limitations are just a challenge ;)

Last up was Mario Klingemann who needs no introduction. I’d already seen half of his presentation on Flash on the Beach ’07, but the second half was all new to me. It’s always a joy to see him solving mathematical issues in an untraditional way; using *gasp* BitmapData! How he comes up with it, who knows, but it works ;) Finally, he demoed his modular image processing tool “Peacock” for Aviary, and tho it looked a bit confusing at times, it could produce some very cool results, that would take quite a bit of time to make in Photoshop:)

All in all, a good day! Hats off to Koen de Weggheleire! :D