Keith Peter's art - During his 60 minutes, Keith Peters talked about one of his newer websites artfromcode.com and making, well ehm, art from code. Keith showed off some pieces he wrote out in the past few months and explained some of the logic behind them.

Mario Klingemann's tinkering - Just before lunch Mario Klingemann set off to talk about triangles in his session titled "The tinkerer's box". Starting out with dividing up triangles in a seemingly plain manner, he gradually added functionality and eventually ended up with some really amazing stuff. Very neat indeed.

Jared Ficklin's sound - Had Jared Ficklin been my highschool science-teacher then (to say the least) I would have been a hell of a lot more interested in the subject. During his session "Seeing sound" he showed us how similar most Nirvana-songs really are, how to make a spectrum analyzer that visualizes audio with fire and the reach of sound-waves with smoking barrels (litterally).

more photos of FITC Amsterdam 2009 on my Flickr profile

Ralph Hauwert's pixel-pushing - During his session "Professionally pushing pixels (with Flash 10)", Ralph Hauwert showed off some really neat tricks with Pixel Bender, the preview-version of Adobe's C/C++ magic-box for Flash codenamed Alchemy, and the new 3D API in Flash (demos of the latter were posted on his blog back in november)

Grant Skinner's coding-standards - Right after lunch Grant Skinner made a very solid attempt on trying to get people to write more decent code during his talk titled "Things every Actionscript developer should know". To us the most valuable part of the session was where Grant shed his light on the process of going from being a scripter (focused on completion) to being a developer (focusing on correctness, i.e. perfection in code-structure) and ultimately becoming an architect (mainly focusing on getting the job done cleanly) - a real eye-opener, 'nuff said.

Florian Schmitt's story - Nearing the end of the day and starting to notice the effect of an overload of information I sat down at Florian Schmitt's session "Everything was beautiful and nothing hurt" simply looking for some cool and inspiring stuff, and eventually getting exactly that, and more than some.
Florian told his story about moving from London to Germany with his wife Alexandra in the late nineties, setting up the now famous design-studio Hi-ReS!. Florian's session was in my opinion one of the most inspiring and creativity-boosted sessions of the day, hands down.

more photos of FITC Amsterdam 2009 on my Flickr profile

Here's a quick summary:

Record type - The record type is like a light-weight class and lets you define a set of properties that any variable of that type should have.

Array type - The array type lets you specify the allowed datatypes for values in your array, in a semi-indexspecific way:
type someArray = [boolean, int, string];

This also goes for rest-argument arrays in method-signiatures, which is hellacool.

Union types - ECMAScript 4 allows you to specify multiple allowed datatypes for a property, return-type, etc:
var n:(int|uint)

Nullable & non-nullable types - With the ? and ! characters you can (respectively) allow or keep variables from carrying null-values. The same goes for classes.

Lexical block scoping - ..gives you just a little more power over the scope to which your variables and functions are local. Just surround the required scope with accolades ( { and } ) and declare your variable with 'let' instead of 'var'.

One-line methods - Lets you declare write a function in pretty much the same way as you would a one-line if-statement.

||= - Easy for assigning default-values:
iDontWantToBeNull ||= "not null" // value is only assigned if var is null

Method overloading! - Hooray. Yeah.

..use the generic keyword.

Operator overloading - Useful if you would want to have + (the plus-operator) perform a concat-operation when executed upon arrays.

cast-operator - As in AS3 there's still a difference between the as-operator and the oldskool-way of casting (MyClass(myVar)), the cast-operator will be introduced to replace the latter.

Datatype switching - ECMAScript 4 will allow for variables their datatypes to be evaluated through a switch-statement, which is kinda cool.

Multiline strings - Putting three double-quotes at the start and end of your string will allow you to have it spawn multiple lines, you also won't have to escape any double-quotes you have in your triple-quoted string.

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For those of you interested, here's the online version of Colin's presentation:
moock.org/lectures/newInECMAScript4

Having overslept I walked into today's first presentation not before halfway through, and honestly I instantly regretted not having been on time. Koen de Weggheleire did a really good job entertaining the audience (which still seemed kind of sleepy and reluctant with applauding) with his presentation about bitmap-manipulation. Especially the fly-smashing part really got me smiling.

The rest of the day was really just one big bunch of inspiration, seeing some really beautiful artwork by Jared Tarbell (here are the pieces he showed) and also Erik Natzke.
Also really mind-blowing was all of the audio-stuff Andre Michelle had to show (but more about that later).

In my opinion the best part of today was James Paterson's (most inspiring) presentation. I was already familiar with the work he's done for VH1 and as it turns out I had already come across his website a couple of years ago, so seeing him show off all of his insanely awesome animations, characters and drawings was althemore exciting/interesting.

Also Colin Moock had quite a few interesting things to say about the new ECMAScript and Actionscript 4.

Fortunately Jonathan did make it to FITC and we met up halfway throughout the day.

Right now I'm going to write an end to this post but I'll be sure to write some more later this week about some of the actual lectures themselves. Stay tuned!

I'm particularly excited about getting to see Joshua Davis talk, I remember being baffled when I first saw his work. Also, I'm very curious as to what Erik Natzke will be talking about, but I guess I'll find out tomorrow..

I'll try to keep you guys posted over the course of the next two days.