2008 Conference round-up

A list of conferences I’ll be giving talks at this year so far. If you’re in the area you should check them out:

  1. FiTC: Toronto (April 19-22, Toronto, Canada) – Always a good time Flash conference up in The Canadia. I’ll be giving a talk about the new YouTube API features we announced today, specifically the Flash and Javascript player control APIs and about the new Chromeless player.
  2. Google I/O (May 28-29, San Francisco, CA) – A conference all about Google apps and how to use them. I’ll be giving a talk on using the YouTube player APIs and Chromeless player.
  3. Flashbelt (June 10-13, Minneapolis, MN) – One of my favorite Flash conferences is back this year with a ton of great speakers. I’ll be giving a presentation on lessons learned while rebuilding the YouTube video players from scratch.
  4. Singularity (October 24-26th, Everywhere) – Singularity is a new ‘conference’ that takes place online – all sessions are broadcast over the internet, and there’s a TON of speakers for this thing. It will be very interesting to see how it turns out – I think it has the potential to change the way technology conferences happen online.

I think that’s about it for now. I’m interested in talking about the YouTube API stuff at more conferences. So if you are running a conference and would be interested in having me speak, please let me know.

The 2008 update!

Hello!

I haven’t posted anything in quite a while, but I suppose I’ve been busy enough to justify it. So, I’ll start with an update to what I’ve been doing over the last few months:

  1. Rebuilding the YouTube video players. Nearly from scratch. More on this later.
  2. Helping out here and there with SWFObject 2.0 – It’s nearly complete, go try it out. This is a completely rewritten version (sorry, not backwards compatible), but we think it’s an overall better solution to any other Flash embed method out there.
  3. We got a puppy.
  4. Mostly enjoying San Francisco. The city is a pretty cool place to live. If you’re a nerd. So far it doesn’t quite measure up to New York City, but it’s still growing on me. My main complaint is that everyone here is crazy crazy crazy about the hot new web startups or who you work for and what you can do for them. New York had a little bit of this, but at the same time there was so much other diversity of interests it just seemed so much more interesting. I used to think that a city full of nerds would be awesome, but now I’m not so sure. Anyway, enough of the SF bashing :).

In a couple of weeks I’ll be heading off to my first SXSW. Should be very exciting, as I normally just hang out with Flash or Javascript nerd conferences, but this one seems so much bigger.

SWFObject 2.0 Beta

Today at Adobe MAX I’ll be giving a presentation with Michael Williams on the next version of SWFObject (previously the SWFFix project). As most of you probably know, I’ve been working on a project with Bobby van der Sluis and Michael Williams (From Adobe) that was going to become the de-facto standard for embedding Flash/Flex content. Well we decided that we didn’t like the new name all that much, so we are adopting the SWFObject name for the project.

The new version is a complete rewrite from SWFObject 1.5, so we’ll need lots of testing before we officially launch it and replace the older SWFObject and UFO scripts, and since we have Adobe involved, they will be including this embed system in the Adobe authoring tools in the future.

The SWFObject project is moving to Google Code, where you can download the source from svn, grab the latest build, or file bugs or read documentation.

I’ve also created a new Google Group for SWFObject support questions and discussion.

If you are at MAX today, our presentation is at 2:45pm in room W-196c and it’s called “Flash Detection and Embedding: An open source solution”.

If you can’t make it today, we’ll be doing it again tomorrw (Wednesday) at 11am in room W-185d.

I got a Wii

Add me as a Wii friend, or whatever they call it:

3689 8870 8247 5302

I don’t think I have any games that use this yet… Just sports and Zelda.