Glasgow Flash Meetup

Well Friday night was something special. The greatest minds in the Glasgow Flash community met up to discuss all things Flash related and to have a good ol’ iPhone bashing session. But wait a minute, it turns out that even Flash devs are divided by all this Flash v iPhone malarkey. Incredulously some even seem to think that Steve jobs is right to ban Flash from the iPhone! What the frak! The night nearly ended-up in fisty-cuffs I tells ya. Oh and a special guest from Finland turned up too, but let me introduce everyone first.

So who are all these brilliant individuals? Well the group was kinda split into two camps – actual Flash developers (myself, Lindsey, Jamie and Dave), and special hardcore mobile Flash Player developers (Alex, Cameron, and Dave again). You mean to say you had actual C engineers from Adobe at Glasgow Flash Meetup? Well not exactly. You see these clever dudes used to work for a company who built their own Flash player for mobile even before Macromedia released Flash Lite 1. Pretty cool huh?

To be honest, all the individuals I’ve mentioned are so good at what they do it makes me sick, but I’m gonna try and not hold it against them, and actually sing their praises a little. Let me start with Lindsey and Jamie. You see they’re both super special because unlike most people they’re pretty amazing coders and artists. What you don’t believe me? Well take a look at Lindsey’s gallery then, and this photo of an amazing painting Jamie did of a cheeseburger sitting on an Atari ST. If you take a look at the comic strips in this post you’ll realise that Jamie is a bit of a loose cannon but please don’t hold it against him.

Now onto the C engineers. Well Alex still works for the same company that produced the Flash Player and he’s also currently working on an XBox game in his spare time. I honestly think Alex must be the best C coder in the world. In fact I barely understand a word he says, mostly because I think he actually talks in C rather than English. Cameron too is a C guru who loves registering great domain names (his latest is a cracker) and dreams of stealing money from cash machines.

Finally there’s the enigma known as Dave. I could write several pages about Dave (in fact I did just that once) but this quick paragraph should suffice. Dave is an Apple fan boy and can code in almost any language. For several years he worked as a C engineer with Alex and Cameron writing a Flash player. His career took a turn for the worse when he started sniffing glue. Before Dave knew it, his life was out of control and he found himself reduced to coding in ActionScript. Even today he works full-time as an ActionScript 3 developer, but secretly dreams of the day when Steve Jobs successfully purges the planet of Flash.

It was a good night. Jamie and Lindsey had a big argument about Flash on mobile. I tried to stay impartial, as did Dave. Later on Jamie went a little crazy and started talking about killing animals or something!? The whole Flash on mobile/iPhone debate was very interesting. Jamie seemed to think that running Flash on mobile was simply impossible. Others argued that HTML5 and JavaScript on mobile wouldn’t be any faster than Flash. Personally I passionately believe that there is a place for Flash on mobile so it was good to see Lindsey fighting in my corner.

The night was made extra special by the appearance of a guest of Jamie’s who’s currently working for Nokia. I seem to remember loud music, lasers and pyrotechnics going off as he entered the room. But then again that might just be my mind playing tricks – I do like my Nokia phones. It was kinda like being in the same room as a rock star so it took me a while to pluck up the courage to talk to him. Glad I did though coz the dude had some pretty interesting things to say. For liking Nokia so much he installed a secret app on my phone. It turns any photographs you take into comic strips complete with speech bubbles. Pretty sophisticated stuff don’t you think? Sure did come in handy for this post.