I have some insider information saying that the opening day party will be all 60′s; like a geeky version Mad Men except with less debauchery. There’s also some roller-skating and cotton candy involved. Nuts right?

If you’re in the industry, you do not want to miss out on this event. Buy your tickets now if you haven’t done so already. And while you’re there, stop by my presentation for support.

If you want to know what you’re missing, watch the following highlight reel from last year:

Hope to see some familiar faces there.

Q: Let’s talk a bit about Flash technology.  How did you get into it?

Head: Oddly enough, I started at a place that did e-learning here in Toronto, and I thought Flash would be interesting to use for our work.  One day a third party company couldn’t get something done and asked us if we could figure it out for a project with Flash, and we did.  Ever since I’ve been a Flash person.

Q: Would you consider yourself more a designer than a developer?

Head: Definitely more of a designer, most of the things I’ve done up to now has been centered around graphic and web design.

Q: Compared to all the other possible technologies, why is it that you like Flash? What are the Pros and Cons?

Head: Flash is pretty nice since you can do whatever you want, play around and have fun with it.  It’s also nicely self-contained as one piece; you just work on it then add it wherever and don’t have to worry about browser stuff, which is nice.  Everything else you do, there’s always that question about browser compatibility, which isn’t always necessarily bad, but sometimes it is truly frustrating.

Q: Have you mostly been doing creative work, like advertising, or is it more enterprise level?

Head: Kind of neither, really.  Most of the places I’ve worked at aren’t really advertising companies, but I guess you could call them interactive studios.  They don’t exactly do their own branding work, but they do work on existing brands.  The place I work at currently often gets hired by advertising agencies that have a plan, but don’t know how to execute it.

Q: Have you ever touched Flex?

Head: I have used Flex Builder as an Actionscript editor, but never touched Flex itself.

Q: Have you had a chance to touch Flash CS5? What do you think?

Head: I have and I like it a lot.  When I first heard of it’s features at the time I thought ‘no big deal’, but then I started playing with it and thought the live movie preview on the timeline was really cool.  Since I work a lot with video, it’s saved me a lot of time.

Q: What are you thoughts on the whole iPad, HTML5, Apple closing down on the Flash platform?

Head: The whole thing is up for debate.  Do they really have to be fighting? Come on, seriously?  I really like the products from both.  It’s kind of crazy the amount of press it has gotten, even outside our industry; regular people are talking about it, even my parents ask me about it.  That’s nuts.  I mean, Apple can do what they want, its their platform, their app store and it’s kind of always been like that.  The only thing I don’t believe is that they’re doing it because they love web standards, I think it’s for their own self interest.  It sucks but its their call.

Q: Do you think it will have any repercussions on Adobe and their Flash product?

Head: I dunno.  I think there’s a lot of people that wanted to use the packager to adapt their Flash work to the iPhone, but I was always kind of curious as to what kind of content would end up there once everyone would have it.  There are a lot of Flash that could be made into an app, I know there are some up right now;  I haven’t seen them all, but the one’s I have looked pretty good.  But once everybody could just make an app with Flash, I’m sort of wondering what kind of quality there would be.  Hopefully there won’t be that much of an impact, I mean, it was one of the features that Adobe was pushing;  It’s disappointing, but there’s a lot of other features.

Q: And what about you as a designer,  are you going to learn HTML5 as well?

Head: I already plan to.  I know a lot of HTML/ CSS already and HTML5 is pretty cool especially with CSS3.  But I feel as a Flash developer, you should know that kind of stuff anyway.  If you’re going to build things for the web, this is the basic structure and if you’re want to have a good fallback for people that don’t have Flash player, as alternate content you can always use HTML5.

Q: For the future of the Flash Platform, what would you like to see?

Head: I would like to see better performance, and I’m hoping that when 10.1 comes out it will just be awesome.  But essentially I just want to see Flash do more amazing stuff, which is why we love it.  I hope that it continues to evolve and push the boundaries of what it can do.

Every year, I try to attend FITC Toronto to learn, play, network and recharge my creative battery.  There’s a lot of things that you can learn about the industry and the technology at this amazing conference.

Now, let’s do a small recap; in 2007, not long after the introduction of AIR, an ambitious project surfaced called Saffron.  This was a sexy Flash UML tool built with AIR that could be used to plan, architect and design large applications.  The creator, Samuel Agesilas, wasn’t talking much about details but he did show the Flash world a glimpse of his project.  Shortly after though, it had seemed that Samuel went completely offline.  Rumors started to surface that Samuel and his project was bought by Microsoft so that he can make a sexy, functional UML tool for Silverlight.  Nobody could confirm or deny it, Samuel wasn’t there to comment.

Everyone thought this project vanished, but at the conference there was a talk about working with Orchid, given by Samuel himself.  I thought to myself that he must of changed the name of the project.  I was hopeful that this could be his official release.

Well, I was wrong.  Orchid is a Flex alternative for creating user interfaces.  Personally, I think it’s re-inventing the wheel but I’ll save my opinion of it until I work with it.  Orchid was released that day with some documentation to support it, but a website hasn’t been created yet.

After the talk, I confronted Samuel about Saffron, if it’s still being developed and when/if he’s planning to release it.  He says the Mac version is almost complete and that the windows version is 75% (apparently, he’s using some native process for each OS which is now supported in AIR 2).  I also suggested that he open sources it so that the community can work towards it, but I think he took my suggestion with a grain of salt.

I started scouring the web for more tidbits on Saffron and only found old posts, however, there some relatively new images (August 2009) of the UI design on a personal UX website of Juraj Rosa‘s:

So there it is, Saffron is in fact still alive (oh, and I guess Samuel as well) and I figured I’d keep the community updated on it’s progress.