We Arrived in Edmonton around 5pm local time on the 15th of October. We came in Thursday night because we were going to be attending the Optional Papervision3d Workshop hosted by Ralph Hauwert . This was to be his final "Papervision3d" workshop or speaking about Papervision3d again. He has recently left the Papervision3d team to pursue his own interests.

We were with Ralph from 10am till around 5:30pm, teaching approximately 40 #Flashers the in's and out's of Papervision3d using both Adobe CS4 and Flex. By the end of the day we were all left with "on export" planet earth rotating and a moon orbiting the planet in Papervision3d.

The Conference.
FITC is a smaller conference then lets say Flash Forward. This allows for way more opportunity to speak with some of the presenters if you were so inclined. We saw some great presentation on both days. We had a chance to have some one on one time with Stacey Mulcahy talking to her about a variety of things including process and "deselopers". If you follow her Twitter account @bitchwhocodes You might think we were insane to approach her. Believe it or not She was very nice and helpful. Sorry to blow your cover Stacey.

I think the one important thing to take back from this conference overall is that in our experience attending previous flash conferences; Its easy to feel like your not good enough after seeing some of the things these guys have made. The Good thing about #FITC is that we had a chance to see people like Erik, Ralph and James beginnings. Seeing that they are in fact Human and that they started where you started. If you take the time like they did... you'll be up there speaking.

Follow FITC . Look up these other guys and subscribe to RSS or Follow on Twitter.

While we start putting the pieces in place for a new digitaloctane.com; it's a small start and a much needed shove in the right direction. Let us know what you think.

HTTP Headers form the core of an HTTP request, and are very important in an HTTP response. They define various characteristics of the data that is requested or the data that has been provided. The headers are separated from the request or response body by a blank line. HTTP headers can be near-arbitrary strings, but only some are commonly understood. - wiki

Wow, What did that just say?

There are two add-ons to firefox which will significantly help you troubleshoot problems with your site especially if your making alot of calls for assets. You should have at least 1 of them, take your pick: Firebug or liveHTTPHeaders. Both will monitor HTTP Headers for you. I am sure there others, however these are the ones i have used and have had success with.

Now lets talk about how this can help you.

When you deal with Flash in the manner that i do. Your loading a base swf and XML. loading content in various swfs who's content is loading XML, who's XML has paths to images and assets. That can be a lot of data to look at, and when something doesn't show up... Then what?

Personally, i turn to Firebug first. turn on headers and refresh the site. I then watch the headers, which is tracing every call I am making. With firebug you will quickly see red 404 show up with the file path that was called. This can very easily save you a TON of time digging through code... looking for some error only to discover you made a typo in the file name you called.

This very simple add on and change to your troubleshooting process can save you time and your sanity.

Firebug does not stop there, Firebug offers some Robust features for Inspecting elements which i will talk about at a later time. You should Install Now, And start using these great features.

You may notice that some open source projects such as Tweener, swfobject and PaperVision 3D are all on code.google. Each project has a repo accessible through a UI such as tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac). This makes it a lot easier to make sure your files are up to date with out having to download zips and manage the files yourself.

So which one should I use?

At Digital Octane we utilize both a Subversion Repository along with a Dropbox account(s). This isn't a comparison between any syncing / version control apps. Each have their own benefits and it really depends on how you plan on utilizing your files when choosing one.

Dropbox

If you are a small boutique shop like we are, Dropbox is extremely useful for syncing/sharing files between our team, clients and freelancers. It's a very simple client side installation for any user sign up is a snap. Once the install is complete the user will have a series of Dropbox folders added to their Documents folder.

Making file sharing a breeze for non tech savvy clients. For those of you that are used to another method for version control you may feel a bit hindered by the lack of file/folder controls. If this is your first jump into remote file syncing or version control for your files. You wont really know what you are missing. Just knowing that if you accidentally lost a file or need to access your file from the web you can.

Subversion: The 30 second breakdown

Subversion's overall controls are more robust compared to the abilities of Dropbox, but there comes a bit of  administration with Subversion and a little bit of know how (Which I will not get into here) to get things up and running. If you choose to go the Subversion route. You will be greatly rewarded for your hard work.

Here are a list of features within subversion

Some things to keep in mind about subversion

1. You will need to install subversion on a dedicated server/machine that you can access locally and/or remotely.
2. It's in your best interest to install client side controls such has tortoise svn(Win) or versions(Mac) to make it easier on your users.
3. Read up on project trunks and branching. If you have a good process for branching your code base. It can make deploying code to dev, staging and production servers much easier.
4. Subversion has pretty good integration with task management systems such as Jira (using a plugin) I am sure others are out there as well.
5. The Subversion project is quite large and community is very active.

So what did we cover?

In this article I talked about Subversion and Dropbox but there are a ton of other projects out there and Adobe has actually started shipping their own version control within their Creative Suite. Regardless of which product you choose. It's a good idea to start implementing version control today if you haven't already.

Oh and if you are interested in using Dropbox how about using this link (https://www.getdropbox.com/referrals/NTUxNDA4ODk) so we get a referal bonus?

Over the next few weeks we will be highlighting some of the techniques Mack and I utilized to create this blog along with our own Website (which is still in development).

These are not only programming and design techniques but also production and process tips that have really helped us through out our careers.

I'd really like to take a moment to thank every one who has given us constructive feed back! It is much appreciated.

While I originally felt let down by the experience. I took some time before writing this post to reflect on this summers conference and to give Mack and I some time to get our act together. 2008''s conference was presented by Metaliq and there were some major differences between Flash Foward San Fran and other conferences like FF Boston. The location did afford some great speakers from the west coast and a very memorable performance from Zoe Keating. One of the major differences was the way the event was organized. Instead of pseudo workshops around an hour+ long with a great deal of overlap, the event was changed to shorter monologues about inspiration and what drives each speaker to do what they do. I feel this is a topic you discuss after the conference finished for the day and you head to the bar. There wasn''t enough time for some speakers to get into the nitty gritty let alone opening up Flash or writing a line of code.

Instead the conference was riddled with Infomercials in the guise of "lessons", a few professional speakers that do not really care or have any involvement in our industry and a pretty big hole in the pocket of a small boutique design firm from the East Coast. I don''t want to portray the event as all doom and gloom. I give Metaliq and Beau a lot of credit for putting the event together and some of the speakers were truly inspiring including Grant Skinner, David Carson, Keith Peters, Erik Natzke and Stacey Mulcahy (who gave one of the best presentations of the entire event) to name a few. I think this was a great first step for Metaliq to help make Flash Foward even better in the years to come. I really put a majority of the disappointment I felt after the conference on myself for not really being an active part of the community.

Now that I think about it, in a way Flash Forward San Fran was a success. It was inspirational for me after all; it inspired me to create this blog and to put up or shut up.\r\n\r\nHopefully in 09 you will see Mack and I posting a lot more about the techniques that we utilize within some of our projects as well as some of the tricks of the trade we have created/developed or outright stolen to get the job done. So fly with me! FLY!