From their site:

What is a workflow conference? It’s an opportunity for Web professionals to learn how to use their tools and collaborate with their teams more effectively. It’s two full days of intense real-world information from leading professionals in the business, including many Adobe Evangelists and Adobe Community Professionals.

I’m on the speaking bill with some great professionals that I admire and respect. Adam Flater, Andy Matthews, Andy Powell, Ben Stucki, Scott Janousek and so many others. It’s going to be a fantastic conference. It’s taking place from June 19-20. This two day event is discounted with Early Bird pricing of $175 (ends April 1). Tickets will be $225 after that. A great price for this much information.

I really love these smaller community centered events. They are a great opportunity to connect with regional professionals that share the same interests as you. Perfect!

Massive Attack-Splitting the Atom-directed by Edouard Salier from edouard salier on Vimeo.

Director : Edouard Salier
Commissioner : Svana Gisla
Production : Scream Park, Paris
Executive Producer : Anne Lifshitz
Post Production : Digital District
Post producer : David Danesi
CGI: Jean Lamoureux, Rémi Gamiette, Kevin Monthureux, Jimmy Cavé
Art & Compositing : Julien Michel, Xavier Reyé.
Flame: Christophe Richard

As a professional, it can sometimes become more about the day to day. The grind. You need to take a step back every once in a while and experiment. Like these guys…

Read on.

So what tools are worth playing with? Here are some toys I have had fun with over the last couple years… Maybe if you get some time, you should check ‘em out. In general, I would recommend just picking the ones you want to play with based on how much fun it looks or if you have any interesting ideas percolating that look like they might be tackled with that tool. Don’t look at it from only an angle of commercial applicability.

• Silverlight – Unless you have been living under a rock, you have encountered the Silverlight plug-in somewhere. Olympics video, MLB and NFL have all deployed content in the plug-in. If you are not a Mac only developer, you should at least install the toolkit and try to see how easy it is to rebuild some of your basic Flash stuff in this format. The codebase tends to be a little cleaner overall, as it’s a bit more modern and has less of a history than ActionScript does.
• JQuery – Like dot syntax? Hate JavaScript because of it’s lack of structure and OOP? Maybe you dislike it’s over-verbosity? Whatever your reason, give this JavaScript API a shot. It will seriously change the way you look at ECMA/DOM scripting. Since first dabbling with other JS APIs like Prototype, MooTools, etc, I have standardized on JQuery and really, I no longer fear or dread writing JS. I would like a better standardized testing and integrated IDE (Firebug + a Text editor is okay, but there is so much room for improvement), but learning JQuery has made JavaScript a lot more fun for me.
• Processing and ProcessingJS – Processing has been around for a while. It’s now a 1.0 release, no longer Beta. You can pull some serious stuff off with it. A very robust Drawing API and support for GL. Wow. On top of that, the library was recently ported straight to JavaScript, so no Applets are required to render sketches in the browser. The performance isn’t quite stellar (it’s not that bad, though, either), but really, this is an amazing feat of engineering. Expect this space to get a lot hotter as browsers start to add GL support in the impending HTML5 era.
• iPhone Dev Tools – No ‘buts’ about it. Developing for the iPhone platform is hot. Apps are popping up like crazy and with the iPad on the verge of release, it is only going to get more so. So, why not get on the bandwagon and write something? Well, beyond the politics and approval process of getting your app in the store, there is the challenge of learning a very complex and expansive language, Objective C. Couple with that the CocoaTouch API and a rather complex provisioning and deployment process needed to build and test on your own device and you will quickly realize that as a Flash dev, you aren’t in Kansas anymore. That doesn’t mean you can’t dabble though. If you are a student or educator, you can get free access to the iPhone dev program. Also, you can try out the Unity platform for a really powerful game creation toolkit that also will open a world of advanced 3D online gaming and possibly even Wii development. With the next generation of Flash just around the corner, there will be opportunity to use the iPhone packager to get your Flash apps on the iPhone, too, so why not start your research early?
• VDMX/VJ tools – If you are more into the visual side of Flash (animation and dynamic drawing), doing generative graphics or have investigated using Flash as a video switcher or live performance tool, you should really check into this type of software. VDMX is perfect for glitching video or acting as a visual accompaniment to a electronic set or art installation. Completely configurable, media friendly and super powerful, VDMX is made to perform live. If you have some musician friends, use your media production skills to augment their performances. Tons of fun!
• VVVV or Quartz Composer – Related to the VJ tools, but also capable of doing much more in terms of programmatic and generative effects, VVVV and QuartzComposer both offer node based editor spaces. These types of tools should be familiar to old-timers that played with Hypercard or Apple Media tool. If you haven’t come from that back ground, prepare yourself for a bit of a learning curve, but wow, once you get rolling with these tools, watch out! The limits are way way out there. So much cool stuff is possible with these using protocols like UDP and OSC, multi-node environments and on and on.
• NodeBox and Context Free Drawing – I have lumped these two in together due to the somewhat similar outputs: images and animations. They are both scripting based drawing tools. NodeBox uses Python. ContextFree uses a set of rules called “grammars”. These grammars’ syntaxes somewhat resemble C/C++. The drawings these produce can be simple or really really in depth. Each of the apps have examples of the work you can produce with ‘em at their respective sites. It looks like the upcoming FlashBelt conference has a session on NodeBox, so you could get schooled up on it before hand. NodeBox would be really sweet IMHO if it has a server-side version that could do dynamic image creation as a CGI script. As it’s made with Python, I’m sure that wih enough tinkering, you could probably pull it off.
  

Some of the ones I have been wanting to try out, but just haven’t gotten around to.

• haXe- HaXe is a multiplatform language. While most other languages are bound to their own platform (Java to the JVM, C# to .Net, ActionScript to the Flash Player), haXe is capable of outputting to JS, Flash, C++ and a lot more. Pretty cool. ECMA style programming for client-side, server-side & desktop. Are you using HaXe? Done any cool stuff? I’d love to see it.
• OpenFrameworks – At The Iona Group, we do a lot of installation work. It’s fun. Sometimes Flash doesn’t cut it. One of the avenues I have considered going down was using OpenFrameworks. Check out this video for some cool info on it. High resolution output and lots of awesome hardware integration.
  

  made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.

So… What are you playing with these days? I’d love to see what you have going on.