Here’s the skinny, thanks to grad student Indy Hurt:
A couple weeks ago I saw an invitation for something called FlashCamp, and I decided to fill out the registration – not imagining I’d ever be selected to participate. This event was designed to bring together Flash content developers at the Adobe San Francisco office where participants would have the opportunity to develop with pre release Adobe Flash CS4 and the new Flash 10 player before they are available to the general public. These types of events are often called hackathons, and, wouldn’t you know it – “hackathon” has its own Wikipedia page. The registration form asked for number of years experience authoring Flash content (in my case, less than 6 months), and general interests (to which I simply responded “spatial applications”). Surprisingly, despite little experience and somewhat vague interests, I got an invitation!
I contacted Kailen Wright, and he was able to get an invitation as well. I drove up to San Francisco on Friday October 10th and arrived a little after the doors opened at 5:00pm. Kailen was on his way from work, so I was left to take in the amazing building that looked exactly how I imagined an Adobe building to look – lots of graphic art, clean lines, and modern fixtures. After an easy check in process, I was handed a copy of the software, an all-access badge, a few stickers, and a giant beer mug that I can’t seem to find now (but that’s another story). Everything was catered and free, including a cooler that was perpetually stocked with several types of beer – domestic and foreign.
I found a seat next to a web designer named Morgan and looked out over the sea of Mac laptops. I would guess that there were about 50 to 70 participants, and, surprisingly, all but a few were men. Kailen arrived and we listened to the organizers go through Adobe staff introductions. The first night was designated for team building. Neither one of us had much experience writing ActionScript 3, which is the programming language behind the current Flash platform. Dom Sagolla, the conference organizer, did an excellent job of helping pair experienced developers with designers. He let me pitch my idea from the stage, and Chris Thilgen found it interesting and offered to join our team to help us with the coding. Boy, did we strike gold. Chris was our ActionScript hero. Not only did he help us write the code for our app, he took the time to teach us syntax and a lot of cool tricks – but getting started was a challenge. I told Chris that we wanted to build an interesting interactive map. I gave him the two-minute GIS lesson and showed him all the different formats I could use to export a map from ArcMap. Our first challenge was interoperability. Flash is definitely not a GIS, but it’s a great application for visualizing information. We decided on an electoral map, given the current political state of affairs, and our cartogram became affectionately known as “Squishy Map.”
Saturday morning we arrived at 9:00am and coded until 10:00pm – no kidding. Exhaustion was setting in. The data behind the map was obtained from three sources: state boundaries and electoral vote count from the US Census Bureau, campaign ad spending and initial predictions from CNN, and speeches in each state obtained from Karl Grossner who was kind enough to share his data with us via email on Saturday night. Sunday was our last day to pull it all together. Some of the more advanced coding behind our application was over my head, but Kailen was asking a lot of questions and following along relatively well for someone with little ActionScript 3 experience. Chris even taught us how to use JavaScript to drive the authoring tools in Flash. While they were discussing the “whos its” and “whats its” of the XML parser I helped write the night before, I took a lap around the room and found a rolling freezer case filled with It’s It ice cream treats! I guess it was right there in the room the whole time, but you miss these things when you’re tethered to a computer monitor for 13 hours.
To wrap up the hackathon, teams submitted their applications by 1:00 pm on Sunday and presentations began about an hour later. Contest categories included coolest, best open source, best use of video, best use of sound, best mobile, best student app, most educational, best game, most useful, and honorable mentions. I think there were 33 projects submitted, and we won best student app! Overall, we got exactly what we came for: an opportunity to learn, create, and test a new release of the Adobe Flash software. As a reward, each participant received a copy of Flash CS4 worth $699. Copies of Adobe Flex were also available. Winners of the hackathon won an additional $50 American Express travelers check! I left the city around 7:00pm on Sunday. Two stops, five hours and 9 minutes later, I made it home.
Cartographically, it’s not the most stunning map, but the application works and can be reproduced in a lot less time than it originally took to build. There’s a link to the map on my web page titled “Remapping the Election,” and you can watch the video of us presenting our application, along with the other prize winning applications, here.
Hurt_Indy (2).jpg<|>1296<|>Indy (“Flash”) Hurt{|}Wright_Kailen.jpg<|>491<|>Kailen (“Flash”) Wright{|}FlashCamp_Indy_frown.jpg<|>600<|>“This was my typical expression of confusion every time something didn’t work, but the jaw-dropping guy off to the left scratching his head says it all.”{|}FlashCamp_Indy_smile_600.jpg<|>600<|>“Typical smile every time something did work.”{|}FlashCamp_Kailen_Indy_presentation.jpg<|>600<|>Kailen and Indy on the stage introducing their application, “Remapping the Election: Maps Scaled by Electoral Votes.”{|}FlashCamp_Kailen_explains_coding.jpg<|>600<|>Kailen explaining some of the mechanics behind the coding necessary to transition between the unprojected map and the cartogram.
