The 24th and 25th June 99 saw the Newport Bay hotel in the Euro Disney Resort in Paris hosting the Macromedia European User Conference – UCON-99. There was a very large gallery of some hugely excellent multimedia and web projects from European Companies. Most of the folk there were from the average small (5-20 folk) multimedia and web firms – though most of the very big players had representation. Amongst all the enthusiastic users there seemed to be at least 20-30 or so keen and helpful macromedia folk there. I must say that having been made very cynical recently about how slowly and poorly most academics were taking to media and the web (after some very depressing conferences) some of the work on show here was somewhat shocking (a clumsy pun). It is easy to become smug about the jolly cleverness of ones own work – but when you see what some of these small focused commercial projects can deliver (all collected together like this) and then hear them talk you though it – one can can be pretty bloody impressed.

I have posted a full report, but for this story have abstracted a few headlines and urls.

Some Headlines

The 7.02 shockwave release wont be out for a couple of months, but will have quicktime 4 controls and non-rectangular movies in a window. The Flash team are bullish about the ecommerce potential of their editable text features of flash 4 – they now have a 45 strong KPMG team on site! Personally, I am impressed by their powerful implementation of mp3 for streaming audio. And the implementation of a shockwave flash player on the Palm Pilot (v5) was very sweet. There was an awful lot of games driven discussion (esp. through their new site at shockwave.com) and the new remote app that will accompany the 7.02 shock release; so even the power of the multiuser server (which MPath will make industrial strength) was discussed in this context – but the serious teaching and commercial applications of these things are very powerful.

Some Urls

Checkout Roy Stringers new concept navigation site http://www.navihedra.com. Then try this neat little example of actor casting (cute animated postcard/cartoon type idea) “zouga tv” at http://flash.tf1.fr/zouga/. Checkout http://www.Ss7x7.com for their way cool livejam797; very nice multiparty music-mixing demo. If you want to hook up with the important MultiUserServer chat you need to checkout http://poppy.macromedia.com for Sarahs pages.

A more full version of this story see : http://kmi.open.ac.uk/people/scott/reportage/eucon99/