Multi-Mania is a Belgium conference about multimedia and web: there is sessions about video, audio, web development, web design, 3D, game development, etc... It's Europe's biggest FREE multimedia fest ! Located in the nice city of Kortrijk, in the middle of Europe, the conference is attracting thousand of designers and developers with an international bunch of speakers including Aral Balkan (UK), Rob Chiu (UK), Ben Lucas Boysen (DE), André Michelle (DE), Scott Janousek (USA), Marc Canter (USA), Jason Levine (USA), Paul Burnett (USA), etc…

Day 1 - workshops

In this 9th edition of Multi-Mania, and for the very first time, they organized FREE workshops. Limited to 25 seats per workshops, lucky ones could learn about Flash Video, Flash Lite development, Creative Programming in Actionscript 3, CS4 time savers, Flash Catalyst or Flex/BlazeDS/PDF. It was a huge success, sessions filled up really fast, and surprisingly the audience was more designer centric.

Day 2 - conference

The day started with Adobe keynote: Serge Jespers made a short Augmented Reality demo followed by a quick Flash Catalyst preview (part of the MAX EcoTour demo). Then, as he promised on twitter, he showed us two "World Exclusives": a Stratego AIR game and another AIR application called "JackassWorld Pranks". I will let you guess what this last application is about, I will just mentioned that it connects to your Facebook account. Maybe it was not what we were all expecting, but it was Serge's birthday so we forgive him! Few slides about the future of Flash, AIR on mobile and Open Screen project followed, then they introduced the Adobe Mobile Packager and demonstrated some mobile apps (BACARDI Suggest-a-Cocktail).

Next session that I attended was Aral Balkan's inspiring session "Remember The Magic": if you never attended any Aral's sessions before then it's something quite hard to describe. This time he sung  to introduce his subject and the audience was in charge of the chorus! I suggest that you have a look at the pictures I took during his session. 

Third session focused on Flash Catalyst, Flash Builder ("Gumbo") and Centaur ("ColdFusion 9") workflow. Serge Jespers demonstrated the creation of the Adobe Employee Directory application, starting from an Illustrator file to the final Flex/ColdFusion application: It was pretty impressive to see the transformation of the Illustrator file into a Flex project (with states and smooth transitions) in less than 10 minutes. The built-in service introspection in Flash Builder makes it easy to connect with your your backend data. Public beta of Flash catalyst and Flash Builder should land very soon.

In the afternoon, I went to Scott Janousek's session on the "AppStore Revolution Craze": he presented the business model of the different existing mobile platforms. Really interesting and I was wondering who will create the next revolution? Will it be Palm with the launch of the Palm Pre?

There was a session later on Silverlight 3: I didn't attend it but the feedback I got from some attendees was that the session wasn’t that exciting. They showed features that are already available on the Flash Platform.

Jason Levine and Paul Burnett have done the closing keynote: they showed us latest Adobe Premiere improvements. They introduced also a new product called Adobe Story (an AIR application!) which let you create scripts. Those scripts can be later imported into onLocation to create meta data. They also highlighted the 3D capabilities of PhotoShop CS4, the new video component in Flash CS4 and some other features like the Bone tools.

I let the final words to Koen De Weggheleire (coordinator of 2M09): "I am sure this was the best Multi-Mania since we started 9 years ago, we had more then 1000 people at the event and really great speakers from around the world! We are proud that even in difficult economical times we were able to keep the event FREE for all the attendees. So of course big kudos to Adobe and all our other partners and sponsors. I also really want to thank all the attendees and speakers and I hope they will be back next year to celebrate the 10th edition ! I am already looking forward to it."

Read more from Cyril Hanquez.