I returned home from FITC Toronto 2 nights ago and I’m still trying to catch up with everything. Five days away really adds up when I’m in the middle of school, work and a quickly growing little boy I can’t get enough of.

FITC or “Flash in the Can” was an amazing conference. There is a lot of great and new things happening in the Flash community. Several of my favorite designers / Flash developers were speaking and it was one event not to be missed.

A few of my favorites were Marcos Weskamp, James Patterson, Grant Skinner, David Carson, Jared Tarbell, Bradley Grosh, Joshua Davis, and Yugo Nakamura. Wow! That is almost every session I attended. With the exception of one or two sessions they were all absolutely golden.

It was refreshing to have a mix or traditional designers like David Carson (the only presenter that used an actual slide projector) and other web technologies like Processing and Avalon.
I’m totally going to check out Processing and build some heavy duty pixel animations. After looking at the Java language used compared to ActionScript, it should be very similar to programming in Flash.

A few other things I’m inspired dig deeper into are Coldfusion, thanks to Marcos and 3DS Max, thanks to Gmunk. The work these guys have done is among the best I’ve seen and is truly leading the way in the interactive and motion design.

Toronto is a great city, very huge–reminded me of Manhattan. I have to admit I have not heard the F-word in the last year as much as I did the 5 days I was there. I knew it was going to be an interesting weekend when the cab driver from the airport spent 15 minutes trying to sell us some “call girls.” Our hotel was right on lake Ontario with a beautiful view of the city and the lake. We ate very ethnic and I only got the rizzuns once (and when it hit, it was a very good thing we were staying in the same hotel as the conference… 3 trips man).

The smaller venue was excellent as it allowed easy access to personally chat with the speakers and better odds in the raffle. I actually won a DVD in the raffle.

Photos of the Event: here, here and here (ooh, even videos)

Notes of the event: here, here, All found here, plus using the MX tween (I missed this one)