During Devoxx 2008 we were preparing demos for the JavaFX Keynote including a demo for JavaFX Production Suite called Swish. Swish is a demo where we take a photoshop file of graphics and an Illustrator file with animation paths and put together a small animation using those resources in JavaFX. Then we can take a new set of graphics and paths and swap them out with the same code and get a completely new look for the animation. You can watch the standard version of the Swish demo on the  JavaFX Videos page on the video called “Designer-Developer Workflow”.
 

 

At Devoxx Danny Coward asked if we could tweak the graphics and add a Devoxx logo or similar. I asked Stephan Janssen if he could send me some of the Devoxx graphics and he sent me the graphics that were being projected behind the speaker and slides on the big screens. As I am a perfectionist and can never do the simple thing I spent some of the day before the keynote creating a complete Devoxx theme for the Swish demo.
 

When I showed the graphics to Stephan Janssen he said half joking (I think!) wouldn’t it be cool if we could replace the graphics behind the slides and speaker with this animation. After some discussions we worked out that if I could create a full HD video loop 1920×1080 then they had the technology to project that on the big cinema screens. So not to be one to let a challenge go by I created a full HD version of the graphics and we ran the JavaFX application on Martin’s MacBook Pro as it was the only machine we had access to with full HD resolution screen. We then screen recorded it and spent the rest of the night creating and encoding a video loop. So while everyone was walking into the room and during the performances by the Beatboxer Roxorloops our video was playing on the big screen.
 

It was a whole pile of fun so maybe next year Stephan can arrange a machine which we can install JavaFX and have animated backgrounds for all the talks. I think we were all impressed that JavaFX could pull off full HD animation, makes me want to write a video titling tool in JavaFX 🙂