Colin Moock started off his FITC presentation quite differently, by starting it off joking that people should skip his session and go check out Evan Roth's presentation next door. He even gave a quick summary of his presentation and said he wouldn't be insulted if anyone left. One person did get up to leave and Colin asked if he was going to see Evan's presentation, when the guy answered "yes", Colin gave him a free copy of his AS3 book and told the guy to tell Evan that he said hi.

I've seen Colin Moock present a number of times over the years and he's always done a great job very clearly explaining technical concepts. This presentation was no different as Colin went through quite a number of new features in the latest ECMAScript standard, which we are likely to see in a future version of ActionScript. Moock had the slides of his presentation up online for quite some time now (which can be found here) and as an example of how quickly things have changed recently a number of features for ECMAScript 4 have since been deferred or removed. It was a disappointment to some in the crowd to see some of what would have been cool features such as method overloading deferred for a future version of ActionScript.

I asked Colin about all the deferrals during the Q&A and he mentioned that for a lot of these items it was just a matter of timing as they are looking to December to finalize the ECMAScript.

Interesting enough at the end of the presentation Colin Moock talked to Jim Corbett, who's a Flash Player engineer at Adobe, asking him if anything in the presentation was new to him. Jim said some recent deferred and removed items he hadn't heard about yet and he showed some frustration with ECMAScript 4, wishing it would stop changing and be finalized.

That's Jim Corbett in the blue and grey.