I just came back from Paris where I animated a second Processing workshop there. It went super well again, thanks to Craslab (cheers Agnès and Jean-Noël) and all the participants who were strongly motivated to learn and code. Cheers to them too ! As usual, two days were damn too short, but I have the feeling that when you do something you like with people positively interacting, time goes fast no matter what you do.
When I get back to home, a mail from my friend Kss was waiting for me in my inbox. He was very enthusiastic about released products at Breakpoint 2007, a famous demoparty held in Germany. So I comfortably sat down, typed www.pouet.net in my favourite browser and started downloading the products from the usual suspects, with a first surprise seeing old-timers popular crews like Andromeda, Equinox or Rebels among teams which released a demo there. I always thought that a good demo was a demo making you wonder “How the hell did they do THAT ? Which TRICK did they use?” and then making you freak out. That exact feeling happened first when I saw The Cuddly Demos on my Atari ST. And it happened again yesterday while watching Farbrausch “Debris”. That is totally impressive in every aspects. I won’t spoil here, but the main effect of the demo is insane. And best of all, the program is only 180 kb. An instant classic which is already and undoubtedly part of demomaking history.
Two other demos worth being mentionned are the megacool intro invit “Frameskool” by Equinox, which contains lovely shadowed vectorballs as well as tons of revamped oldschool effects (scrolling, stars, text-writer, distorted rotozoom 
) and a catchy chiptune by 4mat, a well known musician from Amiga. All in 64 kb of course. Andromeda struck hard too with their “Noumenon”, including an amazing kind-of-infinite-3D trip and shiny glowing effects.
Though, Windows broke the experience. In the middle of Andromeda, a window popped up telling me I had to install updates right NOW. It made the demo crash and didn’t restore the default resolution of my screen. I was really impressed. How the hell did they do that ?
