parkerkrhoyt
Adobe MAX 2006
Today was the opening day for the Adobe MAX developer conference in Las Vegas, NV. The first General Session (of two) got off to a wild start with a presentation by The Blue Man Group. I first saw Blue Man Group in Boston, MA as an evening event for a sales meeting. It was a phenomenal experience, and I've since taken Marna (when they were at The Luxor in Las Vegas).
Much of the opening was a numbers game. Acrobat 8, Flash Lite on 100 million devices, Flex downloads hit 100 thousand, Flash technology turned ten (10) years old, and more. The Flash Player 9 was put at 40% adoption in three (3) months - the fastest adoption rate to date. Estimations were also made that there are approximately 200 million PDF documents on the web today.
The remainder of the general session presentations were geared towards HTML, Flash and PDF workflows.
After a rough start with a dead mouse, Greg Rewis got started in Fireworks 9 by showing pages, and then Photoshop cut-and-paste into Dreamweaver. Greg also showed Spry integration for Dreamweaver.
Mike Downey got into Photoshop palette docking and import into Flash. Steve Galinski animated a puppet in After Effects, got Flash Video cue-points and performed batch output to include device profiles. Mike and Steve also debuted Adobe Soundbooth; what will eventually be an easier entry point for audio editing.
On the RIA workflow side of things Sho Kuamoto revealed Flex Builder 2 for Mac beta. I've had fun giving the beta out from USB drives prior to the announcement (thanks to the Flex team). Next up Ben Forta with no time left blew the doors off the ColdFusion application wizard for Flex 2 and a sneak of CFIMAGE coming to Scorpio (code name for ColdFusion 8). Ben also showed PDF workflow with field recognition, PDF/Flex sync and more.
Ed Rowe start the drive home for the session by breaking out some Apollo applications. He walked through installation, local file IO, web services integration and a cool audio visualizer built in ActionScript 3. Then Ed switched over to a Mac to show how Apollo applications will be cross-platform. Debuting HTML renderering (with WebKit) inside an Apollo application, Ed showed Google Maps running inline with Flex application overlays. There was even seamless drag and drop between the two.
Making sure that the audience got the picture, Adobe's Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch showed a MySpace-developed chat client, and even placed a live web auction using an eBay-developed Apollo auction manager. Kevin showed a word processor written in Flex, deployed on Apollo from Virtual Ubiquity (code-named Nimbus), which is something I've known about for a while, but not been able to talk about. There was even an Internet TV desktop application code-named Philo that included custom branding and full-screen video.
Before getting into a new Jaguar (who's dashboard console is powered by Flash) and driving away, Kevin dropped what is probably the most significant news of the show so far. Adobe has set up a $100 million venture capital fund for applications developed with Adobe technologies, and with a specific emphasis on Apollo. This amazing contribution to RIA is going to drive some amazing innovation.
Adobe MAX 2006
Today was the opening day for the Adobe MAX developer conference in Las Vegas, NV. The first General Session (of two) got off to a wild start with a presentation by The Blue Man Group. I first saw Blue Man Group in Boston, MA as an evening event for a sales meeting. It was a phenomenal experience, and I've since taken Marna (when they were at The Luxor in Las Vegas).
Much of the opening was a numbers game. Acrobat 8, Flash Lite on 100 million devices, Flex downloads hit 100 thousand, Flash technology turned ten (10) years old, and more. The Flash Player 9 was put at 40% adoption in three (3) months - the fastest adoption rate to date. Estimations were also made that there are approximately 200 million PDF documents on the web today.
The remainder of the general session presentations were geared towards HTML, Flash and PDF workflows.
After a rough start with a dead mouse, Greg Rewis got started in Fireworks 9 by showing pages, and then Photoshop cut-and-paste into Dreamweaver. Greg also showed Spry integration for Dreamweaver.
Mike Downey got into Photoshop palette docking and import into Flash. Steve Galinski animated a puppet in After Effects, got Flash Video cue-points and performed batch output to include device profiles. Mike and Steve also debuted Adobe Soundbooth; what will eventually be an easier entry point for audio editing.
On the RIA workflow side of things Sho Kuamoto revealed Flex Builder 2 for Mac beta. I've had fun giving the beta out from USB drives prior to the announcement (thanks to the Flex team). Next up Ben Forta with no time left blew the doors off the ColdFusion application wizard for Flex 2 and a sneak of CFIMAGE coming to Scorpio (code name for ColdFusion 8). Ben also showed PDF workflow with field recognition, PDF/Flex sync and more.
Ed Rowe start the drive home for the session by breaking out some Apollo applications. He walked through installation, local file IO, web services integration and a cool audio visualizer built in ActionScript 3. Then Ed switched over to a Mac to show how Apollo applications will be cross-platform. Debuting HTML renderering (with WebKit) inside an Apollo application, Ed showed Google Maps running inline with Flex application overlays. There was even seamless drag and drop between the two.
Making sure that the audience got the picture, Adobe's Chief Software Architect, Kevin Lynch showed a MySpace-developed chat client, and even placed a live web auction using an eBay-developed Apollo auction manager. Kevin showed a word processor written in Flex, deployed on Apollo from Virtual Ubiquity (code-named Nimbus), which is something I've known about for a while, but not been able to talk about. There was even an Internet TV desktop application code-named Philo that included custom branding and full-screen video.
Before getting into a new Jaguar (who's dashboard console is powered by Flash) and driving away, Kevin dropped what is probably the most significant news of the show so far. Adobe has set up a $100 million venture capital fund for applications developed with Adobe technologies, and with a specific emphasis on Apollo. This amazing contribution to RIA is going to drive some amazing innovation.