MAX Day One Keynote - Full Coverage
Shantanu Narayen announces that this is the best attended MAX ever. Adobe's vision of the future "combines the power of the desktop with flexibility of the Internet." Currently, he believes, great digital experience are currently the exception not the rule. To help change this, he offers some rules in engaging users in this new age of applications such as "content is king," "make it personal", "less is (still) more" (as in make things simple), "movement has meaning" and "create an experience not a UI." He shows some examples of these rules including different experiences on cell phones, the Premier Express software-as-a-service application. To demonstrate the movement has meaning, he shows the new Adobe Media Player with the new "glide UI." To illustrate a focus on experience, he shows a site that shows a bike race that integrates video, photos, chat and GPS mapping into an interactive experience.
Kevin Lynch returns to cover the Adobe Technology Platform. He begins by discussing video and notes that 70% of video on the web is Flash. To keep this lead, he mentions the H.264 integration in Flash for HD content. Next a video plays about how Yahoo!'s engineers are using the new H.264 support with their content using a variety of products in Adobe's video platform. Kevin announces that Flash will now even support video up to 1080p quality, which is applauded by the audience. He demonstrates this by showing a video published in 480p and then 720p, with a dramatic difference in quality, particularly when in full-screen mode. He also shows the new Flash-video-based Halo 3 site on Microsoft's site with comment about what a great job Microsoft is doing with Flash that draws both laughs and applause from the audience.
The next video related demonstration is with Adobe Media player which was just released as beta on Adobe Labs, where Kevin shows how to integrate video feeds that get updated automatically with new content. In addition, he shows how you can publish your video and integrate advertising to generate revenue. He shows a video from the CSI television show on Adobe Media player, then shows the same video on a cell phone using Flash Light which should be available next month.
Next Kevin shows the United Way web site which integrates Flash, ColdFusion and CS3 tools. Adobe set about adding features in this site during a single week. This project was led by Scott Fegette and Ben Forta (with consulting help from Doug Hughes' Alagad consulting) who come on stage to demonstrate what they built. Ben previews a new feature that builds a custom PDF document based upon the users input of personal information, all built with ColdFusion 8. Scott then shows how they improved the form itself by using the Spry framework and Dreamweaver CS3's new UI widgets. Scott passes it back to Ben who displays a combination Flex and Coldfusion application that automatically builds the images on the page allowing the image to be built on the fly, on the web without an image editor.
Kevin Lynch returns to the page and shows off ScrapBlog, which allows you to build an publish image scrapbooks using a rich Flex interface. Kevin invites Ed Rowe on stage to discuss how AIR is further improving these applications through desktop integration. Ed explains what AIR can do by showing an customer manager application built for SalesForce.com. He demonstrates some of the power of building this in the desktop by dragging an dropping a vCard into the application what automatically adds it to the application's database and updates the SalesForce.com site with the new data. Ed announces that beta 2 of AIR and beta 2 of Flex 3 are both available today on Labs.
Next Kevin introduces Heidi Williams to discuss the latest in Flex 3 including the profiler, language intelligence, advanced visualization comps and Flex framework caching. She demos this through a charting front-end to the open bug-base for Flex. She shows how the profiler displays detailed information to improve application performance and refactors a function easily replacing the function name across the application. She illustrates the new datagrid with drill-down and multi-column sorting support. Lastly she discusses how the framework code is cached on the first run of an application, improving performance on subsequent visits.
Kevin Lynch returns to show the AIR Derby winners including the winner, Agile Agenda for project management created by Mark Hughes. Kevin then introduces an AIR desktop application for travel agents built by Frog Design for Disney Parks. The developer demonstrates what he was able to build using AIR's new API's. It interactively creates a custom PDF quote for clients using an intuitive Flex interface. Kevin then returns to show off a number of different AIR applications including Snippage, struggling a little with a broken keyboard. Snippage allows you to quickly and easily snip any portion of a site. He also shows an email client called Pronto!, the Google Analytics AIR application and a PayPal desktop application. Each of these applications can use desktop integration to allow you to drag and drop items across the various programs, including non-AIR applications.
Another application he demonstrates is WaveIM, which is an instant messenger application based upon the Facebook API. Kevin moves on to mixing audio using another AIR application called Digimix, even exporting his mix to WAV which he then uploads to his Pownce application through the Pownce AIR application. Kevin also impresses the audience by showing another AIR application built by Nickelodeon whereby he can drag puzzle pieces from the Nickelodeon web site into the AIR client. Next he shows a top 100 music video application.
Kevin shows off Buzzword, a Flex-based word processing application with an AIR client by Virtual Ubiquity. He shows how Buzzword now supports opening and editing Word documents, which clearly impresses the audience. Finally Kevin announces that Adobe has acquired Virtual Ubiquity.
Kevin shows what Anthropologie is building with Adobe products including the catalog, email newsletters and web site. This includes an RIA for viewing the catalog online which allows you to click on an item in the catalog and purchase it. Event the checkout is built as an RIA. They also have a version of the catalog available as an AIR application, which allows you to quickly browse items, add notes to items and purchase. It even includes a color picker that allows you to view all items that match a particular color scheme. You can even drag a photo into the color picker and choose colors from the image.
Finally, Kevin shows off improvements to Flash, including the next version, condenamed "Astro". Emmy Huang gets on stage to introduce the new features coming in Flash player. The new text components will include enhanced multilingual support such as bidirectional support and multilingual line-breaking rules. She also shows new layout features including multi-columns that flow properly. Next the 3D effects are shown off including a video that rotates in 3D while playing. All display objects will be able ot be transformed in 3D and retain their interactive properties. There will be new rotation properties for animating in 3D. Lastly, the custom filters, blends and fills are announced and demonstrated. This is done using a language codenamed "Hydra" with a toolkit that is available on Labs today. These create big effects with small filters in terms of file-size, offering superb performance.
