MAX Keynote Day 2
The Day two keynote starts out deafeningly loud. Tim Buntel, senior product manager for Flex Builder, is the first speaker to speak about the Flash Platform. He does a humorous secret agent theme to his presentation, where Ben Forta joins him onstage in a secret agent costume. They show off an AIR client for a home electrical subsystem, where they can turn on lights, for instance, within the AIR client. Next they talk about a (fake, I think) company named Ecotours to discuss the productivity enhancements for creating complex Flash animations in Flash CS4. For instance, including quickly creating point to point animations with drag and drop efficiency, while allowing simple customization. They also show how you can save motion presets for animations and import those into other Flash projects.
Next they move onto some Photoshop enhancements, including content aware scaling of images, which is still pretty impressive even having seen it last year. Another Photoshop feature shown is called depth of field, which blends a number of similar images to create one unified image by masking out all but the best portions of each image. Finally, she shows how she can paint directly on a 3D object and then add an image as part of the pattern on the 3D image.
Next they move on to show some Flash Catalyst demos, showing how you can import static Photoshop, Illustrator and Fireworks into Catalyst and generate well formed Flex code. They show how you can easily add transitions to page states and add interaction by converting artwork into a component and adding events to them. They move to an image built in lllustrator which can be imported simply by copy and pasting into Catalyst and then converted into a vertical scrollbar component. They show how you can tweak the design elements using roundtrip editing in CS4 without removing any of the changes made in Catalyst; this feature utilizes the FXG language they have created. In the next step, they add a 3D rotation effect to a state transition using some very simple actions on a drag and drop timeline. Finally they save the project out to an FXP file which can then be imported into Flex Builder (i.e. Gumbo).
They move on to introduce Project Alchemy which lets you take C and C++ code and convert it into ActionScript. The C code is translated by the Alchemy tools and run inside the Flash Player. They show how they built a Flash library based upon the Open SSL library for encryption. Another example, they show how using C libraries they can add file support into Flash for file types that have never been supported before like Ogg Vorbis audio files. Another example is opening and displaying a RAW image file and used another C library to convert the RAW image to a PNG. Next he renders a PDF inside his SWF using another C library written by Adobe. Finally they show a version of Quake running inside Flash Player and another showing a Nintendo (NES) emulator running in Flash Player and run Super Mario Bros.
Moving on, Tim shows some Gumber (i.e. Flex 4) demos by first importing the FXP file created earlier into Flex Builder. They use this as a transition to talk about the back end services that can be built in ColdFusion. This demo is done by Ben where he shows the new ColdFusion IDE in Flex, codenamed Bolt. He shows how the IDE is server aware - you can stop, start a server from within the IDE. When typing cfinclude a dialog pops up asking what file to include. Writing cfquery dsn, a drop down shows all the DSN's available. Typing cfobject, the IDE is aware of the components within your project and it also introspects the names of the methods inside the object. Next he shows a feature that generates an entire service and beans using ORM based upon a table within a DSN. No previews of Centaur or Bolt are yet publicly available.
They return to Tim, who is talking about how to connect your Flex application to the data layer. He creates a new service based upon the generated CFC service that Ben created. The IDE introspects the CFC and the methods and builds a model based upon it. He then drags getAllItems onto the design view and drops it into a DataGrid without writing any code. Another feature is called data management, which allows you to create a mapping between service methods and your Flex application. He generates an event handler and refers to his "managed" service and calls commit and it automatically saves the changes in the grid related to the backend. The next new feature he shows off is the network monitor where he can view the data that is being send back and forth. Finally, he applies a theme to his project using a pre-built theme that will be on Labs and applies that to the DataGrid. Ben then opens up Visual Studio and edits MXML with color coding in Visual Studio using a new plugin Adobe is creating. Next he shows a native AMF to .net implementation to build a back-end in C#.
Next they move on to show some new AJAX features in Dreamweaver CS4. They show how they have added any number of new AJAX framework support into Dreamweaver CS4. Some of the ones they show are jQuery, mooTools and YUI. He shows how you can interact with this within the "live view" support. The "live view" is shown in a vertical split screen whereby he can change the code and see the results in the "live view." Next he "freezes" a JavaScript element within the live view so that he can see the associated JavaScript and CSS elements and style the element.
The next topic they talk about is deployment. Tim mentions that Google can't index Flex and highly dynamic content, and Ben mentions that Adobe has a solution. Apparently Adobe got together with Google. Google created a "virtual user" that visits the site and does the things a user can do, and Adobe created the Flash/Flex side that can respond to commands from "virtual users." They demo how the virtual user can interact with a page and get the dynamic content that is generated. This is how they hope to have solved indexing dynamic Flex content.
They then discuss Flash Media Server 3.5 which was released, apparently, yesterday. They show the audio glitches and delays caused by network instability. Then they show dynamic streaming where they can up or lower the resolution on a video without any transition issues on a video playing live. This can be used by a site to constantly monitor network issues to optimize the viewing experience. This is done by adding different video to an XML file which are each encoded for differing resolutions and this is all done "with just a couple clicks." With a new version of the Flash Media Live Encoder which can do multiple bitrates on live video streams. Apparently this can also pause a live video stream much like DVR. They added RTMFP to Player 10 which allows any Flash client to talk to another directly, streaming video and audio between them; this is done without a server.
Tim Buntel leaves the stage and Ben introduces Ted Patrick. Ted talks about the 423 Adobe User Groups throughout the world. He announces Adobe Groups which is at groups.adobe.com and is a site for finding and creating a user group. Adobe Groups has full multi-lingual support and so there is one site for all the world rather than one for each area. You can create a profile and share your information with "like minded" people in the community. You can join the groups that you belong to or search for groups to join. Managers of the group can send announcements and calendar items to the group via the site. You can apply to start a user group via the site.
That is the end of the session. Ben announces MAX 2009 will be in Los Angeles on October 4 through the 7th.
