10:00 Tuesday, General Session (Keynote)
Another Adobe self-appreciation session. This time with a 007 theme! Sigh. A couple of guys are playing as spies in suits. They’re visiting lab stations to hear about the amazing new features of CS4! One guy has a fake British accent. Sigh.
10:35 showing off ability to control light switches via flex and third party hardware.
10:40 a spy is demoing new AE-like timeline.
Also bones and IK.
He just copied the motion information from one area of the FLA to another.
10:45 Showing off new features of photoshop. Not worth talking about here. You can see demos online.
10:48 Flash Catalyst (Thermo)
(I’m pretty excited about this because we’ve really needed a step in the workflow between designers and developers for a long time. However, time will tell how well this tool will fill the gap)
Showing off the new transitions. Looks pretty smooth.
Taking graphics from Illustrator and converting into a scroll bar with just a few clicks.
Showing off “round-trip workflow” where graphics are taken from illustrator to Flash Catalyst and then back to Illustrator.
FXG – a subset of mxml which is an interchange format between illustrator/ps, flash catalyst, and flex.
Showing off component states in FC. Allows designers to build entire view including view states and transitions. Pretty cool. Designers, start studying!
DVDs of FC beta will be given out after the session!
10:59 More spy schtick! Let’s head to the development lab. sigh.
11:00 Project alchemy. Converts C/C++ code and libraries into AS3 which can be compiled to SWFs.
(Wow. There are numerous applications for this.)
Showing Hello, World ported from C++ to AS3 to SWF.
Demoing ported Zork in Flash
Demoing OS encryption tool ported to flash.
Brendan Hall introduces libvorbis in flash. Essentially allows you to parse Ogg Vorbis in Flash by using an open source C lib. CSound would be another thing to check out which they didn’t mention.
Same thing with RAW camera images.
Alchemy allows you to run C code in the background asynchronously as well!
Showing Doom and a NES emulator (SMB). Flash player running as3 converted from C code running dumped roms and emulating the NES. Or something like that.
(My head spins with the possibilities)
11:10 The spies throw a bone to the ColdFusion nerds in the audience. The crowd partially goes wild.
New version of CF called Bolt.
I’m starting to wonder if the British accent is actually fake. Sounds weird and now I’m not sure.
A small yet determined portion of the audience is madly impressed with the new CF features which go over my head.
11:15 Showing off some Flex and CF integration.
FlexBuilder themes. “Agent B” gave a shout out to Juan Sanchez who i’ve been hanging out with all weekend and is a way cool guy!
11:20 Demoing Flex in MS Visual Studio or maybe just AMF with C#… I didn’t quite follow.
11:23 Dreamweaver
Support for arbitrary frameworks like JQuery. Including in live view.
Allows you to render JS out to HTML so you can see how it is being rendered in the browser.
11:28 The Deployment Lab. Jim Corbett as a scientist. Looks surly as usual.
Showing off the Google indexing of SWFs. (I saw a talk on this yesterday and I’ll talk more about that on another post). In a nutshell, a special virtual user that Google created navigates every link in a special, text-only version of the flash player. In this manner it indexes all text, static and dynamic, in the entire applicaiton. Pretty fucking incredibly awesome!
11:35 Flash Media Server 3.5
Dynamic streaming lets you change sizes of video dynamically when bitrates change without glitching at all.
New flash media live encoder. Shows live video that can be streamed and recorded simultaneously (a la Tivo)
RTMFP – Peer-to-peer flash player communication. Eliminates the server from flash player communications.
11:41 More spy shit. Enter Ted Patrick
Adobe Groups. groups.adobe.com A new, official site for organizing Adobe user groups. Available in loads of languages by Q109.
Profiles of users. Kinda like MeetUp or something but just for Adobe Groups. Search for user groups in your area. For all Adobe products, not just Flash.
YAY! Max is in LA next year! Oct 7-9
11:48 END
12:03 talked to “agent f”. Accent is real! Confirmed.
Tags: adobe, conference, keynote, live blogging, max, spies
CF is still around?
hmm thermo and doom in Flash were the highlights of last years MAX also. Doesn’t look like i missed anything amazing this time, although I am itching to get a hold of the new FlexBuilder.
Ha! I actually just left a “Sneaks” talk during which Adobe showed off about a dozen new features that will be coming out next year. I think they might be shooting themselves in the foot slightly because it seems like there’s nothing new when they do a keynote. Anyway, it was still really cool. Server Side ActionScript looked so great!
It wasn’t Doom..it was Quake demoed today. :P
Ha, not a fake accent, that was Ben Forta!
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