Downtown Chicago was abuzz last week as tech savvy developers with shiny heads and expanding waistlines took over several of the cities finest hotels for the three day Adobefest that was MAX 2007.

The newly completed McCormick Place West was the locus of activity and Adobe put on a pretty good show. It all started with the keynote which featured 3 massive video screens, a rock and roll soundtrack and Flash graphics which roared across the screen. The keynote opened with a sequence of “real developers” from the San Francisco Bay area (who had actually freely given their time in the weeks prior to be a part of this “MAX moment”) waxing philosophical over their love for code, problem solving and of course all things Adobe. It was all somewhat reticent of a nerdier version of something that Apple might put on.

Adobe Max 2007 Highlights

Adobe announces many “new” products including:

Lots of excitement around Flex, AIR and AS3!!!

  • Apps are converging around Flex/mxml as a common “language” for interop across Adobe product line.
  • Designer focused apps such as Dreamweaver and Fireworks are being updated to export/import mxml
  • New apps are being developed (like Thermo) to convert Photoshop or Illustrator files to mxml

Pursuing a new “service based” approach on many fronts

  • Adobe rolling out series of different hosted services with complete developer APIs
  • Pacifica is a service (now in private beta) that will allow developers to integrate voice, messaging and user presence information into applications built using Adobe Flex, Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR) or Flash technologies.
  • CoCoMo is a new Flex implementation of the Adobe Connect front end. Soon to be released as reusable components that you can roll into your own app. As Kevin Lynch puts it, “CoCoMo will be the next-generation framework for the Adobe Connect Web conferencing service, which will enable developers to take certain parts of Connect’s functionality and integrate them into other applications.”
  • Share is a new service which allows users to share files with other users. Users can take files from the desktop or existing library from the SHARE application and specify who the file will be shared with, or whether the file will require users to log in. The files get uploaded, virus scanned, and emails are sent to the people you shared the document with. The app also creates a thumbnail of the document and tells you who you shared it with. There is also a REST API to upload/share/manage content and a ActionScript? 3.0 library you can use to leverage Share in your apps.
  • Scene7 (acquired by Adobe in May 2007) provides “on demand rich media publishing media services”. Its bread and butter appears to be a set of high quality dynamic image generation tools that you can leverage via service calls.

Reflections on the growing maturity of Adobe enterprise technologies.

  • Flex enables seamless integration to provide richer UI experience on top of existing enterprise software applications - SAP, proprietary J2EE? apps, etc
  • Interesting usage of Adobe Consulting clients to inform future development of Flex component modules - Adobe clients are literally paying Adobe to figure out what needs to be added to Flex next.
  • Many interesting discussions on the utility of higher level frameworks for rolling out large scale Flex applications. Surprising amount of honesty with an open discussion of some competing ideologies:
  • http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Cairngorm
  • http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/articles/blueprint.html

New Products

Flexbuilder 3 Beta 2

  • Flex Profiler - new profiler tool in Flex allows you to track the memory management in realtime and see how long its taking for various parts of your code to execute. This feature is great.
  • Adanced Data Visualization Comps - Some new charting features, such as dragging to select series in charts and the new “Advanced DataGrid?” which does multi-column sorting.
  • Flex Framework Caching - Apps created using Flex 3 now include signed Adobe components, including the entire Flex framework. This means that users who are using the latest version of Flash Player 9 (Moviestar aka 9.0.60) will only need to download Flex from your domain once. All subsequent downloads will ignore the Flex part of your app (~200K) and simply download the app itself.

Adobe also announced the Flex SDK would soon be open sourced.

Flash Player 10

The next version of Flash Player was presented with three main features:

  • Advanced Text Layout (including using multiple columns in a single text field and providing support for a myriad of different International languages)
  • 3D Effects
  • Custom Filters, Blend Modes and Effects built using Hydra (allows you to write your own photoshop style effects)

Adobe did not provide a release date.

A new toolkit was also released which allows you to start writing Hydra code right now:

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/AIF_Toolkit

Example Hydra code:

kernel NewFilter
<   nameSpace : "your namespace";
    vendor : "your vendor";
    version : 1;
    description : "your description";
>
{
    parameter int width
    <
        defaultValue:   200;
        minValue:       1;
        maxValue:       400;
        description:    "height of the generated plasma";
    >;

    parameter int height
    <
        defaultValue:   200;
        minValue:       1;
        maxValue:       400;
        description:    "width of the generated plasma";
    >;

    void
    evaluatePixel(out pixel4 result)
    {
        float2 coord = outCoord();
        float a =   0.5 + 0.5 * sin(   coord.x             / 16.0 ) +
                    0.5 + 0.5 * sin(   coord.y             /  8.0 ) +
                    0.5 + 0.5 * sin( ( coord.x + coord.y ) / 16.0 ) +
                    0.5 + 0.5 * sin( length( coord )       /  8.0 );
        a /= 4.0;

        result = pixel4(a,a,a,a);
    }

    region generated()
    {
        return region(float4(0,0,width,height));
    }
}

Thermo

Thermo is a very cool new tool that’s still very early but got many developers out of their seats cheering. A demo was shown of how to import a PSD doc using Thermo and very quickly convert it into a highly customized, almost completely functional Flex app. Thermo also exports and imports mxml which means it can be used by designers in coordination with developers so each can update the same codebase.

http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

Featured Flex Apps

If you haven’t seen them, check out these Flex apps:

Scrapblog http://scrapblog.com

Buzzword http://preview.getbuzzword.com/?s=true

MTV Air Challenge

MTV has launched an AIR challenge for users to create AIR apps using MTV assets.

http://adobe.mtv.com

They’ve provided quite a lot of cool MTV assets and content feeds for users to incorporate into their app. Developers are going to now mash it up and make cool stuff for them for free…

http://www.mtv.com/partners/adobe/mtv_air_challenge/assets.jhtml

More information

There’s been some excellent blogging about MAX:

Flex Components Tutorial - http://www.velloff.com/?p=39

Videos of Sneak Peeks -  http://www.peterelst.com/blog/2007/10/03/adobe-max-chicago-sneak-peeks/

General Overview -  http://blogs.adobe.com/pdehaan/2007/10/rough_notes_from_the_adobe_max.html

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