Products

The Adobe MAX 2006 keynote opened up with the Blue Man Group performing for the crowd of over 3000 attendees. If you've never seen Blue Man Group, they put on an entertaining show - and did a great job of getting the crowd going.

Shantanu Narayen is talking about the Macromedia/Adobe merger, likening it to a marriage. Lots of video of customer feelings on the merger - some pretty funny stuff. There's a lot of talk about making the developer and designer workflow better, unifying the user interface as much as possible. Adobe has fully embraced the labs concept first put forth by Macromedia.

A little more humor, letting us know that Ben Forta's racked up over 3 million air miles evangelizing ColdFusion.

Milestones:

• Flash lite is now on over 100 million devices world wide. Adobe is continuing Macromedia's work to really push Flash out to mobile devices.
• Delivery of Flex 2.0. Over 100,000 developers have downloaded the technology.
• Flash Player 9 - performance is where it needs to be to enable next gen of apps
• Flash turns 10
• Acrobat 8
• Breeze integrated into Reader and Acrobat

Where does Adobe go from here? Beyond Boundaries - the theme from MAX. Adobe's strategy can be summed up as "Engagement".

Next up is Kevin Lynch. Flash player upgrades can now be done relatively quickly. Adoption of Flash Player 8 hit 80% in just under 9 months. They're shooting for 80% in 6-9 months for Flash Player 9.

Performance in the Flash Player 9 virtual machine is greatly improved. Kevin showed a demo of a particle based animation of fire. The demo ran at around 100 ms per frame in AS2. In AS3, it came in at 5 ms per frame. That's 20x faster.

Flash Video has a lot of momentum. Over 200,000,000 PDF files on the web.

Kevin then spent some time talking about workflows.

The first one was HTML design. The typical workflow goes Photoshop (comp), Fireworks (prototype), Dreamweaver (HTML), Spry (Interactivity). Adobe is putting a lot of energy into being able to seamlessly move from one tool to the next in the workflow - this includes being able to cut and paste from Photoshop into Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver/Spry integration is coming, making it "easy" for designers to add Ajax functionality without having to be "developers".

Mike Downey and Steve Kilisky talked about the dynamic media workflow: Photoshop (Comp), Flash IDE, After Effects, and Soundbooth.

Photoshop gets an iconic palette mode, allowing you to collapse docked panels. Flash will soon allow for natively importing PSD files, with options to select which layers to import. After Effects gets a new puppet tool that lets you animate more organically and expressively. You'll also be able to add cue points directly in the timeline. Flash Video will be able to be output directly from the After Effects render queue - meaning you'll be able to do batch video creation, something that you can't do today. A new product called Soundbooth will let you work with audio specifically for Flash. Should be up on Adobe Labs this week. Improvements in the video importer make it easier to import and use video with the Flash IDE.

Sho Kuwamoto showed off the RIA workflow building a music sharing/playing application: Photoshop/Illustrator (comp), Flex (build app), and ColdFusion (manage and deliver data).

Illustrator will be able to export symbols as SWFs. You can then take that art and bring it into Flex by a simple stylesheet declaration. This makes re-skinning really easy.

Next, Sho created a ColdFusion page (cfm) that generated an XML playlist file. Flex then calls the cfm file to get its data. A few lines of code are all that's required to pull the data from ColdFusion and display it in a grid. The whole app took him all of 10 mins to create. Also noted was that Sho was doing his development on a Mac, meaning the Mac version of Flex Builder is forthcoming. Public Beta is being distributed at the conference.

Next up, Ben Forta. He gave a quick recap of ColdFusion 7, ColdFusion 7.0.2 and Scorpio (ColdFusion 8) before showing how the ColdFusion back end for the music player was built. He opened Flex Builder with the ColdFusion extensions (an install-time option) and showed the ColdFusion/Flex Application Wizard. Stepping through the wizard, he was able to generate a complete application with Flex front end and ColdFusion back end in about 5 minutes. The wizard generated all of the necessary Flex and ColdFusion code.

Scorpio is going to have image processing, server monitoring and .Net integration. There are conference sessions on each of these. There's also a lot more coming later. There wasn't much time to show off features during the keynote, so Ben decided to show the new image processing capabilities. Over 50 new functions are being added to deal with image manipulation. More Scorpio functionality will be unveiled later this week. There's also a meet the CF team session.

Ben also did the discussion and demo for the electronic document workflow. This workflow consists of designing printed forms and developing interactive forms. He took a paper based insurance claim form and scanned it into PDF. He then used a field recognition wizard in LiveCycle Designer to automatically recognize all of the fields in the scanned form - very impressive. He also showed a Flash/Flex app that seamlessly integrated with a PDF document. Updating the Flex app caused the form to be populated. Changing a value in the form caused the app to update. What really seemed to rock people was a Flex wizard in LiveCycle designer that allowed him to take the PDF form and generate a Flex representation of that form, including all of the code to synch the data between the two. Ben also mentioned that Scorpio will contain additional hooks into this as well!

Last but not least is Ed Rowe on Apollo. Apollo is RIA for the desktop. It allows you to create occassionally connected applications for working on or offline. The value proposition is really that you can create a whole new generation of applications using skills we already have - ActionScript, Flex, XML, video, audio, HTML, Ajax, JavaScript, SWF, PDF, etc.

Ed's next demo showed Google maps running stand-alone, outside of the browser on Apollo.

The Apollo deployment package contains all of the assets necessary to run the application. Activating the package installs the application to the local machine for the user to run.

Last up is Kevin Lynch again showing a bunch of Apollo apps for things like MySpace chat, eBay, mortgage applications, Nimbus word processor, and more. His final app demo is an internet video app where video is delivered to an Apollo based player using RSS.

Kevin also announced the creation of a $100,000,000 investment fund for Apollo based applications and technology.

The keynote ended with a display of the largest device on the planet with Flash player installed - the new Jaguar. Pretty cool Flash based navigation and control system.

That's about it from the keynote. Stay tuned for more...