Products

I missed the Indesign and Flex sneak. Apologies to all you Indesign fans out there.

Ok, that's it for tonight. It's off to the MAX special event. This year's event is supposed to be the best ever. Hope to see you there.

Back from break. The next 4 presenters are getting ready to go...

Danielle Beaumont is showing off custom skinning Flex and Air components using Fireworks. I'm not really familiar with all of the challenges associated with custom skinning (other than the fact that most Flex apps have a very similar look and feel), but I can see that what she's doing here is making a lot of people happy (loud applause).

Next up is Hemant Khandelwal talking about building online/offline apps with AIR & ColdFusion. This is huge. He's showing a typical application built using CF with the new layout and AJAX tags. Next he adds a new attribute to the cfgrid tag to tell it operate in off-line mode. ColdFusion then generates an AIR package containing the JavaScript, HTML, and other files necessary to make the application work. These applications can be run in both offline and online mode! There's automatic synchronization of data when an offline application goes online. He's now showing a mail application that's in offline mode sending data to the server. He clicks submit and data moves to an unsent folder. When the application goes back online, the data is sent out. This one is what a lot of ColdFusion developers have been asking for.

I have to post this now. Be right back for part 3...

Live blogging from the Sneak Peeks session at Adobe MAX 2007. Sneak Peeks is one of my favorite sessions. It's always interesting to see what's on the minds of Adobe engineers, and what might be coming down the line in future releases.

They're pulling a Blues Brothers skit with Mike Downey and Marc Eaman dressed up like Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi. The standard disclaimer applies - the tech previews here may or may not ever make it into products...

There's going to be a vote for best sneak at the end of the session (built with CF and Flex, of course).

First up is Karl Miller and Karl Soule from the visual communicator (Vc) team. They're showing off a new tool (version 3) for doing video production that's supposed to be easy enough for a third grader to use. It has a teleprompter interface for script reading with the ability to place content at various places throughout the timeline. Pretty simple and powerful. It can also communicate with Flash Media Server for live streaming. It can control up to 3 cameras and has both blue and green screen built in. This tool looks like it makes it very simple to do tv quality production on a laptop.

Up now is Danielle Diebler who is showing off VoIP in the Flash Player. She's also mention that P2P in the Flash Player as well as extended codecs are in the works. She's demoing an application now that built using the technology called CoCoNiki. It's an online diary that uses voice and presence awareness. The VoIP quality seems pretty good so far. She's moving on to an Air application now that also does VoIP (she's making a live call to a cell phone.

Ken Sundermeyert is up from the Flash Home for Mobile group. He says Flash Home will let you replace the home screen on your phone (has to be a Flash enabled phone, of course) with a customized Flash based screen. The market for personalization is huge (2+ billion last year, excluding ringtones). Flash Home is capable of getting web data, including from Flash Cast. It is also integrated with the device. No sandbox, so it can access phone functionality natively (address book, sms, call logs, etc.). He's demoing a custom home screen that he built that pulls up a person's location when they call by getting their phone number from the call log, checking the area code, and displaying a graphic of the city. Live demo of someone in the audience calling his phone. The wallpaper on the phone switches from blue background to the Statue of Liberty. You'll also be able to get home screens from a catalog over the air.

Geoff Baum is showing off Photoshop Express, a new online version of Photoshop built using Flex. It's not meant to replace the full Photoshop, but is supposed to provide a "consumer" alternative for performing common image editing tasks. The interface is pretty intuitive. Lots of impressive editing capabilities. It's got a timeline for edits, so you can move backward/forward in edit sequences. All of the editing is non-destructive. Very impressive stuff!

They're setting up for part 2 now, so I'm going to cut this post of here, grab a beer, then come back for more. Stay tuned...

The title says it all. No ETA, but Adobe has given it a name and it's now on the future development roadmap.

I'm here in Chicago this week for the Adobe MAX 2007 conference. Following tradition (well, now that I've done it twice, it's a tradition), I've created a Flickr Group for posting pictures of the event. It's a public group, so feel free to post pics and share the group link:

http://www.flickr.com/groups/adobemax2007/

You can see pics from last year's Flickr group by following the related link below.