Frank, the author of “How to Dance Properly” opened with a
riff on how a party invitation made him Inter-famous. He’s
funny, and moving quickly, so I’m just going to type notes
from here on out.
“Shut it down? People were finally paying attention to
me!”
“The Scribbler”: a drawing toy that
rewards crappy drawing. Mentioned Director!
“Atheist” and
“Buddhist” and
“Christian” games.
Stephen Elop, CEO had to follow. said that there were over
3,000 people in the Ballroom. Mentioned those in the
community who have maintained support for New Orleans, site
of last year’s conference.
Showed comments from people on Studio 8 and Cold Fusion
7.
Flash Player 8 gone from 0 to 100 million downloads in less
than a month, still around 5 million per day.
Mentioned partnerships with SAP, foreign mobile phone
vendors, Flashcast in Japan. 1,600 Breeze customers.
Snarked at Microsoft and their efforts to move into the
multimedia development market by displaying a blue screen of
death.
Got around to the Adobe merger about 35 minutes into
presentation and asked people to maintain trust and keep the
faith.
Kevin Lynch, Chef Software Architect, came on to talk about
the future of the web and plugged a Kevin Morale (sp?) essay
called “What is Web 2.0?” It encourages separation of UI and
data.
NOW: Studio 8, Flash Player 8, Flash Lite 1.1, Flex 1.5.
Feedback on Studio 8 has been good. 1.5 million trial
downloads of the studio so far. Kodak EasyShare camera has a
Flash Lite-based touchscreen interface.
Flex adopted by 400 customers so far. Guido Schroeder of SAP
brought onstage for some demonstrations.
Back to Kevin, he says that Player 8.5 has an entirely new
Virtual Machine, ActionScript 3 (with runtime error
checking, standard event model, inline XML, regular
expressions).
Flex Builder designed for developers to create rich internet
applications without a the Flex server. Sho Kuwamoto, one of
the leads on the Flex Builder team comes on stage to build
an app that queries Flikr for some photos and displays the
results. (An error crops up as he builds it. Dead air.
Second time it compiled but he doesn’t notice the app’s
loaded in the browser behind Flax Builder until someone from
the audience mentions it.) 9 minutes from start to finish,
even with the delay.
William Wechtenhiser of the Flex Enterprise team came to do
his own demo, extending the photo search to include chat.
Lynch announces partnership with Mercury Interactive for automated testing with Flex applications. Canned video from Chris Lockhead.
Battery getting low! Gotta go. Only a few minutes left.
[UPDATE]: The future got its licks in via an application mock-up presented by Macromedian Mike Sundermeyer, who was with a group I believe was called “Experience Potential.” His media center app was meant to simulate the nexus of an interconnected electronic homeverse, where all of your videos, games, and music are tied together, with reviews, recommendations, and purchasing capabilities in one groovy application (although I did notice that Spice World was in his collection, so I’d have to wonder just how groovy it really was). I didn’t see any books, though.
At the end, Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen came on and talked about how he really couldn’t tell us anything since the last few hurdles of the merger haven’t been cleared yet. He definitely implied that there would be some sort of event next year — we’ll see if that’s just wishful thinking on the part of those of us who are used to shelling out our hard-earned coin to meet our ever-shrinking pool of peers. Some quotes I wrote down for no particular reason:
- The merger should be final “sometime in the next few weeks
- Regarding the Universal Player discussed earlier in the session — from which Acrobat was noticably absent — “use your imagination.”
- The combination of Adobe and Macromedia will “revolutionize how people engage with life.”
