Max Day 2 Keynote - Full Coverage
Posted on Oct 02, 2007
Max Day 2 Keynote
Another introductory video montage about design and development, again featuring both Ben Forta and Laura Arguello (no Ray this time). Kevin Lynch enters and announces the MTV AIR contest at adobe.mtv.com. He introduces Adobe CEO Bruce Chizen begins by speaking about what keeps him going. He describes some of the difficulties of his job such as dealing with people in the financial world and the press. In describing what keeps him going, he talks about talking his son to a Dave Mathews Band concert and getting invited back stage, where, while feeling a little starstruck himself, the band and producers kept raving about Adobe's products. Another example of what motivates him is tat 4,000 plus people are sitting at the keynote who paid to come to this conference and are motivated by Adobe's products and innovate with them on a daily basis. He says that this continues to inspire him.Kevin Lynch returns to continue the "journey through the Adobe Platform," moving on to the server software. He introduces Steven Webster of Adobe Consulting, and one of the creators of Cairngorm, to speak about enterprise applications, specifically LiveCycle ES. Steven introduces a video about MFG.com who are using LiveCycle ES within their business. LiveCycle ES includes a number of services including Data Services (formerly Flex Data Services), forms, rights management, digital signatures, process management, output, reader extension and barcoded forms. He shows off the built-in form builder that can even turn a scanned form into an RIA. He also displays how you can "choreograph" pre-built services in LiveCycle ES and even build your own customizable services. Kevin Lynch announces that they are looking at making many of the LiveCycle services available as hosted services.
Kevin introduces a speaker from Scene7, a company recently purchased by Adobe. Scene7 provides a "rich media publishing service." You place your "rich media content" into their service and it is available as just a URL call. He shows how Gucci's site renders images off Scene7's imaging service including thumbnails and high resolution close-ups including functionality like drag-and-pan and rotate. The URL calls the Scene7 service with a number of parameters specifying things like the size of the image, for example. He then shows a uniform site that allows you to change the colors, type and other attributes of the uniform in real-time, even adding customized, uploaded images rendered on the uniform. the audience seemed impressed by this example. Finally, he shows what Scene7 is working on, which he does through a prototype AIR application built for QVC that allows you to browse the product being views on the video feed while integrating things like chat and email.
Next Andrew Shebanow enters the stage to discuss the new Adobe Share service that recently went into a beta. Share is an RIA allows you to share documents with a free gigabyte of storage, but also makes a number of other features available. After fighting some initial technical difficulties, Andrew was able to show how you share a document with the service. The new Flex UI for viewing the received documents is described as "FlashPaper on steroids" which draws a strong response from the audience. You can take this shareable view and embed it with full interactivity on blogs and web pages. In addition their is an entire REST API available to accomplish any functionality available within the service and a full ActionScript library pre-built to work with the REST APIs. They are also working on better organization, Buzzword integration and other features.
Next Danielle Deibler gets on stage to talk about "Pacifica", which is a new Adobe service offering high quality real-time audio and video via Flash/Flex with a private beta beginning this month. She then starts a video/audio conversation with her lead engineer. Version 1.0 is primarily focused on the voice aspect of the service. The goal is to eliminate the complex back-end for enabling high-quality player-to-player voice connections using the service and pre-built components. Sometime next year they will enable features like video chat and P2P.
Nigel Pegg comes onstage to talk about "CoCoMo" which is a is a rebuild of Connect with Flex and on a revamped platform. Each portion of the Connect UI is now a seperate Flex component. They are also opening up their service via a number of API's for things like real-time data messaging, AV streaming and more. Nigel then shows how, through five lines of code, you can build an application that connects to a Connect session with a full-screen webcamera pod. He then adds, through single lines of code, an audio subscriber, simple chat and whiteboard. This component framework will launch with the next version of Connect.
Kevin Lynch returns to introduce the tools section of the Adobe Platform. The first product introduced in this line is codenamed "Thermo". Thermo is a new tool that "makes it really intuitive for a designer to create RIA's". It allows designers to create Flex applications that use dynamic data while not having direct access to that data. It also includes a workflow to work with Flex Builder. Another speaker walks through a demo of the current build of Thermo. As you draw graphics in the UI, Thermo is building the Flex source code under the covers. Part of this includes new components within the Flex framework to represent graphical elements that designers use. Next they show a workflow using a Photoshop comp that is imported into Thermo with layers and text intact and converted to MXML. You can then directly convert artwork to actual working items through a simple intuitive context menu actually turning the graphic into the skin for the item - this draws wide applause from the audience. Next they show how to work with dummy data to enable building functional lists, for example, within the design comp. They turn a group of images into a design-time list which allows you to modify properties and behaviors and apply this to the entire list of items at once, including adding rollover behaviors by changing state and adding automatic transitions between states. You can modify the default transitions it builds on the fly using a simply drag-and-drop UI, all the while enabling items to be dynamic data with auto-generated "lorem ipsum" dummy data. Lastly they convert another portion of the artwork into a functional scrollbar with only a few UI commands, automatically associating the scrollbar with the aforementioned list duplicating items, also automatically, to simulate a longer list. This entire demo was seriously impressive and drew the strongest applause of the conference so far. Thermo is expected to be released next year.
Kevin Lynch returns and introduces Mike Sundermeyer to introduce the experience design team's work on building great RIA experiences through the Adobe Inspire Experience design site at xd.adobe.com. The site covers many of the design principles and best practices for building RIAs. Users can add comments to any pattern or case study covered on the site. The site is currently in alpha.
Kevin Lynch returns again to show off the biggest Flash device in the world, a luxury Yacht called "Susan B" which uses a guided system called InteliSea with a UI built on Flash/Flex. The system has a touch screen display that allows the boat's pilot to view information from a large number of real-time sensors throughout the ship, including tags on crew members to protect against people falling overboard, which drew some laughs from the audience.
Kevin next introduces the roadmap for Adobe technology which Adobe Media Player, Buzzword, AIR 1.0, Flash Player "Astro", Flex Builder 3 and Flash Media Server 3 to be released in 2008.
Finally Kevin introduces a video about "what actually happened on the onAIR Bus Tour." Apparently this included lots of beer, lots of Red Bull and lots of "Guitar Hero" and "Halo 3". In between, there appears to have been a few presentations too.
Comments
Posted By Tink / Posted on 10/02/2007 at 9:27 AM
Posted By Andy Growheld / Posted on 04/16/2008 at 6:33 AM