Adobe MAX 2008 Opening Session

Posted on November 17, 2008 | Filed Under Adobe Flex

“MAX - Connect. Discover. Inspire” is the theme of this year’s gathering. The Adobe CEO is now on-stage introducing the conference. He just said this is the largest MAX to date, over 5,000 attendees.

He continues “Consumers are demanding consistent experiences both at work and home. Hand-held devices can deliver things the PC was never able to. Consumers are demanding the consumerization of corporate experiences. Adobe is allowing us to create experiences across a variety of devices.”

Adobe’s vision has been the same, to allow content creators to deliver the most engaging solutions across multiple platforms, devices and screens.

Flash 4 Professional, Flash Catalyst (previously Thermo) and Flex 4 provide the tools to design and develop. A preview version of Flash Catalyst and Flex Builder 4 is being provided to all MAX attendees.

Major web players have already or are in the process of updating their content to take advantage of Flash Player 10.

We’re now watching a demo of Product Red’s music discovery service called (RED)WIRE. It offers a monthly subscription ($5) to an online magazine and music source that is being developed as an AIR app. Just five people subscribing ($25) can save a life by providing retroviral drugs to fight AIDS in Africe. It will be available later this year.

Now on-stage Kevin Lynch, Adobe CTO. He’s talking the transforming trends in software. First - client + cloud computing, a blend between both platforms. Second - Social computing, third, a major shift to a variety of ways to access content (devices + desktop).

Client + Cloud - The future of computing is a combination of the two. Flash Player 10 features Print-Quality Text, 3D Effects and Drawing, Pixel Bender Filters now being upgraded to by the majority of users in about 10 months.

Flash Player 10 Examples - Demonstrating Hobnox which appears to be old-school audio components that can be combined to do all kinds of dynamic real-time audio processing in FP 10.

Next demo is a 3D animation that is controlled by the beat. And now showing a 3D curved gallery using the 3D transformation effects in FP10. Now he’s showing a cloth bouncing around with images and video mapped onto the surface.

FP 10 nows supports right-to-left text languages, full worldwide support. The new text capabilities are da bomb! Pixel bender effects take capabilities from After Effects and have made them live real-time effects that can be applied in FP 10.

A 64-bit version of the Flash Player is also being introduced for Linux today at MAX 2008.

The latest stats show that 90% of all video online is viewed using Flash in the US, 80% worldwide.

The Disney CTO is now on the stage describing how Disney is using Adobe technologies. Disney, ESPN, ABC are all using Adobe technologies. They’ve already upgraded all of their sites to use (thus requiring) Flash Player 10. Disney and their properties are now in the top 3 of all online video providers.

Kevin Lynch back on-stage now, just stated that FP 10 is being downloaded over 10 million times per day. He also announced that Major League Baseball is switching to Flash for their video delivery on their site. All four major sports associations now use Flash to deliver video on their sites.

Now discussing AIR apps, on target to hit 100 million installs of the Air framework on it’s one year launch anniversary. Adobe AIR 1.5 is on track to be delivered soon. It offers Webkit + Squirrelfish for accelerated Javascript interpretation, encrypted local databases and support for Linux as well as OS X and Windows.

Kevin introduced Michael Zimbalist, CTO from the New York Times. He is demonstrating the online edition of the International Herald Tribune, an Adobe AIR 1.5 app. The words hyphenate and paginate automatically as the viewing window is resized, thanks to the new text capabilities in FP 10. It even includes an online edition of the daily crossword puzzle.

Kevin is back on stage and is now showing a mobile processing device that has Air installed on it. It runs on Linux He is showing the NYT Air app running on the mobile device now. It looks and behaves the same as was demonstrated on the computing platform.

He’s now demonstrating an AIR app built for the California Museum called “Learning Lab” that teaches about the California Legacy Trails. Teachers can use the site to create classroom materials including quizzes and text and/or photo essays that their students can use in the classroom. Students can create a slideshow of the materials they’ve gathered and show it to the teacher and classmates.

He is now introducing Maria Shriver, First Lady of California, and Ann Lewnes, SVP, Corporate Marketing to talk about the project. Maria is describing the thinking behind the project. Maria was familiar with the Freedom Trail in Boston and thought it would be a good idea for California since so many people move there and know nothing about the state’s history. Funny thing, she said she felt like she was at a Star Trek convention when she first arrived and was listening to the previous speakers. But then she realized the attendees were 99% men so she decided she would stay!

Kevin is back on the stage and demonstrating a new demonstration of Flex called “Tour De Flex”. It’s an update of the old “Flex Component Explorer” that contains all the latest Flex and AIR APIs. It also demonstrates how to integrate with Twitter, Amazon Web Services, SalesForce.com and lots of other popular services. It has some great real-world examples of using Flex and AIR and all examples include the full source code.

Now on-stage, head of Force.com. Force.com now supports AIR and Flex application integration with its Platform As A Service offering. He is describing how Force.com provides all of the infrastructure needed to build applications. Database servers, analytics engines, you name it, all available and ready to go through their service.

Kevin Lynch is back on the stage and is talking about Social Computing, the second major change in computing. He is introducing Nigel Pegg, Senior Engineering Manager, who is going to talk about Adobe Cocomo, which allows you to build realtime social applications in Flex. He is demonstrating the Acesis Medical Review Air app, which uses Cocomo to enable peer review of patient care records. They can both co-navigate on the shared screen with both users’ cursors. They aren’t screen sharing though, just the cursor position and screen scaling is shared. The information being reviewed is retrieved directly from a secure server.

Cocomo provides a client SDK that sits on top of the Flex framework. The app demonstration took a couple of days and about 30 lines of code to get up and running. Cocomo provided audio/video streaming, file sharing, and real time data messaging. Full source is included for the framework. You can download a beta from Adobe Labs.

Kevin is back, now talking about Adove Wave, which makes displaying a desktop notification as simple as sending an email. He is now demonstrating it. It provides a single way of displaying desktop notifications for a variety of online services. He is demontrating it being used with eVite.

The third section that he is discussing is devices and desktops. PCs are now the minority of devices connected to the internet. Mobile phones make up over half of all connected devices, PCs are less than 25 percent. Content creators should be thinking “mobile first” as they are now the majority of users.

Adobe is working hard to bring Flash to mobile phones. 1 Billion Flash-enabled mobile phones will ship by the end of 2009, a full year ahead of Adobe’s projections. They’re working with mobile phone manufacturers, chipset manufacturers and mobile phone companies to bring the Flash platform to more and more mobile phones. Adobe believes standalone applications as well as web-browsable Flash sites should be possible. They’re in the process of engineering Flash Player 10 (the full player) run on the higher end of the mobile phone market.

Kevin is now bringing out a few new mobile devices “hot out of the oven” to demonstrate. First up is a Nokia N85 running Symbian. He is viewing an interactive graphic from the Wall Street Journal. No special content, just the standard content from their site. Next up is a demonstration of last.fm. He is running FP 10 in the Opera browser. Next up he is viewing a Youtube video on a Windows Mobile, Opera browser device. AND FINALLY…Flash Player 10 on the iPhone! Not approved by Apple yet but well under way. Oh yeah, “one more thing”, a demonstration of a Google Android also running FP 10.

Now on the stage is Andy Rubin, Director of Mobile Platforms at Google to talk about Android and FP 10. He is very excited that Adobe has been able to bring the full version of FP 10 to the mobile platforms including Android.

Kevin is talking about standalone applications on the mobile platform. He is going to demonstrate where they are with Flash Lite. First uo is Nokia phone with Flash Lite on it. He is showing what is required to launch a FL3.1 app. Once the app is started, it is the great experience. However, getting to the content and launching it is challenging.

They’re working on a system that will allow content creators to package a Flash Lite app to be deployed on mobile OSs, distributed via aggregators or direct URL links. If a user tries to install/launch a Flash Lite app on a phone that doesn’t have the runtime installed, the installer will automatically download the runtime and install it and the application.

He is demonstrating this by clicking a link in an SMS message. Unfortunately, the wireless network isn’t cooperating. He goes on to describe that installer will place an icon for the Flash Lite app right on the main phone interface menu.

Next up is demonstrating interconnectivity that allows for multi-screen awareness. He is using a Samsung device and tossing images from the device the large presentation screen with the flick of a finger. Very cool! Now another guy is on the stage with a device. They’re both throwing content on the screen as well as audio (music starts playing) and a video game they’re now both playing.

The keynote is wrapping up. For more info, visit adobe.com/go/keynote!