Liveblogging MAX 2007 Day 1 General Session keynote
MAX 2007, Community participation, News and events 2 Comments »Hello faithful readers. Welcome to the Day 1 General Session keynote, brought to you from Chicago at MAX 2007. I’ll be your host, Jen (sometimes Jan) deHaan, and I’ll be liveblogging [although I know most/all of you will be reading this after the fact…] from the employee overflow room as we’re not allowed into the actual keynote. This is OK, because I’m all plugged in and limbered up, ready to take notes for you as fast as I can. Right now, just waiting for the fun to begin (as I watch a video feed of the guys practicing their presentations and getting the video screen all set up). Things look good.
9:17am - Doors are opening! The MAXee’s are streaming in (a new perspective from my remote viewing area…)
Stay tuned to this blog for the notes, brought to you as things are happenin’, starting in another 11ish minutes.
9:30: And now the fun is about to begin - I bring to you the General Session, Day 1, MAX 2007.
9:37 - still waiting for the fun to begin. Employee overflow room is nearly packed.
9:39 - music stops, video intro begins - General Session starts!
Video of people (employees and community folks) taking about engaging experience.
Kevin Lynch takes the stage. Welcome to MAX 2007
Theme of the conference: connect, discover, inspire. Enable community to connect, inspire each other, discover new technologies. Lots of that featured at MAX, make MAX your (commuty) conference. Worldwide MAX - going to Barcelona, then Tokyo.
Here at conference - going over the layout. General session area, Community Pavilion - different technology zones. Created space, sign up and present things, or go and talk to other people.
Over in AIR Park has the AIR bus, inside that there is a theater, tables for developers creating AIR apps, where you can go talk to developers. And a developer support lab where developers will answer your question. MAX the dog is in there, that you can buy. (oh so THAT’s what that dog is)
Adobe Developer Connection now launching (www.adobe.com/go/adc). Launched over the weekend, resource - all sorts of content (yay, this blog is linked!) — check it out, lots of articles, and people will be writing about this (!!!).
Launched the next generation of IntroNetworks connection - used for the social network. Now the IntroNetwork is out on the Developer Connection, and won’t be going away after MAX. Flash Player can support thousands of data points. Use it to get to know people at the conference, and keep in touch after the conference too.
25th Anniversary of Adobe. Kevin is going to recap what the decades have been like:
- 80s: Punk, people looking like something. Geeks were creating desktop technology things. Using postscript fonts. Newsletters with lots of fonts.
- 90s: grunge. People were creating CD-ROMs. New form of engagement, interactive pieces, people all immersed in them
- 2000s: rich internet applications, interwebs, people communicating out around the world, and have a 2 way communication with people.
Technology changes, and the work you do keep changes. We’re going to stay on the leading edge, rich internet apps, pushing us forward and we’ll push you forward. Great travel. And don’t miss the party, you’ll be able to experience some of these decades there (!!)
Shantanu invited up.
Shantanu:
On behalf of over 6000 Adobe employees, welcomed you all to MAX. We’re at an interesting juncture of the industry. If you think about the new rich media types people are using, and the new devices people using to create and use - we think the time is right for a bunch of new applications to emerge. We’re here to share with you the interesting things we’re working on to show you the innovation at adobe, and the fab things you guys are working on.
With all of the content - how do we engage our audience, and keep our customers happy. Simple: to make the customer front and center of everything that we do. Digital experience that we deliver focuses on the individual. When we think of great digital experiences, it’s the exception rather than the rule. Move to capturing the emotional and human needs of our customers. As we (Adobe) deliver experiences, we’ve learned a number of lessons.
5 experiences and rules to make good experiences great:
- Content truly is king. Fact is, great dig experiences all about the content. Unfortunately the chrome being an enabler, sometimes a barrier. Some of us design the UI before the content. Think about the content first, and make sure the interaction flows from that.
- Great digital experiences adapt to the personality of the user. One size doesn’t fit well. What the user wants when the user want it - design this way. Sharing two digital experiences on a phone: First phone designed for a middle age individual. Extended the TV paradigm. Can switch through channels - person who is interested in news, stocks, and so on. Not the personality of a teenager. Now the second device: now it looks like what a 17 yr old might like. Fun, multimedia messaging, share pictures and video. Focus on their social life. Still have mutliple channels, but fun and makes a statement. If you can adapt it to the indiviaul, you can make it more desirable and make people more loyal to your app.
- How does one make things simple. We’re in a constant state of sensory overload, need to focus on simplfying the experience and make it user centered. Less is more - allows us to focus on what the heart of the problem is, and make things simple. Tried to do that in video editing in Premiere Express - tried to make sure that everyone who wanted to make video content could do it - and we can offer it as software as a service. Creating your own composition in PExpress is as simple as dragging and dropping video clips. You can also add pictures, graphics and captions, and add text to the video. You can change the length of clips, add a border around the composition, and add transitions between the video clips. In a matter of a few clicks, he has simplified clips, added stuff to it, and can preview it. <showing the video>
- Great digital experiences can use moments to guide. Actions meet the expectations of what the customers expect. AMP used to guide and orient users using the “glide UI” - showing Adobe Media Player. Can have a catalog of content, favorite shows and episodes. Eyes moving around the experience, provides meaning. Shows that movement can have meaning and turn into a compelling experience. USe movement and meaning - can be really powerful.
- Holy grail - increasing the engagement, experience of the user. Focus on the experience of the user. Showing a website created with Adobe stuff. Wanted users to focus on the excitement of a live race (bike race). Done a great job of integrating video with GPS information, can see Flickr pictures (people can share pictures in real time), can share information thtrough a chat. Everything in a single experience, integrate all these different mediums into 1 compelling and engaging experience.
Fact is, technology finally catching up with our vision. Opportunity to make every interaction a compelling experience. Take the quality of digital experiences to a whole new level - the digital revolution. Partner with community to make it a reality.
Adobe technology platform.
Kevin Lynch. Back to the stage, showing diagram: At top - applications. Video, websites, RIAS, cross-media technology.
Video: huge wave on internet. Flash is number 1 video format on the web today. Over 70% is Flash. Flash is number 1 player on PCs, and around consumer electronics, H264 - (cell phones, game consoles, etc), want to make sure Flash is part of this. So we’re embedding H264 into Flash Player. I tmeans it will make it easier to repurpose video content across platform. Lets hear from Yahoo about this.
<video> Video is everywhere, Yahoo uses video everywhere. Yahoo can take it, put it into Flash, and have the same experience across Yahoo. Play everything back seamlessly. Blah blah.
Video software at Adobe - offers the entire workflow from planning to playback. From early stages at concept, right through to delivery (includes creation, CDNs, encoding, etc) - have connections to everyone in the industry so you can create the best experience for your users.
Flash Player team has been enabling this in Flash Player. They’re adding other things to Player - up to 1080p HD in the player, and you can deliver this over the interweb. Fullscreen hardware acceleration. Kevin showing what HD video looks like (HD in Player). Showing a video with encoding - you can see the quality is pixelly. Showing same video publishing out and the quality is much much better in the new Player. And then he takes it fullscreen - shows the quality which is pretty amazing. (Applause, I think in both locations).
Great work out on the interweb - wants to show Halo 3 site. Created this great website about the death of Master Cheif. Showing Halo 3 website. Showing this cool 3d experience. Delivered as interactive streaming Flash Video. (this is really cool, you otta go check this site out). Made 3d models - they ran the camera through the clay model - great example of FLV online. Great example of Microsoft using Flash on their website (!!) big applause.
Working on a desktop player (as most video formats have one) - working on one called Adobe Media Player (AMP)- built on AIR. Allows you to take RSS feeds of video, and load/stream them onto the computer. Or you can download and watch them offline if you want. Can search by genre, watch recent shows, collect favorite shows, paste new feeds in and add new shows. It will pop in new episodes when their available in the feed. You can expire old ones. Demoing MAKE (O’Reilly) videos in AMP.
Has some CSI (TV show) feeds in AMP. You can have ads in your videos too, and there’s a commercial (prerolls, postrolls), or traditional ads running on the top. Or you can have overlays that pop-up during the shows. Ad experience in your videos. Fun way to collect, watch your videos - from large media players, or individuals on the web - can do RSS feeds into AMP.
AMP is on beta in Labs right now! Check it out.
Over 300 million phones with Flash. Over a billion by 2010. Same video feeds on PC, can also send them to mobile phones. Has a Nokia phone, and he will show the same CSI video from the PC going onto the phone. Same video feed, produced for mobile phone, sent using Flash Media Server. Going to be available next month (Flash Lite 3 for Symbian) on Labs.
Human experience can be improved by having 2 way communication with people. Showing the United Way website. Have gotten over a million volunteers through their website. They can rapidly change their website as they have new projects come up. Built using Dreamweaver and ColdFusion. Using both Flash and HTML to deliever the experience. CF8 and CS3 now out, and their more productive. Lets see what features we can add to United Way in 1 week - challenged Ben Forta and Scott Fegette to add it. They’re coming up to show what they did.
Scott Fegette and Ben Forta:
United Way had a long list of features they wanted to use. They are non-profit and resource constrained. So Kevin donated Scott and Ben - and they roped in to help with this effort.
Productivity of CF8 and DWCS3. Starting with a current page on the site. Volunteer tip sheets, and has a series of printable PDFs. And another page that you can tell about yourself to submit and goes into a database. How about they combine the form and the feedback submit page.
Entering in information into the form on the website… like selecting a radio button that Ben is transgender… and then it puts into information that pertinent to him into the document. So it’s a customized thing. Created with some cool CF tags, and includes certain pages and it creates a custom PDF for the user and gives it to them.
Now they want to design the form nicer. Form is really long on the page, like pages and pages of form. DWCS3 has new interface widgets (Spry framework) - so he puts the SPry accordion widget into the form — makes the process easy because he’s dropping this widget in without much work. Then he does some restyling with the CSS panel. Now it’s easy to jump between steps, everything is much shorter. So now he shows a crazy CSS form, and he just clicks a button that cleans up the CSS automagically.
Now showing United Way image that’s on many places on the site - image has text on it that needs to be updated. Previously it was complex to update those images. ColdFusion is going to make it much easier to update those images. Ben showing that a Flex app is running inside there, and he can enter new text for the images on the site. Hits Generate in little Flex app - and it sends the info to ColdFusion, then use Ajax to update the page or something. So anyway, you can update the text on the image really easily/quick.
Back to Kevin L.
Websites - we’re focused on productivity and expressiveness. Give you more time to think about design and give you more time to build them. RIA transition is really under way. People trying to deliver them well, and we’re trying to give you tech to do that best way possible. We’re going to show you Scrapblog - a good RIA on web today.
App built with Flex. Scrapbook blog. You can take media/photos and move them around — rich editing. Drag stickers and drag them into the application. Can rotate and so on. Can create multiple pages. Drag and drop photos into the scrapbook. Can put little thought balloons over people head.
Now you can publish it directly to the web. Applications on web are more like desktop apps. And you will want to run them from the Start menu and stuff - we’re enabling this with AIR. You can take all your web app skills and tools, and you can now bring that to the desktop to engage the user there as well as on the web. Introduces Ed Rowe.
Ed Rowe, leading the AIR development team.
- Cross platform applications using familiar web technologies and skills. Enabled by the AIR runtime, sits on top of the OS, and cross-platform. You have APIs to isolate the operating systems. Detect network system, mutliple window apps, system notification notification, drag-and-drop, clipboard, integrated PDF viewing. Another new feature in AIR - embedded SQL database. Development community said they needed that feature, so they added it into AIR.
- Demo of some of the AIR capabilities. Showing CustomerManager application. HTML, drag and drop, network detection, disk usage, etc. Integrates with SalesForce.com - in the field and not online, but want to look up account or manage contacts or add new ones.
- Starting with Dreamweaver, shows app in DW. All the source code to the CustomManager app is in DW, and he shows the main HTML file for the app.
- Concept of AIR - take what you know, and extend it, so you don’t need to learn something new.
- Then it says, lets preview this in AIR - the application opens, and it downloads stuff from SalesForce (list of accounts) - and you can see contacts and so on. Good example of what AIR good at, put rich experience on top of existing web services.
- Switching to web browser showing exisiting SalesForce website.
- Returning to desktop. Dragging a v-card on his website onto the app, and it automagically puts his v-card into the application and uploads it to SalesForce. Switches to HTML site, and you can see his info righ tin the SAlesForce database on their HTML site too. Pushed the information from the AIR app right to website.
Whole application built by one guy in a couple of days. - Going to freeze the AIR APIs very soon - so if you have requests or feedback, need to get AIR feedback in soon developers!
- Go to Labs for an AIR update. Bunch of team members here, and they will give you copies off their flash drives here at the conference if you want it.
Kevin Lynch.
Today over 300,000 downloads of runtime, over 100K downloads of SDKs. Great progress in AIR. You can also build them using Flash, Flex to build AIR apps. Working at making Flex a great, efficient framework that allows you to build apps rapidly.
Heidi Williams
Heidi Williams from Flex team showing new developments in Moxie - next version — Flex 3.
Lots of enhancements, new features.
1) Flex profiler.
Have an application, charting front-end on bugs.adobe.com. Slow to launch, so launching profler to find out what’s going on. As app starts up, you can see a graph showing memory usage over time. Have a detailed view of all the objects in the memory heap. Taking a performance snapshot to see detailed view. You can see all the methods on startup and how much time they’re taking. So you can jump to the source and see what’s going on - changing code and saving. Now that a change has been made, wants to rename the method. You can right-click and “refactor and rename” - renaming it, and you can preview to see references and declarations to see a quick preview across the app. (you can rename across file, project, or entire workspace).
2) Language intelligence,
3) Advanced data visualization comps
Select mutliple sections of graphs and preview.
Can show heirarchical display of data in an advanced datagrid. Multicolumn sorting in columns.
4) Flex Framework caching. Smaller SWFs
Can cache the entire flex framework cache in Flash Player cache. So every time someon revisits application they don’t need to re-download the application.
Kevin Lynch back.
AIR Developer derby.
5 categories of winners.
- Spaz.air - Twitter client
- Ora Time Tracker
- Agile Agenda
- SearchCoders - Flex community
- Digimix - custom audio mixer
Overall winner: Agile Agenda - Mark Hughes. Win trip around world!
Demo of the winning application, Agile Agenda. Can manage projects. Can look at schedule of what’s going on in projects, milestones and so on. Light table view to see who is doing what, who is overloaded. Then you can reassign tasks to other people, recalculate the schedule. Then you can relook at the schedule and so on. Neat little application here.
Mark is considering New Zealand, Australia and Tahiti!! And he gets a travel bag. Woot.
Lots of AIR apps heading out there to world at large.
Ebay is releasing an AIR application today at MAX.
AOL launching an app here at max - top 100 videos.
SAP, PayPal, SaleForce, etc are building AIR apps.
Kevin is going to introduce an app Disney is building. App for travel people involved with Disney.
Disney folks demoing their app:
Team develops a bunch of applications, and needs to support travel industry in key parts of world. Need to communicate with travel agents, give them easy access to complant disney content (about hotels, booking, what’s going on in park, client management, and so on). Became clear that AIR gave Disney the best solution possible. Going to give us a look at the desktop application built in AIR.
- Had to look at their agents day to day life, what they needed, and so on. Business needs vs user needs to address and balance. Created a workspace application.
- Aaaand we just lost audio. Sorry folks. Can’t liveblog….dude is still talking but no sound.
- Sound is back. Yay.
- They’re storing assets and stuff (PDF, info, pages) and giving info back to the users.
They have a scratchpad where users can drag in stuff (such as maps) that they can use later on. And he’s dragging in a PDF into the scratchpad. Can save assets for later use. (applause). - You can embed video and rich media into the application. Then you can go and book the vacation.
- They’re making multiple quotes to send out to agents. Then they can send the quotes, and send things (like PDFs) off to the user.
- Then the application compiles everything and it’s all added into a PDF that’s customized (as such) and sent by email from the application to the user. So the user gets everything in one nice package.
- Then you can get alerts (system alerts, like when you receive an email in outlook and so on), and you can see alerts such as when a customer has returned from their vacation - so an agent can then contact the customer and make a followup.
Kevin back, says that’s possible the “happiest app on AIR” <people groaned>
Now giving a demo of a day in the life of AIR development.
- He’s going onto Twitter that he’s presenting at the keynote… but his keyboard isn’t working so there is an awkward pause as the keyboard is reset. He reminds the audience that USB is not an Adobe technology.
- Has another app, called Snippage, where you can take snippets of web content and snip and share them. Take the application and expand them, and then go to other web sites and snip content there - it’s like a web browser like thing. Something is happening, something’s not working. Not sure what… OK, Kevin is heading over to another computer. Now people are cheering. Ah - now the site is working.
- You can make your own interactive widgets. OK, so now we’re trying Pronto - which is an email application that looks kinda like Outlook, but isn’t. So now you can
- So now you can look at Google Analytics Reporting Suite (YAY!!!) widget - and you can see a flex animation of the dashboard with the stats and so on. You can see the map embedded int he AIR app, and you can generate stuff like PDFs and you can see it right in the weidget, or you can save it or send it or whatever. Returns to the Email app and replies, drags the PDF to the email in the AIR widget.
- Now heads to a PayPal widget, you can look at history timeline and update what you see on the graph/chart. Now he is dragging the chart right into the Pronto email application. So now attached both a chart and PDF both dragged into the email from the other AIR apps.
- Cooperative applications working together in richer ways.
- Now he is going to another app developed by SAP, a briefing book, it’s like a dashboard for SAP. Has pages that update when online, info is there when you’re offline. You can drag data into the application.
- Desktop applications can also cooperate with AIR.
- Working up a project he has been working on, a music thing in Digimix. Adding voiceover vocals to music, mixing and so on.
- Messenger application on top of Facebook - so instant messaging with your Facebook. Available later today, you can get the AIR application, all of your facebook people are in the instant messenger. This thing is called WaveIM. Can download today.
- Back to digimix. Now he can bounce the mix to disk, and save it as a WAV file. Save it to desktop.
- Then he can send it to friends - sending it to Pownce (like Twitter but not). Taking the WAV file, dragging it directly to Pownce- uploading it to server, announce it to everyone on his Pownce network.
- Nickelodeon application for puzzles and … whatever else maybe - can go to the Nick.com site, and find the puzzlepieces there. Grabbing it from the web browser, and drag it directly to the AIR application.
- So, AIR integrates with browser too.
- Now looking at AOL top 100 videos application available today. Built on AIR. Put all the HD video, all H264 stuff will be in AIR - working with Intel on mutliprocessor acceleration improvements. So looking at video in the AIR application right now. Post, share, see favorites, and so on.
Kevin talks about Buzzword now –
Adobe interested in Word processing, so we want to push the boundaries forward. Started Lets bridge the fridge magnets with the PC desktop. Decided cool, but people want page formatting, flowing text, and so on. So - Buzzword was out there, and it was great. Application running on AIR, working on browser, and so on. Store it on server, load stuff, and it has rich formatting, support for lists, tables, embedded graphics, fonts, everything. All the lines layed out with ActionScript - so you can type right in there, change formatting, all works great. Text wraps around graphics, resize graphics, can go to image inspector and change its formatting. Strong capabilities in the application. You can also share docs, collaborate. In addition to documents on network, you can also open them from your desktop. Kevin has a Word doc files, and he can open that in Buzzword too. <applause> First word processor using paginating.
Happy to announce that we have acquired the company who built this word processor - Kevin welcomes Buzzword to Adobe, we’re looking fwd to working with you guys.
Still in the early days of AIR, lots of room for innovation, and contests!
MTV is starting an Adobe AIR challenge - if you’re interested in building one, now is great time. Get a trip to NY, pitch to MTV execs.
Give us feedback about what you want in AIR.
People are starting to use RIAs, but a combination of everything (print, web, offline, online) all together in a single app. Anthropologie is a company that has done this very well.
Anthropologie demo - showing a catalog of their products. Catalog produced with InDEsign, but they’re using the same assets in the catalog and on their website. They’re also using the same assets in emails that they send out to their users. You can click through the catalog and zoom in, and so on. Then you can click on the items and buy them. Scene7 technology in the background to deliver the images/zooms. Then the checkout is another RIA to do 1click purchasing and so on. They did cross media all the way out to AIR.
Now they have an application to zoom through the catelog in a fun way, get more information. Now you can go around and search for things by keyword and pull out all the items that match that keyword. Then you can add notes on the catelog - and your notes are saved on your own computer - and then you can look at all your noted items. Lots of people are choosing items by color, and then it pulls out all the items just using that color or similar colors (really cool - applause and reaction).
Now you can also take a photo - now showing a picture of Ted Patrick, from the desktop - and you can pull the image of Ted into the color wheel in the Anthroplogie AIR app and it will match things for Ted — matched to what he’s wearing.
Behind the scenes, using Flex, Flash, PDF, HTML, Flash Player, AIR, Scene7.
Flash Player
Now lets look at the client technologies. Flash Player. Working on next gen of Flash Player. Adoption of FP9 90% of the world to update in less than a year. Unprecidented - first in the world to have that many people update that quickly.
Next Gen of Player - Code named Astro.
Emmy Huang and Justin Everett Church.
- Major theme has been expressiveness (bitmap filters, etc)
Focing on text this time - today we have a built in text field, b - In Astro - new layout engine and APIs that will support bi-directional text. New APIs to allow you to take advantage of this.
- Demoing - has device fonts, and you can see tranlation - and you can see that the text break is in the right place for right-to-left text. Japanese is behaving correctly as well.
- Showing text spanning across multiple columns, and you can highlight the three columns of text. Selecting text and removing, and it still correctly reflows between columns.
- Lot more planned, but text is becoming an extensible part of the ecosystem, so you can build apps on top of these APIs and the applications can take advantage.
- Support for transforms.
- Demoing 3D. FLV playback component, and he’s spinning a video around in 3D.
- And there will be built-in 3D APIs that will spin the video. And you can pause the video, play it, while you transform the video with 3D - so everything will still work while they’re being transformed.
- Showing a movie clip that is being transformed while being tweened. Showing some of the APIs that are being used on the movie clips. X and Y and Z - you will be able to animate in 3D. You can use what you already know about animation, and just extend it to 3D.
- Today you have pre-defined filters in AS (blur, filter, etc). Now you will be able to build your OWN effects. Showing a twirl filter.
- Written in Hydra, new language for image processing. By combining hydra with astro you can create a whole new range of effects, with the things already native in Flash Player. OUT ON LABS. (Hydra)
- You see a filter already, and you can edit and preview your effects all at the same time (so if you chage a property, you see the filter update realtime). It is very much like ActionScript (Hydra). You have metadata for min and max values, and default values.
- Hydra is a pixel shader, and will run pixels one after another, adjust and sample colors, sample pixels already available.
- Creates really small filters - this filter being demoed is 1K. once you combine with the existing filters and effects, what you can create is even cooler.
Kevin Lynch.
Check out the ADC Developer Connection for more information on what you’ve seen today.
Have a good time, thanks.
OVER AND OUT!!!



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