Adobe Max 2007 Day 1.5 October 1, 2007

So last night was the event kickoff.  I felt the presentation I gave at Ignite went well. Though I didn't do any beatboxing, the mic handling skillz came in handy. The entire event is being video'ed and I imagine will end up on the blog or related sites.
Day1:

The Keynote tipped off many new features across the Macro...er Adobe product line. There is a strong push to Desktop/Internet integration with AIR. The most inspiring consumer example was the anthropologie catalog where you can drag a user photo in and then select a pixel to see what in the catalogue match...accessories and clothing in a semi radial view. I could imagine pairing this with the Kuler to come up with themed sets.   Then the semi obvious business cases of dragging a vcard/excel from the desktop having it import or render in the air, and then synch with web services, and output the custom thing to PDF.  Which got applause, but..back in 2000 we were working with  variable postscript for this, sad to see it's taken near a decade before it's viable.    Another eye opener, was since AIR has a full web browser you can point it to *any* URL, and then 'snip' an area of that screen, that live feed into a component, turning it into a widget in just a few steps, this is a new type of mashup.
Flex3 supports refactoring..which is great. So comparing to the flash timeline, we're about they year 2000 in Java (VisualAge anyone?) I wonder how long it will be before the FlashVM supports hotcode recompiles on live code. Flex finally supports profiling so you can see the biggest code hogs and memory useage, which I'm hoping will also be available to people developing with Flash first workflows.
The highlight for me came at the very end when they discussed the upcoming Flash player feature changes. Key is text, and intrinsic 3d transforms, custom blend filters.  Text has always been an achilles heel of Flash especially when getting into international charactersets, and editing which is where Flash is heading, from a predominately sit back to more interactive.   This is HUGE. In Flash8 ...not that long ago, (having attempted to build a rich text editor) it simply wasn't possible due to textfield and player limitations, so it wasn't the imagination that was limited it was flash, and generally.    Understandably this is a complex topic, as every local has their own rules for line breaks and such, and editing text with nested formatting is complicated...even after a decade Word hasn't gotten this right. Multi-column text fields and auto flowing is now possible using the new (yet undisclosed api's). Also Adobe has acquired the Buzzword text editor...which I haven't played with yet but have heard much about, smooth ui, inline photo resizing, wrapping of photos, tables etc. This is great to hear, and congrats to the Buzzword team. While normally I'm wary of small companies getting gobbled up by bigger ones,  in this case Buzzword gaining Adobe's muscle benefits us all, this might mean that Flex and Flash might eventually get the kick ass editing tools, and we can all play with in our own apps instead of reinventing them.
The intrinsic 3D transforms I've been suspecting would come for awhile, especially given the degree of 3d expression in the Afterfx video, and many OS exploring.  While papervision has great 3d, it comes at a cost, everything on the stage is a bitmap projection of a component, meaning that interactivity is generally compromised.  In addition papervision is in Actionscript, which is fast..but still way slower than using native hardware for these operations, With the new 3d you can rotateX, rotateY, rotateZ, with perspective transforms (which currently have to be approximated by subdividing into triangles). One demo they showed was a video player rotating in 3d, still maintaining it's standard player controls for scrubbing etc. It's as yet unclear what percent of the 3d will be in the player versus script.
One thing that people fail to realize that much of this web driven stuff could have only happened about ...now. Mac and Windows finally share a common processor so the player can start to unify native instructions, and the multi-core allows for hardware fullscale streaming HD interfaces with or without dedicated video card support.
Also if your going to a conference I strongly suggest getting new and two batteries. My dell so far has been going for about 3.5 hours on the first battery and have a spare for the second half of the day.