I attended Macromedia MAX 2005 conference last wednesday and thursday (9-10 March). They have Greg Rewis, James Talbot, and Bill Perry to talk about macromedia roadmap and technologies. The highlight of this conference was on the upcoming Flash player 8 (code name: maelstorm) features. Awesome!
The conference started with Greg Rewis’s Keynote address on “The Essence of Rich Interactive Experience”. The Web experience according to him is an unfulfilled promise and he showed hilarious picture on the evolution of man.
Good user experience is not equal of making something pretty, as what most of the people think of. It is rather using ‘means’ (an expressive language – Flash and Actionscript in the context of this conference) to surface capability, improve task completion (user goals), and make it enjoyable and compelling. In other words, great user experience is when it is useful, usable and desirable. To achieve this, he highlighted the four principles of rich experiences:keeping the goal of the application in sight, using focus and emphasis, using context continuity, and using content/control separation. Although these principles are not entirely new, Greg put them in the context of Flash RIA which made them (still) interesting and inspiring. In short, leverage on Flash capabilities to manage complexities through focus, choreography, emphasis and the inductive interface.
After ActionScript for designers and Deconstructing Flash video session, Greg finally showed “Maelstorm” in Macromedia Flash Platform Overview and Roadmap. Following are some of the features supported: bitmap caching that improves Flash animation capabilities – supporting large number of clips playback. The improvement is dramatically smoother and faster – promising enhancement of RIA that utilize many components – which I’ve been dealing with. There are numerous real-time graphical effects like drop shadows, glow filters, blurs, and filters, surprisingly realistic. No more extra movie clips to simulate those shadows.
For video, Maelstrom will have new video codec that promise much more detail at the same size with present codec. This codec will support Alpha channels that make it possible to layer semi-transparent video over other Flash elements. Imagine video presentation where you can change the background seamlessly. Impressive! Things are going to be exciting in Internet video – of which I’m increasingly annoyed if websites are still going ahead with windows media player, quicktime, or worse, real media! Flash is definitely much more better delivery media.
Titu’s “Building Flash Applications with Dynamic Data” was convincing that developing RIA in Flash is really simple, without even code a single line. James Talbot talked about macromedia Flex. His topics were “Migrating to RIA from traditional web and client server applications”, “Creating Your First Flex Application”, and “Using ActionScript2 in Flex and Flash Applications”. Quite informative as well. I surely like the coding features of Flex than Flash. Much more structured and clean.
Finally, the first day of MAX conference ended with Macromedia Breeze presentation by Titu. This time, we got to see live demo of the whole suite of Macromedia Breeze. Gosh! It is really COOL! He started with Breeze presentation that allow people to convert their Powerpoint presentation into Flash – adding sound, voices, and interestingly, surveys and quizzes easily. The result of those quizzes can be tracked by Breeze Training. The last Breeze module was Breeze presentation. You can collaborate easily there, sharing application, give annotation, etc. I started to think how effective meeting could be.
Besides those interesting topic covered in the conference, I actually met one of my weblog readers 
Wow! I’m still impressed that I really experienced how Internet help me to meet with people that I might have never know before. So, welcome 
Yup, the first day ended with me carrying a small white macromedia bags, couple of notebooks, MAX post-it note, and friends.
Wow.. Glad that you enjoyed yourself. Thank you.