Adobe MAX Conference 2006
Last Tuesday I attended Adobe’s first MAX Conference (formerly it was Macromedia MAX) at Grand Hyatt Hotel. It was a two-day conference, (I only attended the first day though) with three parallel breakout rack, covering cretive, application and mobile devices. This year conference theme is “Beyond Boundaries” indicating Adobe’s direction to provide common media platform across technologies and devices - Web, Print and Mobile. Frankly, I feel this is the best MAX conference that I have ever attended. The excitement was there as seen from the queue forming long before the registration counter (Or maybe it was just floor arrangement issue).
The conference featured many overseas guest speakers, such as Jennifer Taylor, Jared Tarbell, Craig Swann, Ted Patrick, Justin Everett-Church, and more. The keynote was brought by Jennifer Taylor, the Product Manager of Adobe Engagement Platform, talking about activities after Adobe acquisition of Macromedia. There are a number of exciting synergies in the pipeline.
For mobile devices, Photoshop will have great saving emulator (giving a preview of mobile screen, scretch to fit the display. backlight and reflection simulator). Flash will have various control of mobile emulator (memory usage, time, battery level, performance callibration).
For Web, Dreamweaver is going to support pasting from Photoshop and still maintaining link to original file (double click to access) - giving much needed improvement on the design workflow. It allows user to save the image into the Web format (png, gif, jpg) and automatically uses the same configuration if user pasting a revised image from Photoshop. Fireworks (I thought it was going to disappear) - will have full compatibility with Photoshop. It will have support for multiple pages of PNG that provide basic Flash-like interactivity (click to change page, all within the same single PNG file). Dreamweaver will have AJAX design features using SPRY Framework.
Flash will be able to import Photoshop PSD file - full support of layers and folders. User will be able to indicate various type of layers imported (such as text and movieclip), set compression rate, set stage to match the imported images. Definitely a more integrated and preferred workflow. AfterEffect will have interesting “pin-in” feature to make basic Flash-like animation (set some pin to control the movement and position of the object) and it will support render queue for Flash Video - user will be able to continue using After Effect while exporting Flash videos.
For Application, Flex have an interesting CSS support to skin the user interface (really cool - transforming basic Flash UI into Windows Vista kind of UI). ColdFusion will have Flex Application wizard to create basic Flex Application simply by creating database queries (supporting queries inside queries, and visually set the query parameters). The demo showed how we can create Flex based music player in 5 minutes, complete with editing feature. ColdFusion will also have support for embedding images on the run-time. Great for generating watermark and presentation on the fly.
For Productivity, Adobe Acrobat will have detect Form Field feature which allow user to create dynamic form from basic PDF page. It will also have activity guide which make it easier for user to fill information into the PDF Form.
There are two products being previewed in the keynote. Adobe Soundbooth, which allow user to create and edit music (like Apple’s Garageband?) and new Adobe delivery platform code-named Apollo. Apollo is cross-platform player that allows designers and developers to easily build desktop-based Rich Internet Application. It will provide better desktop integration features like installation, application shortcuts, drag and drop, clip-board, cross application communication, background process and notifications. It will also provide new APIs to host machine for network, file I/O, chrome customization, local storage and settings. As a result, Apollo will be one of the new application delivery platform that support offline mode. Interestingly, Apollo will have its own native browser rendering engine (based on Webkit Open Source Engine - which is used in Apple’s Safari browser). Hence, Apollo support two type of development methods: with SWF (with embeded HTML) and with HTML (with embedded SWF). I’m pretty excited about Apollo, given its ability, portability and learnability. I feel that Apollo is going to be Adobe’s major breakthrough (much like Flash Video is).
After exploring Apollo deeper from Ted Patrick’s Advanced Apollo Application Development, I attended Craig Swann’s Interactive Imagination. I must say it is the most inspiring session I’ve ever attended. Craig leverages sound and videos support in Flash 8, creating very engaging and interactive works to show his ideas about “People as Interface”. I was awestruck to see how Craig used inputs from webcam, microphone, light, and other sort of custom controllers to create unique experience. For example, drawing using a small pen-light, video snapshot, up to playing a piano. The Flash potential for interactivity is truly unleashed in Craig’s hand.
Last session I attended was presented by Richard Galvan, about After Effects for Flash designer. Nice tips and great intro to After Effects beginner like me 
Richard also showed the AE’s motion stabilizing and alpha channel features…Exactly what I needed.
Finally, my MAX conference day ended after a little bit too quiet bird-of-a-feather session on Mobile and Device by Jeremy Clark and Bill Perry. Pheww! I’ll definitely looking forward for Adobe’s upcoming product launch!