So, today was the performance art keynote. Tim Buntel and Ben Forta opened up the keynote through a whole James Bond kinda theme.
Ben showed off what I have to assume is Air manipulating an X10 networking of home devices.
They showed off some cool Flash enhancements. Basically they added easy animation tools to objects. Things like skeletons, and easy pathing. It was available before by dropping down to ActionScript, but now it does it for you.
With Photoshop they showed off that new content aware scaling, where when you rescale an image it scrunches the background without touching foreground images. That and painting on 3d images.
Next up was Flash Catalyst, or Thermo. It was nice to see a working copy of it. They took a Photshop image and added behaviors to it in Flash Catalyst. They tweaked the image in Illlustrator. They added 3d effects to it. It was really impressive. Basically it seems to me like Flash Catalyst is the first robust application behavior designer.
They then showed off Flash running C code. It’s a feature called Alchemy. They started with a Hello World example, then showed off various absurdly cool examples: the OpenSSL library, Raw image transformation, rendering rasterized PDF within the Flash player. They showed Quake as an Air application, and a Nintendo emulator in Flash 10.
Finally, they moved on Flex Builder with a ColdFusion IDE inside. That’s right there will be a ColdFusion IDE. It looks like it’s going to address multiple things that we need: Automatic creation of object services based on Hibernate; CFC introspection, variable awareness. I can’t wait to see more this publicly .
I zoned out a bit, but came back to see A network monitor get added to Flex Builder.
Then Ben dropped the bomb that they are working on Flex for Visual Studio developers.
They moved on to Dreamweaver CS4. It now works with most of the large Ajax frameworks, automatically.
They moved on to show how Flash has teamed up with Google to make searchable Flash content.
The next product demo was the new version of Flash Media Server. FMS can now dynamically change the bit rate without having the distortions that happen when network conditions change. Additionaly, they’ve made it really to push multi bit rate video into apps your building with Dreamweaver. They’ve added the ability the add DVR capabilities to live steaming Flash video. Finally in the Flash player they’ve added peer to peer video capabilities.
They then handed the show over to Ted Patrick. He did the official roll out of Adobe Groups. I think a major plus to this is to make the Adobe Group eco system accessible from people outside the community. Also it will make intra group communications easier.
tpryan.blog 