October 24, 2006

MAX Day One

I’m out in Las Vegas this week with some co-workers attending the Adobe MAX conference. It’s a little different this year as it is the first year since Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (whose conference it was before). Here’s what I’ve taken from today:

Adobe is providing an unlimited amount of PDF kool-aid. I don't think that many have much against the format itself, but most everyone I know and talk with groan when we think about the Acrobat player.
Flex is where we are going. Flex has really matured over the last two years and its time to take it seriously. ColdFusion developers are in a perfect position to fly with it.
THE MAC VERSION OF THE FLEX BUILDER IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A BETA!! I have it installed and can't wait to start working with it.
Apollo will be everywhere. We don't all write applications to run in browsers because we just can't get enough of Firefox, Safari and Opera. Apollo will allow us to liberate our applications from browsers and turn them into desktop applications.
Flash may be what saves makes PDF bearable. Today's release of the document reader beta from Adobe demonstrates an application that is only a couple of megabytes, yet allows one to select and read PDF files. Its about time that Adobe realize that people don't want to install a 30M file just to read PDFs.

I'm looking forward to tomorrow. Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe, will be anchoring the general session. I'll be attending sessions covering HTML/Javascript/AJAX usage in Apollo, prototyping with Fireworks, creating learnable applications, integrating flash video into sites and manipulating images with Coldfusion. Finally, Adobe is hosting a party at the Palms tomorrow evening. Another long and exciting day...