Day 2 of MAX is upon us, and again we had another excellent keynote session with some of the leads on Adobe projects. Here are my notes from this keynote. You can find a slew of pictures that I snapped with my cell phone on my flickr page.

Kevin Lynch comes onto stage, right off the bat introduces Bruce Chizen, CEO of Adobe.

• Talks about being a CEO
  • Talks about meeting with Press, Financial People

On meeting with Financial People:

It’s like Going to a dentist and getting your teeth drilled without novacane

• “Why do I put up with the pain?”
• Tells a story about being backstage at a Dave Matthews Band show and talking with the light and sound guys about how Adobe products are being used in big shows like the DMB show, and them being so involved in the conversation they forget they have a job to do (get ready for the show)
• Connect, Discover, Inspire
• Developers are inspiring him - “It’s you that inspire me” (awww, warm fuzzy)

Kevin comes back out on stage

• Shows the keynote overview slide with Servers, Services, and Tools
• Business Logic constantly being rewritten (preaching to the choir…)

Kevin introduces Steven Webster to discuss LiveCycle

• Discusses how we do great things with Flash and Flex that look great “in front of the glass” but wants to discuss what goes on “behind the glass”
• Bad experiences behind the glass can spoil the experience in front of the glass
• Shows a case study for MFG.com (Also a MAX Award candidate) - short film
• LiveCycle data services to improve developer productivity
• Demonistrates a Flex application with LiveCycle - shows the Eclipse LiveCycle IDE
• Talks about PDF Rights management
  • Supplier A and B open a PDF document, we eventually deny rights on Supplier B and he gets an error message and can’t open the document.

Kevin comes back out on stage

• Shows hosted services, a Chart on the slide includes Scene 7, Share beta, Pacifica, and CoCoMo

Kevin Introduces Doug Mack from Scene 7.

• Scene 7 enables “Great Website Experience” [Experience seems to be a huge theme at this conference]
• Scene 7 allows rich media publishing services
• Takes focus off of low level coding, and focus on value added [Presumably content publishing]
• Shows gucci.com - beautiful Flex demo where they can scroll through watches, click and zoom in, very high resolution images all delivered “on-demand” [Not sure what this means]
• Shows of company website Teamwork Athletic Apparel website - logos are customized on a model of some guy in football pads.
  • Customizes uniform color, number, etc.
  • Adds a custom logo to the uniform (MAX Logo) from a file on the desktop
• You can add content to Scene 7 in any format (psd, ai, pdf, jpg, etc.)
• Use a scene7 URL to deliver the content in any format and size/resolution, etc. On Demand
• QVC AIR example
  • has a live broadcast of the TV Channel
  • Recent, Current, and Future products are shown that go along with the live broadcast (presumably)
  • Chat (Ask on-air host)
  • Video timeline tags (Doug clicks on a tag on the video timeline that takes us to a shot of the heel of a shoe, which is appropriately tagged “heel”

Doug introduces Andrew Shebanow to talk about Share beta

• Share beta - it’s a flex app that lets you share files [Fitting name, I suppose]
• Tries to upload a file into the app… error message (see flickr)… tries again… error… 3x a charm… works, audience cheers.
• Inserts the shared item directly into his blog with an embedded object, kind of like a youtube video inserted into a blog.
• Includes REST APIs, ActionScript 3 library support, AIR Integration
• You can print, MS Office convert documents, Tagging.
• Available at adobe.com/go/share

Andrew introduces Danielle Deibler on the Adobe Pacifica team.

• Does a demo with some guy back stage… uses voice chat. The guy back stage shares a video with her.
• Works from behind a firewall, supposedly a direct connection to the peer
• Can’t really figure out what the hell this is… seems just like Adobe Premiere Express with voice chat and video sharing…. weird.
• Private beta October 2007

Danielle introduces Nigel Pegg of the CoCoMo team

• CoCoMo is the project name of the Adobe Acrobat Connect redesign
• Redesigned into the flex framework
• Split up into UI Components that you can use in your own Flex applications
• Video, Voice, Chat, Whiteboard
• Run it as a service with an API
  • Real-time Data Messaging
  • Real-time AV Streaming
  • User Identity Presence and Permissions
  • File Publishing
• Goes to a computer, a fake outlook reminder window pops up that says “Not a Fake outlook Reminder” that was due 15 minutes ago with Fang.
• Creates a quick flex app to connect to Fang’s Adobe Connect channel - has video only right away, Fang looks mad…
• Adds in voice and chat to the Flex App and recompiles, connects back with Fang and Fang is angry but he can only chat with him
• Adds in a whiteboard with slides, recompiles, connects back

Kevin comes back out on stage

• Scene7 and Share beta are availble now
• Pacifica and CoCoMo are available soon
• Talks about some great tools in development

Kevin introduces Mark Anders and Steven Heintz (I took lots of pictures of the interface here - check out flickr)

• They announce a new RIA Design tool code name “Thermo”
• It looks like a designer tool, similar to photoshop
• Opens up photoshop and shows an application that is mocked up in photoshop with some CD covers, a scrollbar
• Imports the photoshop document into Thermo, and it creates a Flex application behind the scenes - Audience cheers
• Converts the mock text field into a text-box by right clicking and selecting convert to text box… very impressive. Audience cheers
  • Font info is retained on the text box
• Selects 6 cd covers, converts them into “Dummy data” - creates a field in Flex.
• Adds a rollover event for the dummy items
  • grows the image
  • adds cd cover text
• Converts the mockedup scrollbar into a Flex scrollbar
  • separate the two-part image (thumb+track)
• Links the scrollbar to the dummy data field
• Compiles and scrolls the data with the mouseover events… very impressive.
• Next year “we can experiment” with it.

Kevin introduces Mike Sundermeyer from the Experience Design team

• Asks “What makes the difference between an OK application and a great experience?”
• Introduces new developer site: xd.adobe.com - in alpha
• Purpose for Experience Design collaboration
  • XD Case studies
  • Defining and Designing RIA’s
  • Resource Library
  • User Comments
• Example on the site: A use case of TV 2.0 (now called Adobe Media Player)
  • Started off ass initial idea for RSS feed for TV
• Has XD Best Practices, Design Principles

Kevin comes back out on stage

• Shows a video of the “World’s Largest Flash Device”
• 120 foot yacht called the Susan B.
• InteliSea software - yacht sensors hooked up to a flex interface
• RFID System - Yacht workers wear and an alarm signals if one falls overboard.
• alarm goes off - A woman with a very plesant voice and a happy chime - Audience Laugh
• Kevin displays the Adobe Roadmap (flickr)
• Reminds us to vote for MAX events
• Shows the AIR Bus Video

Event ends

There’s a definite theme to this MAX event and it seems to revolve around getting developers to design for the user experience. The most exciting part of this keynote was the Thermo design tool - very cool stuff. If they manage to pull it off, it will be a great tool for Flex designers.