Lots of great sessions listed there. Looking forward to this one. I attended last year’s MAX in Chicago, since it was basically in the neighborhood. I’m going to do what I can to make it out to San Francisco for this one. I haven’t been to the West Coast at all for a couple years, so this will be a lot of fun. Some great sessions from the Adobe XD team,  Mario Klingemann, Michael Labriola, Scott Fegette, Robert Reinhardt, Mark Niemann-Ross and Kevin Goldsmith all caught my eye on initial glance, but I’m sure once it comes time to set my schedule, I will have a hard time choosing which sessions to attend. I like the fact that they seem to turning a little more focus back to the designer, and I’m sure that tools like Thermo are really contributing to that shift. It’s great to have the stuff that makes the guts work well (Actionscript 3, MXML, etc.), but if the applications and sites we produce don’t look or feel great, they will just end up as unusable software. What’s worse than that?

Are you attending MAX? What sessions are you looking forward to?

Many tech pundits and non developers are all a-Twitter over the article over at RoughlyDrafted. It’s understandable. At a 10,000 foot view, it’s another player in the RIA marketplace. Cool! However, let’s not all start high five-ing ourselves just yet. A pundit’s view is not shard by clients and developers. Of course, when a company like Apple, Adobe or Microsoft puts its’ weight behind a technology or development platform, it’s worthwhile investigating. (more…)

My coworker Mark Tovey and I got back from a 1.5 day event in Chicago, RIAPalooza. (For the record I pronounce it “arr eye ay”, not “reeyah”) He’s already written his recap. I’ll give it my shot here.

The event’s site described the event as such:

RIApalooza promises a platform agnostic and “PowerPoint-Free” zone, which means we are going to forgo the boring marketing pitches in favor of talking technology. RIApalooza is about creating Rich Internet Applications; how to go about building them and what is being built.

Overall, it delivered as promised, the informal, community feeling was definitely there. The Friday night session and the QA that followed it were lively and really quite good. I’ll give a brief overview of each session. (more…)

Are you in the Chicago area? Do you like RIAs? If so, are you attending RIAPalooza? If not, why not? If you are planning on attending, drop me a line. Also, be sure to follow the RIAPalooza feed at Twitter. I will be tweeting from the event, and hope to have a nice long recap post on my site sometime Sunday. Here’s to a 1st time for a promising event! Hope it goes well, I’m excited and optimistic. They have some interesting speakers,  great sponsors, some excellent sessions and its in my favorite city in the USA.

Man Adobe is just cranking em out. Labs has fresh new betas of some CS4 applications. The new Fireworks CS4 beta looks especially nice for RIA UI design. Cool features, indeed. I will be checking out the Dreamweaver SVN integration this week, for sure. I have little faith in using Dreamweaver for my dev work, I just like Eclipse and BBEdit too much, I think. We’ll see if this new Dreamweaver CS4 Live View which uses Webkit changes that. I do like that they are willing to support other JS libraries besides Spry. We’ve pretty much standardized on JQuery at work.

Anyway, fire up your pipes and try em out… The Mac version of the Dreamweaver CS4 beta is 252MB! The Mac Fireworks CS4 beta is a whopping 633MB! Best turn off your Last.fm while grabbing that puppy. I won’t be checking the SoundBooth beta… I don’t really touch the audio stuff.

Some things in the new Fireworks:

• New user interface
• CSS-based layouts
• PDF export
• Live Style improvements
• Adobe type engine
• AIR authoring

The new Dreamweaver touts these features:

• Live View
• Related Files
• Code Navigator
• CSS best practices
• Code hinting for Ajax and JavaScript frameworks
• HTML data sets
• Photoshop Smart Objects
• Subversion integration
• Adobe® AIR™ authoring support
• New user interface

Very nice list of features indeed. A little more on this is available at Scott Fegette’s blog. I will really have to give these a workout. Can’t wait for the Diesel beta! Should be around the corner, I would think.

I recently had the pleasure of spending a full day at a client’s site along with some representatives from Adobe. It was great day for networking, introductions and demonstrations. A number of technologies were shown, from Acrobat 3D to LiveCycle, to InDesign/InCopy and finally Flex with Data Services. This client is already using Flash on their site in a number of presentational media methods, and also in their eLearning initiatives. I wold be willing to bet this profile fits a lot of large corporations current state of media affairs. They have recently begun transitioning from some other print publishing tools to the Adobe Creative Suite. They really haven’t tapped into using Adobe tools for business applications yet though.

I have a couple theories on that reluctance. Much of that is due to their long entrenched legacy systems, built using a myriad of technologies. Some of it though is due to what I am dubbing the “Flash Hangover”. You know what I mean, right? The hangover from the type of Flash that caused Jakob Nielsen to write the Flash: 99% Bad article so long ago. You know the type. The Skip Intro Flash. The extra beepy or seizure inducing Flash. The un-backbutton friendly un-search engine friendly un-content management system friendly Flash content we’ve all come to know and loathe. Flash is either viewed as a acceptable annoyance or a toy.

It’s clear to everyone deep in the industry that Flash Player 9 and the current state of affairs in the Flash ecosystem is a little bit past that, but for people that are only tangentially involved in the electronic publishing aspects of a large corporation, the A-HA moment has probably not happened yet. I witnessed it happen for a room full of people the other day, and I’m sure there are many many companies out there may need that moment to push them away from the tired old HTML powered apps they currently have a towards true RIA development.

Silverlight does not have this hangover to recover from, and I must say, we had many of the people at the event asking about a comparison to Siverlight in regards to the data services we were seeing displayed in the very cool Flex visualizations.

It should be an interesting next couple of years.

Last April, I wrote a post listing some reasons why I felt Silverlight would not succeed. That post garnered a lot of visits, comments and a few trackbacks. It’s still a highly trafficked post of mine. Furthermore, that post is the number one Google result for “silverlight IDE” and ranks pretty highly for a number of Silverlight related phrases like “silverlight penetration”, “silverlight market penetration”, and a few others along those lines. I’d like to revisit some of those points to see how things have changed in the past year. I was inspired to revisiti this after reading Robert Scoble’s friendfeed topic on this subject. Read on to see the progress. (more…)

So Flash and Flash Video look to be open now, at least from a marketing perspective. Not cynical or anything, truly hoping that this does work out. I’m excited. This is a big announcement. Many interesting things will happen because of this… some of thing things on my mind I am hoping will happen:

1. The last reservations of the neckbeard/”Flash is a binary blob” will melt away. This may take a while, but we can certainly hope so. Open source zealots will have little to complain about with Flash player 10.
2. The open format of the SWF/FLV will really push Adobe to continue to improve it, pushing it light years ahead of other web and desktop runtimes out there.
3. The Nintendo Wii will get Flash player 9.
4. The iPhone will get Flash.
5. 64 bit linux plug-ins will finally happen
6. A multitude of easy to use or low cost Flash streaming solutions will materialize.
7. Commodity hosts will begin to offer FLV streaming
8. FLV playback could get bundled into DVD players, set top boxes, etc.
9. Virtually every mobile phone in the world will have Flash
10. Appliances and other consumer electronics will begin to adopt Flash as the preferred UI development platform, thus increasing the market for Flash content exponentially making your skills as a Flash platform developer even more valuable.
11. Open GL Support? Maybe, please?

Some things I am am concerned about:

1. Flash players will become fragmented and certain variants will lack features.
2. FLV players will popup on machines that can only act as dumb video players but lack interactivity capabilities making them second class citizens in the landscape.
3. Refrigerators will now have ad banners running on them.
4. Poor implementations of the Flash player will skimp on security, tarnishing SWF’s name

After reading the FAQs and watching Kevin Lynch’s video, I am hopeful that the good things I mentioned will happen, and pretty sure that the bad things can be avoided. Check out the video here. How about you? What are you excited about? What are your concerns?

There is undoubtedly going to be a lot of info coming out in the near future on this, even though the true effects of the announcement might not truly be felt for months. Peter Elst has some comments really worth reading on this announcement, too. Ryan Stewart has some info, too.

First a teaser back in December. Now a leak at a booth at NAB? Hmm. Weird. Come on already, drop the knowledge. Something is definitely coming out from Adobe soon, just go check out the various Twitter search engines and look for Adobe, you find a few tweets on it. Some big stuff on the horizon. Crossing my fingers! If nothing else, it looks like Mike Chambers and others at Adobe are working to get MXNA back up… lets go! Good work guys, need the MXNA for my daily Adobe blog fix.

Who’s going to this? RIAPalooza I’m interested in learning more about this platform agnostic and “PowerPoint-Free” zone, but there is no info on speakers, sessions or agenda. The only sponsor is MS at this point, so I’m not sure what to think… How about you? Are you going? It’s free. Woot! It’s in Chicago. Woot! It’s ‘power-point free’ Woot! It is sponsored by MS. Woot? If you have dirt on this event, dish it! It’s only a month away.