October 29, 2007 by g.

MAX 2007 has been a big event, traveling to 3 cities with over 6,000 attendees in all.  (This week is the last stop, in Tokyo.)

I caught MAX 2007 in Chicago.

I have been going to MAX since the Macromedia days.  MAX 2006 was the first Adobe MAX and came only 10 months after the acquisition of Macromedia had closed.  At MAX 2006 many of the big preview announcements centered on the integration of former Macromedia Studio products into Creative Suite (Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks and Contribute).  With the successful shipping earlier this year of the amazing CS3 I was interested to see what new surprise announcements our good friends at Adobe might have in store for us this year.

As time permits it is my goal to blog about six announcements by Adobe at MAX that I found most interesting and/or exciting.

• Thermo
• SaaS (Software as a Service):  Share, Pacifica, CoCoMo, Photoshop Express, Buzzword, Scene7
• DRM in Video via FMRMS (Flash Media Rights Management Server)
• AMP (Adobe Media Player)
• Flash Player 10 (with advances for text and 3D)
• Acrobat with Flash Player

First up, Thermo …

THERMO

Thermo may have been Adobe’s best kept surprise announcement for MAX 2007.  Thermo is basically a Designer IDE for generating MXML.  Wow!  The announcement and demonstration of the Thermo prototype was amazing.  Thermo really boosts the Flex designer/developer workflow. 

Videos of the demo of Thermo at MAX 2007 Chicago is up on YouTube in three parts (thanks Aral):

• Part 1:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lGdr3dCmxe4
• Part 2:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d9IjZJ0D_bo
• Part 3:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsfOe_MCEbg

Following are two observations about Thermo.

AN MXML DESIGN TOOL BY THE BEST FOR THE BEST. 
Lightweight rich apps are the future.  It is a competitive world out there.  Adobe currently is dominant in the lightweight, rich app space and announcements like Thermo highlight brilliantly that Adobe is intent on not ceding any marketshare in this rapidly exploding space.  On the design side, my sense is that in the market for design software over 9 out of 10 designers choose products in the Creative Suite.  With CS3, Adobe added extensions in CS3 products to support design of MXML based applications (most notably extensions in Fireworks).  With Thermo Adobe is clearly applying its unparalled design expertise to bringing to market the best possible visual appplication design tool.  And as an FYI, one of the biggest Flex application design shops is none other than Adobe themselves (check back for my forthcoming post on SaaS).  So Thermo is an IDE Adobe is building both for the market and for themselves

MXML SYNTAX EVOLUTION. 
I am a Flex/Flash/ActionScript developer.  When the Thermo demo went into code view the tag syntax you see includes tags that are beyond those for the Flex Framework components (see in this recording at timecode 4:37:  http://youtube.com/watch?v=lGdr3dCmxe4).  WOW!  At MAX the presenters offered no discussion of the code syntax but clearly Adobe has in the works the articuation of new XML based schemas.  MXML offers a declarative, tag based syntax that serves as an alternative to code based ActionScript for instantiating the classes of the underlying Flex Framework.  So it appears Adobe is now creating additional classes and XML schemas. 
Note 1:  This new syntax has even made an appearance in the public Flex Bug and Issue Management System on an issue with the milestone "(Planning) SDK Post Moxie".  You can view the issue here: https://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/SDK-12636
Note 2:  Although outside of Flex and MXML, even Flash CS3 has introduced a limited XML schema to support copy-and-paste for timeline animations in the form of the Motion XML Elements.  See docs here or demo here.

For more on Thermo, watch the following placeholder page on labs:
http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Thermo

Also Julie Campagna, who manages the Adobe Edge newsletter, will be recording a demo about Thermo soon (per comment here).

Posted in Flex | No Comments »

October 17, 2007 by g.

This coming Tuesday October 23, 2007 we will be delivering for Adobe an eSeminar on Flex Video Integration.  You can find further details about the eSeminar and register for it here:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539

This session will be a variation on a session delivered earlier this month at Adobe MAX 2007 in Chicago.

Flex, as part of the Flash Platform, possesses all of the power for delivering and acquiring video on the Internet as has been done by YouTube, on major TV broadcasters’ websites, by UserPlane (now a division of AOL), and by countless others.  And with the Flash Platform now being extended to also target the Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), Flex is also taking video into desktop applications.

At the vanguard in creating Flex based video apps is none other than Adobe themselves.  Flex based video products that Adobe is shipping or bringing to the market include:  Adobe Premiere Express, Adobe Media Player and a forthcoming hosted service for real-time collaboration and multi-user applications code named CoCoMo.

Next week’s eSeminar provides a whirlwind tour of resources for building Flex based Video apps.  We will start with introductory material, but will quickly move to showing video in the context of complex Flex applications. The eSeminar’s focus is on providing a roadmap to working code.  Full code is available for all examples, many of which are described in detail by other sources.  The eSeminar will be only 1 hour long, but we will provide you enough code to successfully build your own projects

Code demos in this eSeminar will include:

• mx.controls.VideoDisplay
• Implementing Full Screen
• H.264 (aka MPEG4)
• ReviewTube
• Flash FLVPlayback using Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3
• Flex Video Conference

Regarding the Flex eSeminar Series, following are other titles remaining in this current series:

• Flex for the PHP Developers  (Oct 30, 2007)
• Flex for the Java Developers  (Nov 6, 2007)
• Rich Internet Applications – The Big Payoffs  (Nov 13, 2007 & Dec 4, 2007)

For details for all of the sessions above, and to register, see the following page:
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/event/index.cfm?event=detail&id=462539

Posted in Video on the Web, Flex | No Comments »