Marc Van Norden

Started with Flex Product Manager coming out with Ben Forta in a 007 scenario. The idea being Q or headquarters working to beat the status quo of development

Start off showing an AIR app that controls the power supply and air systems of a house. The whole idea being that we need to expand our applications, to beat “Status Quo”.

Discussion of productivity in CS4

InDesign: exports something called XFL, that imports into Flash and keeps everything editable.

Tweening in Flash: They have re-introduced tweening, not so code heavy. The motion path is a lot more manageable, creating curves and multiple points along the way.

Kinematics and bone structure. allows for “joint” controll within the Fash environment. With CS4, you can now import animation sequences without editing. Flash animators working with flash developers.

Photoshop: Using several images to combine them and get the sharpest image by combing the sharpest areas of each image.

Thermo/ Flash Catalyst: A new professional interaction design tool for rapidly creating application interfaces and interactive content without coding. The code that is created in MXML is well formed not like the old days of wysiwig dreamweaver. Mac only preview release available today. Early next year mac/pc will be put up on Adobe Labs.

Alchemy: Converts C/C++ to Flash generated in a swf. Using C and C++ sounds libs, you can import and use multiple sound formats. The demo uses ogvorbis, and uses a C lib, (libvorbis) which is run thru Alchemy to play the ogvorbis files! Image files, sound, and other raw multimedia file formats can be encoded in C and tranformed to flash. A demostration of using C/C++ compiler to open a PDF and render it in Flash.They just opened the orignial Quake and Mario Bros. directly in Flash or AIR 1.5! Making for the ultimate rom player!

Gumbo/Flex 4:

New Coldfusion IDE name Bolt announced: Server awareness, stop/start, code hinting that makes life easier. Sign up to be notified for pre-releases on Labs.

In Flex 4 you import the UI components, but then create the data models and mappings into the flex app. Basically getting access to all the data and services on the backend.

Built into Gumbo is a network monitor that logs all the server operations and seeing where the errors are popping up.

Integrate themes directly from builder. download on labs

Ensemble: allows you to build Flex applications in Visual Studio. You can download the preview release on labs. This is directly in response to Visual Studio Developers and Silverlight app development.

Dreamweaver: Now you can include any AJAX framwork within CS4. Previously it was SPRY specific and didn’t allow other AJAX frameworks to be used. JQUERY is used as the simple example.

Flash and SEO? Indexing Content: 2 part solution with Google (Virtual User) and Adobe (Flash Search Player). Virtual User goes and reads, loads up Flash Search Player, loads up the swf and waits. The Virtual users tells it to play. If the Player runs into AS, it reads back to the user and says theres code. The User then “generate event”. More on this tomorrow.

FMS 3.5: Dynamic Streaming with multiple bitrates. This will prevent the audio gliches etc.

New version of flash media live encoder (onLabs). Multiple bitrate incorporated. You can now incorporate liveStreams, as well as download cache. an online DVR for live events.

Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5: Allows for camera to camera connections without flash media server!

Adobe User Group Community: 423 Adobe User groups around the globe. A new website called groups.adobe.com. A new way to connect all the user groups around the world.The groups site is one site not fragmented across language.

Catalyst, previously thermo just hit preview release. It is the goal to create the ultimate proffessional designer interaction program.

It allows the designer to work not only with the skin, but with the user interaction, leaving the developer to focus on the interaction code.

Today adobe gave out a pre alpha version to attendees. With the caviar that “undo” just started working in this version.

A pad design comp can be brought into catalyst. As you do it renders the psd layers and element into mxml and a flex interface. The tool panels within catalyst are similiar to photoshop layers making it familiar to designers. You can add hit states almost like the imageready web buttons. FXP file format works in catalyst and flex 4.

Even in this early version, it looks like there is a lot of potential. Enough that it is worth while to get developers and designers to start thinking about integrating into their work flow.