Macromedia MAX Day 1

Nov 25, 2004

by Judith Dinowitz

The first keynote of MAX did everything a keynote should:

It showcased Macromedia's accomplishments and showed where the company is heading. They are extending their Flash technology into the mobile space and more fully developing the features and performance of Blackstone, Flex, Breeze, Captivate (formerly Robodemo) and the next version of Flash, code-named maelstrom.

It introduced the message Macromedia wanted us to take home from the conference -- the concept that Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) don't only look pretty. They can also help you make a profit.

And the first keynote topped those messages off with the one thing every keynote needs: Flash.

I am not referring to Macromedia's product; here I am talking about the special dazzle that I expect when I go to a keynote session. I expect to come away from a keynote with a feeling of confidence in the company, and a feeling of wonder at what I've seen. And Tuesday's keynote certainly did that.

Stephen Elop, Chief Operating Officer of Macromedia, eased us into Tuesday's session with a broad overview of the history of RIAs and a look at some of the better examples of RIAs today that have actually made a definite difference in the profit margins of some companies. The examples he gave were concrete:

Half the leads to car dealerships that turn into sales now come from the RIA on the Mini USA.com website.
Ralph Lauren has a video section on their website (using Flash video, of course) that saw a traffic increase of 300% in the first month it was introduced.

Having made the business case for RIAs, Elop then introduced the idea of where Flash is going, through the use of Flash on mobile devices such as cellphones, GPS systems when piloting small aircraft, and wifi devices that distribute music throughout the home.

He then brought up a new development process that Macromedia has instituted since last year's conference. This process, called SPD (or Speedy), is Macromedia's attempt to get more developer and customer feedback into their product development cycle. SPD involves customer interaction and feedback between every part of the product development cycle:

Meet with Customers

  Release Alpha

    Meet with Customers

      Release Beta

        Meet with Customers

          Release Product

In the last few months, Macromedia has been meeting with customers all over the world. The Blackstone release of CF has over 2,000 beta testers. Flex has over 500 organizations using it. All of this customer feedback has resulted in better products.

Stephen Elop shows some of the great examples of Rich Internet Applications out there today!

Elop proved his point with a visual and interactive example of a Rich Internet Application in action. He put up an application using Blackstone and Flash that allowed audience members to vote for the Presidential candidate of their choice through their mobile phones via a Blackstone SMS gateway. Developers in the audience were given ten minutes to send in their votes for either Bush or Kerry, while a JibJab "infomercial" played on screen. Though the results of this informal poll did not reflect the election (Kerry seemed the predominant choice at MAX), this interactive example really capped Elop's point about RIAs and where Flash was going, and set the tone for the rest of the keynote.

Types of RIAs and Real Examples

The next speaker was Kevin Lynch, who made Macromedia's point that the general adoption rate for new versions of the Flash player were very high - with a 0 - 80% saturation point in about 12 months. He compared this with other software programs: IE 6 reached 80% saturation in about 36 months; Windows XP reached 53% saturation in about 42 months; and Java version 1.4 has, alas, only reached 26% saturation in the 39 months since its release.

Lynch then proceeded to identify five categories of RIAs, with examples of each type. These categories were:

Expressive Content, providing great content over low bandwidth. A prime example of Expressive Content is the Red Bull plane race website (www.redbullcopilot.com), which has an interactive video of the race, letting visitors choose the camera angle on different planes and showing data that changes as the planes race around the track.
Guided Selling: Here Lynch showed some great examples, such as the Vodaphone site that shows only those phones that have features customers select, and the NIKE website, that lets visitors design their own shoe from the ground up.
Visual Anaylsis: RIAs provide a great way to combine different types of analysis so that multiple streams of data can appear on the same page or in the same graphs, much easier than HTML. Some examples given were the State of New York, which has an application that gives information about the general health and education of kids in New York State (http://www.nyskwic.org/access_data/map_select.cfm), and the BBC, which had a comparison of the outcomes of American elections by state from 1948 on (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/shared/spl/hi/americas/04/vote_usa/map/html/default.stm). He also mentioned the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill, which hosts a website that helps doctors all over the world share information on treating kids for different illnesses. Chris Ogden, Director of Software Development at the university, said that up to 50% less data needed to be sent to a Flex application than to an HTML application.
Applications inside companies - Typically, a company will have many smaller applications that are local to specific divisions or for specific tasks, and then when there is need to see information from more than one application, they will have to go back and forth between them. RIAs provide a means to access the data from all these applications and display them in one simple user interface. Zones, which runs several mail order catalogs, used this strategy and combined several apps into one with a simple UI. The training time for Zones operators decreased rapidly.
Effortless Communication: Flash has proven to be a great way to do video and other types of online communication. CNET uses Flash Video on their main homepage to deliver segments of their TV programming to web visitors; Salesforce.com use Breeze and Flash Video presentations to talk to their customers.

Guidelines for Building RIAs

Michael Gough and Mike Sundermeyer of the Macromedia Design Team provided the following guidelines to consider when building an RIA:

When doing an RIA, first think through the problem you're trying to solve.
Give your application focus and emphasis. Emphasize and draw out the use cases and functions of your application, and make that the main center of the application.
Content and Control Separation: Dedicate content and separate out the controls (navigation).
Context Continuity - Keep your users in the application. Keep the page consistent. Maintain Context.

Gough and Sundermeyer recommended that Macromedia users look out for a new blog that is being developed on Experience, focused on the design of RIAs.

Michael Gough (L) and Mike Sundermeyer (R) give us the benefit of their expertise on the design of Rich Internet Applications.

Flash Video and Flex 1.5

Then Kevin Lynch spoke about the Flash Video Kit for Dreamweaver. With the Flash Video Kit, Lynch said, it's very easy to do Flash Video:

You can embed video in a SWF. This is good for short pieces of video.
You can provide an external Flash Video file (FLV). This is good for 5 - 60 second videos. The video will start playing before it's fully downloaded.
For longer video streams, the best option is to provide streaming video. For this, you would need a Flash Communications Server on the video side. There are hosting providers, such as Speedera and VitalStream, that do provide access to a Flash Communications Server.

Lynch said that Flex 1.5 was immediately available as of MAX! He also announced the availability of a new, fully functional free version of Flex for non-commercial or non-institutional use. This means the software can't be used to promote any product or on any website that generates revenue or that "facilitates the operation of any institution, including but not limited to corporations, partnerships, sole proprietorships, governments, or educational institutions." Other qualified participants include educators or students looking to learn or to teach Flex, and bloggers who want to showcase Flex applications on their personal blogs. If you're interested, you can find out more at http://www.macromedia.com/macromedia/proom/pr/2004/flex15_ship.html.

SMSGateways and Blackstone: The Voting Application

George Riley, Senior Developer at Macromedia, said that in the voting application that had been used earlier in the keynote, all the SMS votes were gathered and stored in databases through Blackstone, with an SMS Gateway that's in the new release. He introduced Ben Forta, Senior Technical Evangelist, and Tim Buntel, Senior Product Manager for ColdFusion MX, who would explain more of the tech behind the application.

Below: Tim Buntel and Ben Forta gave a dynamic presentation that was one of the highlights of the keynote.

Forta and Buntel gave a fun and relaxed presentation, and showed some of the code that was used for the voting application. One thing developers have not seen in previous versions of ColdFusion was the use of curly braces in the language. Curly braces are used in Flash Forms when identifying a variable. Forta showed off the Printing features of Blackstone, making the voting results into a Flashpaper document and then building a report of the results using Blackstone's Report Builder. He showed off the SMS Test Server that is built into Blackstone, using it to test the SMS gateway for the application. The use of Blackstone's new Report Builder to create an on-the-fly report of the poll's results really showcased Blackstone and made this editor feel very good about Blackstone, Macromedia, and where the product and the company is heading.

A sample of the new CFFORM code in Blackstone shows off the "skins" feature that gives you a much greater choice of "look-and-feel" for your forms.

Maelstrom: The Next Version of Flash

Mike Downey, Flash Product Manager, said that engineers focused on two things in this release of Flash: Performance and expressiveness. Some of the improvements include:

Improved ActionScript performance
New capabilities for optimizing performance: For example, in Maelstrom, it is now possible to cache a movie clip as a bitmap. One can save it in memory and then shift the pixels on the screen, which is faster to download than a traditional vector-based SWF file.
Hundreds of components have been added.
New graphics abilities in ActionScript, such as an animated text-glow effect, letting you animate and change text on the fly.
A new color matrix can be applied to a video at runtime, changing the colors of the video on the fly.

The most amazing revelation of Downey's presentation was the announcement of a new codex that had been developed for Maelstrom, giving Flash a much sharper and clearer video quality and allowing for much better effects. The audience was amazed at examples of sites where a person was talking in front of a blue screen and then another video was placed in the background, or where the videos and background were easily changed or where one video was placed on top of another and blended together effortlessly.

Mike Downey explains why Maelstrom takes Flash to the next level.

The Medium and the Message

I came away with two distinct impressions from this keynote.

For years Macromedia has been pushing an idea. The idea is that the Internet as we know it is visually and experientially in the stone age - plain, flat pages with HTML. We've been slowly getting away from the stone age by adding JavaScript, DHTML and CSS, but we're still not there. We're nowhere near there. That is Macromedia's message.

The only way for Macromedia to convince people that this message is the true and proper way is to actually go out and make it so. Macromedia cannot sit back and wait for others to say, "Oh, Macromedia has a good idea! Let's build a better experience." Macromedia has to make it happen, and then show others, and say, "Oh, we're waiting for you."

So what did they do? They took Flash, which is their centerpiece for a more interactive and rich Internet, and they made it better. They put it in other places, such as cellphones or desktops. They made it accessible to other people by giving a programming interface to it (Flex) or letting people build Flash applications without knowing Flash (Captivate, Breeze, Robohelp, etc.).

But it's not enough. Why is it not enough? Because in America, people are sedate. The Internet is good enough for them; why do they have to change? It takes a lot to move Americans. That's why one of the major pushes for Macromedia is Asia and Europe. In Asia, almost everybody has a cellphone. If someone came out with a killer cellphone app, it would gain almost instant market share. So Macromedia is pushing better Flash on devices, better Flash on the server, better things to hit this market.

It's the same in Europe, where mobile technology is very big. Macromedia has to build the best they can, put it out where it's going to be used, and then let America "discover it."

The second impression I took away from this keynote was an appreciation for the possibilities of using Flex, Flash and ColdFusion to create the kind of "Flash" that this keynote gave me. Macromedia has done what they set out to do, which is dazzle those who are not hardcore Flash aficionados. What they need to do now is to get the word out not just to those who were at MAX, but also to the rest of the world.