The Internet Remixed

by Dana Tierney, MAX Correspondent

Adobe thinks we're on the verge of "the next digital revolution."

Seventy percent of all video on the web is now Flash, Chief Software Architect Kevin Lynch said proudly. This ubiquitous platform is undergoing a massive face lift. Flash Player now supports H.264 playback for greatly improved video quality, up to 1080 p with support for full-screen viewing. This is the same standard used by Blu-Ray and HD-DVD. This improved quality has led to new partnerships, with Yahoo for example.

Lynch demonstrated the improvement by showing a clip from CSI: Las Vegas in in the Flash Authoring tool at 480p and then at 720p. On the large screen there was a striking reduction in artifacts. It is now possible to "integrate video in a seamless way," said Lynch, showing a clip from a website about the death of Halo's Master Chief, and praising it's "immersive" effects. "A great job by Microsoft of using Flash on their website," he chortled.

Adobe released a beta version of its new Media player at MAX, and Lynch showed that off too, noting that it can display ads before, after or during a video. "There is a total revolution with video right now," he smiled. The player is also capable of the type of wipe transitions that I, at least, had associated with PowerPoint rather than a media player.

The Adobe Media Player (AMP) can accept RSS feeds. Lych mentioned and showed feeds from CBS, PBS, Yahoo and Make magazine. However what is perhaps most interesting is that it can be monetized with advertising, potentially opening the door to a business model other than pay-per-download.

Flash Lite 3 was also released at MAX. There will be a billion phones with Flash on earth by 2010, Lynch said, and beginning next month Nokia and NTT DoCoMo will be selling them.

Lynch then called upon Scott Fegette and Ben Forta to present a makeover in Flash, ColdFusion and CS3 of United Way's volunteer site, visited by a million volunteers a year.

Since United Way is not-for-profit, it is "resource-constrained," said Forta dryly, so Narayen asked Kevin Lynch what Adobe could do for them, and "Kevin offered Scott and me." The original site, said Fegette, had volunteer tip sheets in PDF format, and a "really long form" about the volunteer whose data went to a database. "I would be a little daunted," he said.

Fegette and Forta used the makeover to highlight a number of new features in Adobe products of interest to developers. Spry version 1.6 allowed a tabbed interface to be applied to the form, and allowed the two to drag form elements into it. The result was a much more compact and less-intimidating accordion form. There were chip images on the original pages highlighting various tips, and in order to update them they needed to be opened in Photoshop and then uploaded to the server, a process that was possible but "tedious." Applying LiveCycle to the problem allowed MXML tags to be edited inside the pages, so that United Way could "build ads on the fly." Forta commented that the CFImage tag treats images as a bytestream. Fegette demonstrated one-click source formatting in the new Dreamweaver.

Lynch then showcased the Ajax functionality of Scrapblog, moving images and text around with his mouse. "From inside a website I can do this!" he exclaimed. Adobe AIR uses the same tools also, he said, "and now we are going to bring them to the desktop."

Ed Rowe of the AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) team talked about the runtime, a cross-platform tool for creating applications that can run from the desktop and provides network detection, drag and drop functionality and an embedded SQL Lite database. The latter was not originally planned, Rowe added, but developers told Adobe it was important. "Thanks for telling us that," he said. He demonstrated how AIR could by used to build a contact manager for a salesman who was frequently online but needed to sync with the company database. "The concept is not to say you need a new tool, you need a new language," he emphasized, but to "use what you know." He added that the application he was demonstrating was "written by one guy in just a couple of days."

Flex 2 was released in June and has been downloaded 300,000 times since then. The SDK has been downloaded 100,000 times. The API is about to be frozen so now is about the "last chance" to submit any feature requests, Rowe said.

Heidi Williams of the Flex team demonstrated a new tool in the upcoming Flex 3, code-named "Moxie," that can be used to find code that is slowing down applications built in that framework. By request, improved language intelligence allows refactoring. Right-clicking on a term in the code gives the option to refactor/rename and preview not only references but also declarations. Framework caching "drastically reduces the size of stuff." An application which is 500k in Flex 2 will be 300k in Flex 3. Drag-select has been enabled in the charting interface to allow a series to be selected, and the advanced data grid now supports multi-column sorting.

Agile Agenda won the Air Developer Derby, with a project management application that allows tasks to be dragged and dropped between users. The tasks resize themselves on the timeline automatically on the fly. Ebay and AOL both released new AIR applications to coincide with MAX.

Cary Gibaldi of Frog Design presented an application designed for Disney travel agents that integrates with salesforce.com. He found that agents tended to want to save offers locally. His application allows them to drag a copy of an offer into a scratchpad and embed video and other rich media to accompany it.The application allows agents to quickly create multiple quotes and itineraries which then compile into a PDF.

Lynch returned to the stage to for a quick run through of some other AIR applications, such as Tweetr, a Twitter client, Pronto beta, a desktop email application, and Snippage, an application which allows you to save snippets from a web page to your desktop. Other examples included a suite of applications for Google Analytics, a messenger application for Facebook, and a Paypal application that allowed Lynch to drag data into Pronto. The industry is going "beyond mashups to cooperative applications," he said. He also demonstrated Pownce, commenting, "There's a lot of social networking applications right now. And with AIR, you can keep up with them." He mixed a nice little track with AIR Developer Derby finalist Digimix by dropping snippets of sound onto a timeline. Lynch won the day's award for poise when, stymied by repeated problems with the mouse and the keyboard, he pointed out that "USB is not an Adobe technology."

Lynch then announced the acquisition of "the best word processor on the web today," Buzzword. This application, which moved from private to public beta for the event, allows text to be wrapped around an image, and preserves the pagination of the original. Based on XML, Buzzword is "a really robust word processor," Lynch pronounced, and like other applications it allows an online document to be opened from the desktop. He then announced that he wanted to buy a blue shirt for Flex evangelist Ted Patrick; a wonderful excuse, as it turns out, to visit the website at Anthropologie and show off the site's Flex-based ability to zoom in and out of photos and shop by color (and shoe shape for that matter).

Finally, Emmy Huang and Justin Everett-Church gave a tour of Astro, the forthcoming version of Flash, promising a major rewrite of the code base, not just the same thing "with some more cool features." Advanced text layout support will allow the text to re-flow across columns when paragraphs are deleted. Right-to-left languages such as Japanese and Hebrew with hyphenate correctly. A simple API will allow the display (and rotation) of objects in 3D space. Also, Hydra, the new image processing engine, now makes it possible to create custom filters that can be set with sliders. They showed a Lite-Brite effect and a spiral applied to a swinging monkey.

Quite a lot to think about all in all. Many of the announcements met cheers and applause from the audience. "Don't wait for 3.0," one developer advised another as the session broke up. "The wave is starting now."

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