MAX 2008: Something Is Cooking at Adobe

by Dana Tierney, Sr. Assistant Editor

All conferences and trade shows lay out a vast smorgasboard of delectable and tasty ideas. At MAX this year, though, you could almost hear the ideas simmer. Adobe has got your infinite photography server-side ActionScript Flex-addressable free hosted VOIP solution coming right up, yes sir. Would you like a side of free Flex training with that?

"You're kidding, right?" I asked the white-uniform-clad woman at the Bouncing Burgers booth, where signs advertised jobs for Fortran and COBOL programmers tired of updating their skills. "We're kidding," she confirmed with a grin, and handed me a flyer for free Flex training.

"We're hiring", said a man at the Sapient booth, asked to deliver his message in ten words or less. All the community partners on the floor had polished a three-sentence mission statement, which they delivered clearly as they handed out literature. People running up for three minutes between sessions? They had that covered. "ColdFusion, ColdFusion, ColdFusion," said a woman at the REOTrans booth. "I need ColdFusion developers!" Yes, she was serious. The economy might look bad, but you couldn't prove it by the vendors at MAX. At least half a dozen partner programs, betas and contests launched at MAX. Intel and NVIDIA were both there showing off new hardware.

CTO Kevin Lynch also sounded a cooking theme in the keynote, showing off Flash 10 on a Nokia cellphone, browsing last.fm and the Wall Street Journal site, neither optimized for mobile devices. "It just works," he said, proudly. However, he said, holding up an iPhone, "This one needs a little more baking. And we do need to pass the taste test of Apple's head chef, but we're working on that."

Google is adopting Flash for the G1's Android operating system, which is not too surprising given Flash's adoption at YouTube. Many of the announcements this year were incremental and of great interest to the particular community whose problems they solved, but hard to explain to outsiders. Some of the flashy stuff from last year has made it to release and beta – Cocomo and Flash's Inverse Kinematics in particular.

Nokia has clearly bought into the Flash Lite concept, and is soliciting entries for three contests. What if you could check whether water is drinkable using your cell phone, the website for the contest asks. Emerging markets is one of the three categories; the others are Technology Showcase and Eco-Challenge. Intuit threw an huge open-bar party to publicize its new partner program, and Ribbit is offering free developer accounts and publicizing its own Killer App Challenge.

Lynda.com gave away free 24-hour passes, most of the Flash mobile sessions gave away a smartphone and one of them had a Wii. There was a drawing for a free O'Reilly book at the end of every session and stickers flowed like maple syrup over pancakes. In addition to the MAX sessions, both the Flex and ColdFusion communities held unconferences and so did an online agency group, the Society of Digital Agencies.

Akamai was on hand to teach us how to talk to an ad server, you can generate Creative Suite documents programmatically now, and the new Gumbo Flex classes now provide serious graphics capabilities. The Adobe development team has resolved some issues with the Flash Lite installer, and one of the sneak peeks used MediaOrchestrator, an AIR app, and LiveCycle to mark up Premiere video. The capacity to index spoken text trumped all this, however, as well as the serverless Flash player session.

In possibly the coolest of the free swag – except, of course, for the free CDs at the Unconferences containing back issues of the Fusion Authority Quarterly Update and Flex Authority – Yahoo was giving away maps of its developer APIs and services. Sifting through the literature I brought home, I find that I could have redeemed a coupon for a free 30-day trial of the Creative Suite Master collection. Yes, it's free anyway if you download it, but it would have been cool not to need to. GoodBarry was there to publicize ecommerce customization extensions for Dreamweaver and Alfresco was showing tools for collaborative content management.

The sessions you say.... ah, the notes are in the other bag.... The big takeaway, however, was interoperability. Flex can now talk to your toaster if it wants to, and if that doesn't mean that ColdFusion will soon rule the world, I don't know what does....

Dana Tierney is the Sr. Assistant Editor at House of Fusion, where she causes authors to cry over their once-thought perfect articles. They recover, and their articles are better for it. But still, the sound of grown men weeping...

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