MAX2005 Day Three

Monday, Anaheim
Cloud and Showers. About 16C

First off it's actually day two of the conference. Day one if your a general registrant. Started numbering my days by day of the trip so will stick with it.

What I find after a couple of days away from home, I usually get a bit depressed. The weather is typical Halifax weather here, which sucks cause its Anaheim. Must be the clouds. In anycase this time it's a bit better as I am emailing home and the home front is being updated by the blog which is a more conversational format and not as short as an email (I usually am brief to the point of rude but so many emails come in to everyone's box it's usually best to get to the point in them).

Technology is great keeping you uptodate and connected to the hearth.

Anyway the home emails usually run like It's a wild windy night. The kids and I had a "Halloween" dinner, meaning we used the new Halloween napkins that we picked up at the Bulk Barn yesterday and illuminated the dining room with the kids new Halloween lights. This is the first time I've had to re-start the heater since you left. I will call Wilson's tomorrow and have them stop by to take a look at it.



This morning I went to the General Session. Great presentation and packed. I mean standing room in a place you could fit three rink surfaces in.

Monday Morning
General Session


1. ze frank
Ze was one of the early web icons..dancing to madonna and creating a hilarous loop in Flash 3.
See http://www.zefrank.com/invite/swfs/index2.html

The address was basically how Flash has changed lives, direction and experience through an ever increasingly rich delivery of content, though the delivery alone cannot sustain itself without content that is of value, even trivial things to make us smile.


2. Macromedia CEO Stephen Elop
Over 3000 were in the audience to hear Stephen relay that Macromedia has delivered on promises from New Orleans 04 that the company would be more involved and more responsive to the community.

His message to Bill Gates on a new vector authoring tool? Try Again

Since September 12, over 100M downloads of FlashPlayer 8 have been downloaded - at a rate of 5M/day.

3. Chief Architect Kevin Lynch
Where things are and where they are going outlined his address, interspersed by other presenters.

There was talk also of current ideas with the release today of Labs at labs.macromedia.com. This is where you will be able to participate in all alpha releases and respond through a wiki. The next release is of something called Appolo. Ok so you have to follow this closely. The Player is now on consumer devices in the form of Flash Player Lite. You have the browser with Flash Player 8. The next step is coined Flash/HTML integrated player for RIA's.

Think of being without access as I am while writing this. You can open up a file saved from a site (print to file) and there you can book online tickets for the next concert, review and update a shared calendar and keep all secure. The next time your online, your requests are handled automatically. Basically it makes offline saved contnet usable for time and personal management. But this is only part of what Apollo will do. One example.

Apollo breaks itself down into the following

Online office
Data sync
Desktop integration
one click installtion
update management
scripting and display integration
secure sandbox.

4. Flex.
Wow. In a space of minutes on the new Flex 2 platform I saw a swf made that calls a css (ok that was prepared) and allowed one to search Flickr photo gallery. Chat with someone else who had the swf, share the photos they searched and found. This is great for one to one sharing of stock art with others i think - and you can skin it with your own logo!

Again great idea, but the idea was made in front of me in minutes with the power of Flex Builder inside Flex2. So what else do you want to build today.


Lunch
Things ran late so I scooped down some type of rice thing with chicken. Mexican but not spicey. Not too warm but yummy.


This Afternoon
Two workshops I honestly don't have the time or energy today to deal with writing about. Suffice to say the following:

Advanced CSS
One Photo..how many words? Well the first one should be Multiple. For those who know me well I suck at spelling - always have.

Advanced workflow patterns with Photoshop and Flash.

Automate the process - Fireworks opens PSD excellently and from there you can save as fireworks file. Now its a layered png and can be brought into Flash.


Modify the pngs to own layers by selecting Modify to layers. Now you must agan reorder and text will come back to correct location if you have them out of composite. ^SHIFT E is the short cut. layers will also be named the same in photoshop. All is in sequence.

Next
Off to the 5:30 visibility event. Guess I do the whoop up with other managers to let people know that there are usergroups. And if your wondering, yes the CEO of Adobe did speak and told us bluntly that the community aspect of Macromedia is one of the prime reasons for the aquisition. Good news.

Edge Newsletter.
Serindipitous run in with Julia Campagna. Talked about what I did and didn't like about the newsletter and suggested they do a recap of this event. Something I can use as a tool, but also something they can refer back to when doing the sales ramp next year for MAX or whatever its called then (post Adobe).

Mentioned I have limited time to read it and decide if I am going to save/dump/return. Mentioned I wanted titles only, so if you see the table of contents finally arrive (back) in the Edge, your welcome.