When Adobe announced the new beta of the Flash player with support for High Definition H.264 Ryan Stewart wrote a post on his blog that there is even bigger news to come at MAX07.

So here’s my best guess at what some of those announcements might be. I’ll add notes during the conference to see if I get anything correct.

VoIP on AIR/Flash

It isn’t a question of if Adobe will add VoIP to Flash/AIR but a matter of when they will make the announcement. Om Malik posted on this topic almost a year ago. I think it’s about time Adobe made it public.

No doubt this is going to be one of those industry disrupting moves. Yeah, great you can add cool voice chat widgets to Facebook or something but consider that the Flash platform is making huge inroads in the mobile market. You can imagine that any cell phone that has a capable Flash player and WiFi would be able to make and receive voice chats with anyone else. Now fast-forward a few years when WiMax is everywhere and you’ll never be concerned with how many minutes you use on your cell phone. You may not even have minutes. You could just carry around a handset with WiMax capabilities and you’d be set.

This isn’t a story that’s going to be told in just one keynote but over the next few years Flash/AIR could become the industry standard for communications between mobile devices or even your toaster communicating with your doorbell.

Public access to transcoding video into FLV and possibly other formats.

What I think drives this possibility is that with the Adobe Media Player coming out they will want to make it easy for people to add videos from their machines to their AMP library. To do that they need to be able to transcode on the client. So adding that functionality to AIR makes sense.

Adobe needs to show that the sum of what Silverlight can do would be the size of a normal Twinkie, while the sum of what Flash can do would be a Twinkie thirty-five feet long, weighing approximately six hundred pounds. :-)

AIR2AIR

This is really a shot in the dark here but imagine what AIR could be with the addition of built in P2P support? Adobe could be the central hub that tracks all the clients with AIR that have enabled P2P. If I write a P2P app I could get a unique ID at the Adobe hub and everyone who runs my app would register under that ID. So each instance of my app that is running could ping the Adobe hub to find out where other instances are.

This would undoubtedly open up a can of worms but it might be worth it. Plus it goes hand-in-hand with their VoIP plans and it gives them another avenue to monetize.

Authoring Flash 3D

The next version of the Flash authoring tool, will be an amalgamation of Flash and AfterEffects. 3D baby!

This was brought up at the Flash Forward here in Seattle in 2006. That’s when Adobe announced that the CS3 apps would all have an interface like AfterEffects 7 - I can’t remember the code name. During one of the Q&A sessions with the Adobe Program Managers the question came up about a marriage between AfterEffects and Flash. They said that it was a possibility but they didn’t know what that would look like. Would users want the Flash timeline in AfterEffects, or visa-versa. Or would there be some sort of amalgamation between the two? I’m betting on something like the latter. I can’t wait for the MAX keynote to find out where Flash 10 authoring tool is going.

Always on Hardware Acceleration

Admittedly I don’t know much about hardware acceleration but it seems to me that if the Flash player is going to support hardware acceleration for full screen video then why not go ahead and use it all the time? So I’m guessing that’s coming to Astro.

Text going the other way

If I recall correctly Ted Patrick already hinted at 360Flex here in Seattle that Astro will have much better font controls like right-left orientation, kerning, and other stuff to make those font geeks swoon. So this probably doesn’t count as a prognostication since it was already mentioned but I’ll leave it here anyway because it may be the only thing I get right. :-)

Adobe Office

Buzzword, a Flex/AIR based word processor from VirtualUbiquity is amazing. It kicks the crap out of Google’s Writely. Hell, it kicks the crap out of MS-Word and it’s not even out of beta yet. That’s the cornerstone of any office productivity suite. Now, toss in a speadsheet app and slide show app and you have the big three covered.

I think the big question is whether Adobe will possibly buy VirtualUbiquity and look to fill out the suite themselves or just invest heavily in this space and let the market sort it out. I’m guessing the later. And I’m hoping that during MAX there will be some announcements that address this. We need a Flex/AIR based office suite and it needs to happen pronto.

Another possibility is that Adobe could pull a Google and just start hiring top notch Flesh (FLEx/flaSH) talent and letting them do what they do best. Eventually a group would create a kickass office suite and gods know what else.

Just to be clear this is all coming via the port on my back-end: meaning it’s all wild guessing but it’s fun. ;-)

Other Crystal Balls

VisualRinse.com has a similar wishlist/crystal ball post about Director.

Mike Huntington has a wishlist for Astro.