I made some predictions about what Adobe would be announcing at MAX about two weeks ago. I’m both happy and sad. On the one hand I only missed on one prediction. Unfortunately the one prediction I missed is the one I wanted the most: client side encoding options for video within an AIR app.

Adobe Office [ hit ]
Adobe has the first, and most important leg, of the office suite with Buzzword. Now the guys have to get busy with getting Buzzword out of beta and get to work on a spreadsheet.

Beyond that they only need to either purchase SlideRocket or build they own presentation app.

VoIP on AIR/Flash [ hit ]
No idea how this is actually going to be implemented but it’s going to be there for us developers to play with. Adobe did say that they have no intention of becoming a service provider. They only want to give us the tools to create the services ourselves.

Public access to transcoding video into FLV and possibly other formats. [ miss ]
For now it’s a no go but I talked to a lot of the Adobe staff about this and got a lot of, “it will be there soon” sort of responses. Perhaps it will be an intermediate upgrade to AIR after 1.0 comes out.

AIR2AIR [ hit ]
Going into MAX I had no idea what P2P capabilities inside of AIR or the Flash player would be like. And after MAX I still have no idea. But they did put it up on a slide for us to see at the Keynote. So they are doing something with this.

Authoring Flash 3D [ hit ]
I wonder if this is the most requested feature ever for Flash? Well, at least we don’t have to ask anymore. I can’t wait to give it a whirl.

I talked to some of the Adobe Flash engineers about Flash3D and Papervision3D and they said that this isn’t a competing approach. In fact they engineers are helping the Papervision3D effort to smooth out some of the issues and make it as good as it can be. These guys are awesome.

Always on Hardware Acceleration [ hit ]
Adobe was a little vague on this subject although it was hinted at. My feeling is that there will be hardware acceleration for the Flash player beyond just the fullscreen video that we already know about. But the engineers are still working on it so it’s not known what we’ll get.

Text going the other way [ hit ]
This one I already knew about going into MAX. It was announced it at 360Flex in Seattle back in August.

Next year MAX is going to be in San Fransisco. They are going to want to make some whopper announcements. I’m going to have fun guessing at what those might be. My long range radar says that it will revolve around partnerships and services. Maybe some Google/Adobe action? A full office suite? It will be fun no matter what. I can’t wait.