There’s an Adobe project code named Thermo that’s having its coming out party at MAX07 in Chicago. Mark Anders posted a job opening for a PM at Adobe that Sam Robbins at pixelConsumption found and wrote about.

Here’s the basic job description:

You will lead a highly motivated team developing an innovative new tool, codenamed Thermo, that will enable designers and creatively inclined developers to easily build rich internet applications and interactive content.

It’s sounds like video.Maru applied to lots of other components. I’ve had video.Maru users ask me to apply the same approach to a number of components, like scrollbars, knobs, mp3 players, etc.

The approach that video.Maru uses is simple. If something is called a play_btn and there’s a videoWindow nearby then maybe when the users clicks on the play_btn it should play that video. This is all done without the designer needing to write any code.

While at the 360Flex conference in San Jose I was showing some of the attendees how video.Maru worked. One of the Flex team members walked by and started watching - I’m not saying who it was. After a few seconds they said, “Ummmm, that looks like something we’re adding to Flex 3″ and walked off.

So, weather it’s Thermo or something else. It looks like making RIA is going to get a lot easier. And I can’t wait to get to MAX.

I just got word that I was accepted to speak at the Ignite event at MAX, Sunday, September 30th. I’ll be speaking about how video.Maru works and how that can be applied to other UI interfaces.

In case you haven’t heard: an Ignite presentation is a slide presentation that lasts for 5 minutes. You get 20 slides, each displayed for 15 seconds. And the speaker has no control over the slideshow. It’s quite a rush to do one of these. I think maybe I’ll practice a bit.

I did an Ignite talk here in Seattle at the AIR Bus tour event. So I have some experience with the pace. Wish me luck.

Oh, and two of the Ignite speakers, out of the 16, will be selected by the audience to give their presentation again at the MAX Keynote. No pressure. :-)

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.

Personal news here. I’m moving on from my job at Xbox to go to work for a small startup in Redmond called SmileBox - or sBox as I like to call them. ;-)

SmileBox provides a service for creating interactive photo/video scrapbooks. They are located in downtown Redmond, WA. You may have seen a bit about them in a video tour/interview that Schoble did about them back in the Spring of ‘07.

I’m very excited about the change. At Microsoft/Xbox I was a contractor/vendor and so not considered a real employee. At SmileBox I will be an employee of the company, complete with stock options, so I’ll have a vested interest in the welfare of the company.

The main reason I decided to move over to SmileBox is because of the work that I will be doing and the opportunity to learn. They have a team of developers who know more about developing applications than I probably ever will.

And SmileBox has a very talented team of designers - two of them are former teammates of mine from Xbox. I’ll be assisting the design team by developing visual effects components that they can use in their designs.

I can’t wait to get in there and start contributing to the team. I have a lot to learn and I’ll be blogging about most of the things that I pick up.

Here’s a SmileBox creation with pictures of me and some of my co-workers. Enjoy, Dan.

Click to play | Make your own Smilebox