MAX was awesome. I got to join Kieth Peters and John Grden for lunch which was a real treat for me. I’m a big fan of Kieth and his Bit-101.com site. Then there are his books Making Things Move ( AS2 version / AS3 version ) that are incredible. If you’re a designer just wading into Actionscript then I highly recommend them as a starting place.

After Grant Skinner’s session I walked with him across the convention hall the next session and had a nice discussion along the way. I had to miss most of a session that I wanted to attend but it was worth it.

All of the sessions were recorded and it has been said that they will all be available as a channel on the Adobe Media Player. We just have to wait for a little while.

My favorite session was the Flash Player Internals with Jim Corbett, Lee Thomason. They did a great tag-team job of presenting. Getting a tour under the hood of the Flash player by the guys who work on it everyday was awesome.

A few notes from Flash Player Internals

• Astro may add fading and masking of device fonts without the cashAsBitmap hack.
• Astro may add chaining to embedded fonts.
• Avoid the scope chain to get the best performance out of your code. If you’re not really sure about the scope chain then read this article.
• Suppose you are creating a game or something that is extremely code intensive. If you would like to gauge the performance of each client machine and then tune your code appropriately then apply a blur filter to a video and render that to a Bitmap. Then see what sort of performance that client is getting. You could do something like that during the preload so that when the main code begins to run you can tune the code to run smoothly on that machine. Kind of a slow, medium, fast toggle for your code.
• A question was asked, “Have you written any code to explore giving authors access to multi threading?” The answer was, “No Comment” with a grin. Can you say Flash player 11 feature? :-)

A few notes from AS3 best practises:

• If it’s a constant then make it of type const.
• If you need to iterate over an ArrayCollection then use a for-each loop. It’s faster.
• Use weak reference listeners unless you’re doing something like loading content or creating a timer.
• If you remove a loaded image from the display list then UNLOAD it.
• null out references to get them garbage collected.

The Lego Vagina Award

Scott Petersen’s C/C++ interpreter for Actionscript wins this award hands down. When he showed Quake 2 running in Actionscript my friends just about fell out of their seats.

If there were such a thing as a lego booby award – second place to the lego Vagina – then it would go to Shai Avidan on “Seam Carving for Content-Aware Image Resizing”. That shit was amazing.

Random Links

Hydra:

• Download the toolkit on Adobe Labs
• Kaourantin has a nice technical overview

Videos

• Peter Elst has a nice video overview of the sneaks session broken up by nicely so that you can watch just the sneaks your interested in. I’m sitting just to the left of Peter so when he pans to the left screen you can see my head in the way. Sorry. That’s also me adding narration, such as “You’ve got to be frakking kidding me” during Scott Petersen’s presentation about the C/C++ interpreter.
• Lee Brimelow has a nice interview with Justin Everett-Church about the Flash player 10

Peter deHaan has the play-by-play of MAX.

• Blogging from Adobe MAX 2007 – North America
• Adobe MAX 2007 Keynote (Day 2 Edition)
• Rough notes from the Adobe MAX 2007 North America Sneak Peeks

Geeks of the world unite

Doug McCune has a great shot of geeks in 3D glasses

Movement has meaning

I can’t remember where that quote came from. It just ended up in my notepad but it really strikes a chord. For years Flash has been dissed for people using it to create sites with poor usability. But Flash is only a tool and it took some time for the community to really learn how to take advantage of the capabilities to create more usable sites than can be created from a more static approach.

With the upgrades to text rendering and 3D coming in Flash player 10 there is really no limit to the sort of interface that we can create in Flash. The limit is now our imagination. Not the tool.

ColdFusion speakers rock

I attended two sessions about ColdFusion: Mike Nimer’s and Simeon Bateman’s. Both are just amazing presenters. I think it the secret is in the code. There must be some undocumented CFperfectPresentation tag that they know about.

There are a slue of reasons to attend a conference like MAX.

• It’s geek fun to the Nth degree ( I was going to say, “to the max”, but no.)
• You can learn a great deal about your field
• You get a good cross pollination of ideas. Designers hanging out with developers and visa-versa.

But I find the best reason to attend conferences is the connections that are formed. Here’s an example.

On Tuesday at MAX I ran into a friend of mine, Chris Hughes, that I originally met at the 360Flex conference in San Jose. I didn’t know that Chris was going to be there or I would have made a point to hook up with him earlier.

While we were catching up he mentioned that he would like to be involved in getting a volunteer group together in the Los Angeles area to do some coding for one of the local charities.

I told him that a group at the 360Flex event in Seattle had done something like that and he should look them up.

Ali Daniali is the Flex Users Group leader here in Seattle. He and I have meet only a few times locally and planned on meeting up at MAX. We were both distracted during the conference and never called the other to set up a time/place to meet.

On the final day of the conference we bumped into each other in the sponsors room. He was on his way to get some presents for his kids and didn’t have much time to hang out. So we planned on getting together later in Seattle.

As he was leaving I remembered what Chris had told me about doing some charity work. I ran after Ali and brought him over to meet Chris. The two talked for 5-10 minutes and then Ali took off.

Chris told me that they were going to talk more later but essentially Ali was going to help him set up a charity code jam at a conference in Los Angeles next summer. Just as Ali had done at 360Flex in Seattle.

The timing was near perfect because they were in the room together at the same time. I introduced them and as a result they will work together to help feed the needy in the Los Angeles area.

You never know who you’ll meet and what will become of it. A chance conversation in the hallway could lead to a startup being born, or charity work, whatever.

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.

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.