Here at MAX for the 5th year in a row – I didn’t go to these until Adobe bought Macromedia and it has been very interesting to see the changes over the past 5 years.
Keynote – Kevin Lynch started in with discussion technology trends, then moved into presentation of the Digital Publishing features. Wired magazine was presented, and really didn’t show much different than what we’ve seen already. They seem to have reacted to some of the initial bashing. They showed dynamic text wrapping in HTML, identical to SVG text wrapping demos from 10 years ago. Not exactly thrilling, though they do say they are contributing to WebKit. He presented the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, starting from InDesign, collaboratively produced and distributed, and of course they want to use Omniture to analyze the results. It is quite a stretch to think they will do the full-cycle at all as well as they have built the low-level tools.
Kevin spoke of video… quite an awesome amount of video going out in Flash, but unlike last year they are not showing the trend towards ubiquity, but rather “most video on the web is still shown in Flash.” Flash 10.1 was very quickly adopted, apparently, yet we know where it did not show up. Internet television keeps advancing, and Flash does have quite a head start there: the streaming is really impressive. AIR for TV is out; first launch partner is Samsung. Marc Goldberg of Epix spoke of multi-screen, saying their subscribers watch on a number of different screens: the demo broke, however.
Flash Media Server is working on on-the-fly encoding. Wowza seems to have made some real inroads, based on discussion with some attendees. P2P-assisted video looks kind of cool.
Kevin showed a number of small apps built targeting the tablet computing environment… it would appear they are rewriting things to be more lightweight. He demo’d a table device / PC wireless app, where the iPad served as a palette for a user in Photoshop.

Adobe MAX 2010 - Tablet as artist palette connected to desktop via wireless
He spoke of the enterprise… the impact of multi-screen, as well as LiveCycle. He mentioned the Day Software acquisition, which we have been watching with eager anticipation at Silicon Publishing, and brought their CTO David Nüscheler to present.
David Nüscheler from Day spoke of the need for discrete control of how things work across devices: he explained that the communications are truly different, it is not as trivial as spewing forth variants of the same thing entirely, but there is a true need to have some separate content specifically targeted. David demo’d CQ5, showing editing of HTML and mobile content. He did not dwell on the DAM, which has been our primary interest in Day. We are in the midst of a very exciting integration with the Day DAM, and so far we have been extremely impressed with the DAM aspects of Day. Adobe has done several acquisitions really well, and even though it’s the LiveCycle group that they are subsumed into, we are optimistic they will take over appropriate leadership roles. Wouldn’t it be cool if we can connect the rendition power of Adobe to structured information in LiveCycle? We have witnessed a long and pathetic history of the Acrobat monopoly being squandered on silo-based random junk (Central Output Pro? Graphics Server? Document Server? Forms with dirt-crude formatting?…) for rendition, yet there is good security and DRM in LiveCycle, hopefully the Day team will gut it and connect appropriately to the rendition side of Adobe (Flash, After Effects, InDesign desktop and Server, and above all… Scene7).
Day does introduce a real philosophical paradox. After the keynote, they presented content that had probably mainly been presented before, starting with a 45-minute argument for Open Source. LiveCycle has traditionally been the precise opposite of Open Source, and just the day before at the leadership summit we had heard that the “open source” Flex project had approximately 0 contributions from anybody but Adobe: will Day change this? It will be interesting. It was sort of strange to hear conway’s law cited and consider what that would mean as the organization is not the Apache Foundation any more, it is Adobe. We will see some interesting software!
Kevin demo’d medical imaging technology. Flex really does create powerful front ends for enterprise apps. Flex 4.5 beta is out, I am not sure after the year of Flex 4 beta lifestyle how deeply we will want to dive in. Back then we really needed the TLF badly, so it was probably worth the rush, I think with future Flex betas we can build a bit less production code on top of it.
Mike Lazaridis, CEO of RIM, came on and showed the Blackberry Playbook. Adobe and RIM have been working together with Flash/AIR; fairly obvious that Apple motivates them. “Not trying to dumb down the internet for a mobile device” – NICE stab at Apple. That was, as the 2 of you who read this blog know, my big reaction to the iPad.
Kevin showed some cool games, rendition gets faster over time with more use of the GPU, and AIR is evolving. AIR for Android looks good, Apple has some good competition, hopefully. Deploying from Flash to iPhone OS is once again possible, too.
Social gaming has always been one of Kevin’s interests: he showed the work idol worship, a nice-looking virtual reality game that uses old school animation techniques coupled with slightly newer technologies. He showed some very cool GPU-accelerated 3D capabilities of other games. Flash is really getting nice: the virtual reality driving demo was compelling. With the next Flash 3D, code named Molehill, the immersive 3D graphics should be very good for games and general 3D imaging.
Chrysty Wyatt from Motorola came on to speak of Android and the request of Motorola to put Flash on mobile devices – “anyone who fails to put Flash on a mobile device is not giving you the Internet.” And they are not above bribing us – all attendees at MAX are getting a Droid 2.