MAX 2007, Day 1

As expected, the first day of MAX was full of useful, interesting, and exciting information. Here are some of the highlights from various sessions:

General Session / Keynote

Kevin Lynch announced that an upcoming release of the Flash Player will include support for the H.264 video codec. This was particularly timely for me, because just a couple of hours earlier another attendee told me that he used QuickTime for Web video instead of Flash primarily because QuickTime supported this codec. Along these same lines Flash Player will also support HD video to 1080p.

Emmy Huang and Justin Everett-Church gave a preview of some of the features coming in Flash Player 10, code named “Astro” (don’t you love Adobe’s code names?). Emmy has a video of the talk on her blog, but I’ll just mention the main points here for convenience:

• Advanced text support, including right-to-left text and columns
• Out-of-the-box 3D effects
• Support for custom filters

Customizing the Flex Framework

Deepa Subramaniam did an excellent job on this presentation. There wasn’t a lot of new information for those who are experienced at extending Flex, but I really appreciated her clear and easy to follow style. And I did learn something new: I learned why developers might want to tell the compiler to preserve metadata. I was aware that this compiler option existed, but had no clue as to what it might be used for. Deepa explained that it comes in handy for shops that roll their own testing and / or automation tools.

Flash Player Internals

Jim Corbett and Lee Thomason provided a wealth of useful information about the Player. For one thing, it turns out that the new display list model, which I sort of complained about here, helps to improve performance because it’s array based and doesn’t allow empty layers.

They also pointed out the Flash Player emulates the version of the SWF that is currently playing, so that a Flash 6 SWF still plays like a Flash 6 SWF even if it’s running in Player 9. One consequence of this is that any bugs that existed in Flash 6 will continue to manifest themselves even if the bugs have been fixed in subsequent versions. In order to get rid of the effects of the bugs, the SWF needs to be re-published to a later version.

You may already know that Flash uses retained mode rendering, and that this helps to enhance performance. Well, it turns out that in the case of the Flash player it also precludes multi-threading. That being the case, we won’t be seeing support for multi-threaded Flash apps any time in the foreseeable future. We can, however, look forward to some upcoming improvements to the Player’s performance, including support for multi-core processors and GPU acceleration. There will also be cross-domain caching of the Flex framework code (and perhaps other code signed by Adobe), so that any given client will only need to download the framework once.

Case Study: ESRI Geospatial Application

Mansour Raad of ESRI demonstrated the use of their new Flex API, which is now in Beta. It looks like it will be extremely easy to build geospatial Flex apps with this solution, and the apps are very fast and responsive because they use vector graphics rather than downloading large image files. The only downside I see is that ESRI data does not come cheap, so this solution may remain out of reach for smaller organizations.

BOF: Flex Interface Guidelines

Rob Adams and Narciso Jaramillo introduced a new initiative to raise the bar for Flex UI design and development called Flex Interface Guidelines (FIG). You can read about FIG here. One gem I gained from Rob’s presentation was an acronym for the Windows GUI paradigm: WIMP (I think it stands for Windows Icons Menus and Pointers). For all I know it may be an ancient acronym, but it was new to me, so I enjoyed it.

BOF: Meet the Team: Flex

I didn’t get a lot of new info from this session, but it was really encouraging to see so many members of the Flex team hanging around till 9:30 PM and later to answer our questions. It speaks well of Adobe’s commitment to their user base, and the character of the people on the team.

BOF: Flex Component Panel

I learned (or was reminded?) of a cool site for Flex skins: scalenine. Check it out, if you haven’t already.

Partner Pavilion

I enjoyed talking to some of the Adobe partners at their respective booths, and it was great to learn a little about the cool stuff they’re doing. It was particularly nice to meet folks at Universal Mind who are friends of my friend Harris. They also had a good blues band (didn’t get the name) at the Sponsor Reception.

Free Stuff!

I really liked the free stuff that they gave me. I got several cool things from Adobe and partners, but one item deserves special mention: the green foam hand that I got from HostMySite. It’s not every day that I get one of these babies!

There’s more that could be said, but it’s wa-a-a-ay past pumpkin time, and I don’t want to sleep through breakfast tomorrow (which reminds me - the food was great).