Keynote -
Thermo is now officially titled Adobe Flash Catalyst. I’m one of the lucky few that got a prerelease build of that along with the latest prerelease of Flex Gumbo, but of course here at MAX it is ‘uncool’ to not be an Apple fanboy so Adobe only gave out the Mac version prerelease of Catalyst. So I guess I’ll have to ebay it….
The best part of this keynote was the waiting for the speakers. No knock on the speakers, they were fine. But Adobe does a kick-ass job of putting together a multiscreen multimedia extravaganza. They had some guy in an uncomfortable-looking suit doing some sort of turntable scratching/dj’ing and it controlled the video onscreen. It was cool for a minute or two and then got old. The speeches were lackluster.
Kevin Lynch had a big box of mobile devices. He was demoing some new stuff on them. I was waiting for him to put the box away and then say….”Oh. There’s one more thing…” and then pull out the iPhone. He did pull out the iPhone and say they were working on Flash 10 for the iPhone, but he didn’t exactly seize the moment with any drama, it almost seemed kind of unplanned actually. That leads me to believe that Steve Jobs hasn’t really given any indication that it’s *really* coming. Adobe can build it. But if Stevie doesn’t allow it, it ain’t happening. Just my hunch. I’m probably wrong though and it’s just a simple matter of Kevin Lynch not seizing an easy ‘wow’ moment in the keynote.
Air -
Adobe is *really* pushing AIR this year. Every session, it seems like the speaker was tied up and told he had to incorporate AIR into the presentation or else. Even in the Fireworks session I attended, guess what we exported to? AIR and interactive PDF.
More to come…