MAX 2K6 Wrapup

The 2006 Adobe MAX conference in Las Vegas is over, and it was pretty great.

The conference opened Tuesday with a keynote presentation that included a performance by Blue Man Group. I can't see them without thinking about Tobias from Arrested Development. I guess they are sort of funny, but I just don't get them. Maybe it's their very anonymity - the fact that it could be any joker up there catching paintballs in his mouth - that makes their celebrity. It certainly qualifies as performance art, and if there's one thing I hate, it's performance art. And modern dance. And the gym.

Once the performance had finished, the keynote proper began. The majority of the keynote was about the penetration of Flash beyond the desktop. There was also some stuff about improving Web design workflow across the former Macromedia and Adobe applications, such as designing Flex UI components in Illustrator and then importing them to Flex Builder.

There was a brief demonstration of ColdFusion 8, aka "Scorpio," and it was confirmed that ColdFusion 8 will include image processing functions as well as integrated server monitoring functionality. ColdFusion 8 will also work closely with Acrobat, so that Acrobat fields can be populated and accessed by CFML to improve business process workflows. We were unable to answer the question definitively whether instances of CFCs will replicate across server instances. Guess we'll just have to wait and see.

The keynote also included the announcement of Soundbooth, a simplified version of Adobe Audition for Mac and Windows now in beta on Adobe Labs. Soundbooth will include tight Flash integration, allowing non-musicians to easily assemble audio content for Flash and providing basic audio editing features. Peter Kirn of Create Digital Music posted a quick but thorough first impression.

But the biggest push seemed to be for Apollo, the upcoming cross-platform runtime environment to support Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) as desktop applications. To me, Apollo seems like a hammer in search of a nail; how many developers are thinking, "You know, my Web application is nice and all, but what would really be great is if my users ran it locally"? I understand the benefit of having local file system access, but that in itself isn't compelling enough to me to base a new platform on; I plan to keep an open mind with it and try to see how it's not Central. At least Adobe confirmed that the runtime would be free, and should be available for download on Labs early in 2007. Plus, there were Apollo t-shirts. Somehow, I didn't get one. WTF?

For all three days of the conference, I focused on Flex, ColdFusion, and CSS. Most of the sessions offered something useful, but the most valuable sessions for me were:

• The two hands-on sessions, Building Your First RIA With Flex, and Building ColdFusion-Powered Flex Applications. These two were the most useful, and made me want to get started with Flex immediately.


• A very good Flex Design Patterns and Architecture presentation provided by Joe Berkovitz


• Advanced CSS Concepts and Theory provided by Stephanie Sullivan

Adobe did right by having the conference at the sprawling Venetian. The conference was just big all-around - BIG - and there was a lot of going up and down across the five floors where the conference and sessions were taking place.

For the Wednesday night blowout, Adobe booked the Rain nightclub at The Palms. Rain is simply the largest, most impressive nightclub I've ever seen. The club mixes fog, water, and fire. A giant steel ring over the dance floor periodically shoots flames. And outside, an enormous complex of pools and cabanas allows both privacy and mingling. After Rain, we hit Ghostbar, on the 55th floor of The Palms. The views of Las Vegas from Ghostbar are simply incredible.