Thermo, Connect, and Free Massages: MAX Day 2

Thermo was definitely the highlight of the day. A designer's tool, Thermo will allow users to quickly design and easily prototype RIA's. The demo covered the creation of a Flex app via thermo, starting with importing a Photoshop file into Thermo and being able to convert different elements or layers into Flex components. You can even work with the creation of more complex elements like pseudo list collections that can be used for dummy data. Imagine turning your text from Photoshop into a TextInput with a simple right click, or working with something more complex like turning your designed scrollbar into a real scrollbar simply be specifying which layers correspond to the scrollbar elements. Even databinding by dragging a connection from one element to another. Cool, cool stuff. It's quite possible that now Flex apps won't quite look like Flex apps so much anymore :)
My other favorite was the demo of some enhancements regarding Adobe Acrobat Connect (formerly Breeze). The connect team showed how they're making individual "pods," or elements of Connect, available for use in any application. The demo featured a Flex app integrating the Connect voice chat, video chat, and whiteboard pods from Connect. They're also exposing the underlying classes for the more advanced developer.
My favorite session of the day was Jesse James Garret's inspire session: "Web 2.0 and beyond." Jesse highlighted the importance of seeing our products how our users will see them: not as feature-rich bottles of data but as experiences connected with emotions. Users don't understand the "magic" behind the product, they just (hopefully) love the experience. That's why there are countless instances where feature-rich technologically advanced products fail where "lesser" products succeed; they understand the user.

Overall it was a great day—looking forward to more tomorrow.

p.s. the "free massages" were in the sponsored community pavilion, and they were really free, although I mostly felt like I got beat up and am now more sore than I was this morning.

Astro, Hydra, Moxie, and more: MAX Day 1

Adobe is definitely all about the experience. I must say they did a pretty swell job with the keynote experience this morning. Seemed a little Apple-esque (in a good way) and maybe even a little more rockin'. Here are some really cool things introduced at the keynote:

• Astro. Code name for Flash player 10. They did a simple HD demo with H.264 in Flash on the big screens, it looked great. They're also adding in some elementary native 3D support in the player. Rotation and position on x, y, and z axis. Smaller stuff included Flex framework caching and bidirectional text support (along with a lot better text support in general). Pretty good post on Astro here.


• Hyrda. Code name of application for creating custom filters. Adobe figured instead of making custom filters at the request of the community they could just turn it over to the community completely. Great idea. This one's available on labs via Adobe Image Foundation Toolkit.


• Moxie. Code name for Flex Builder 3. Some cool features coming up, including profiling performance of your Flex app and refactoring for easy updates to code. Some more on that here. Plus, Flex 3 Beta 2 now available.


• Other stuff (not cause it's less important). They showed off Adobe Media Player, some really cool and innovative AIR applications, Adobe Premiere Express, and talked about how the internet experience coupled with technology is changing.

It's been a great conference so far. I'd go into some of my sessions, but I am dang tired.