Observations from MAX 2006
I’m sitting in the hotel after a great conference. We saw a ton of great announcements for developers, had some great sessions, and I got to meet a lot of people for the first time. Aside from being sick for what was arguably the most fun night of the week, MAX was fantastic. We got to see a lot of new technologies, MAXUP helped showcase what developers are doing with Adobe’s products, and there were some big announcements for developers.
Apollo was the biggest winner of the conference in my opinion, and Marco has a great run down of all the information from the conference. Every developer I talked to was excited about the possibilities and were blown away by the examples. What struck me the most is how much buzz there is for a product that is barely in alpha. There were 6 Apollo sessions at MAX and it was the talk of the conference but we are nowhere near a release. That means that the community can play a big part in how Apollo shapes up, and I think that’s going to make the product better. Make sure you give the Apollo team your ideas.
We also saw a lot of cool Flex examples in the keynote and in some of the sessions. Flex has been out for just a few months, and finally applications are starting to come in from the dark and people are doing cool things with it. The application by Virtual Ubiquity that Kevin Lynch showed in Day 1 of the keynote looks like it has a lot of promise.
Another technology that got some attention was LiveCycle. I remember taking a look at the product when the Adobe-Macromedia deal was announced because it was Adobe’s only server product. It has been a big beneficiary of the two companies joining forces and there are a lot of synergies between Flex and LiveCycle that are only going to get deeper and more mature as the products grow. LiveCycle has the potential to bring Flex into the enterprise in a big way and also put it more in touch with the “real world”. Web applications make life much easier, but there are still cases in which the information locked in the application needs to take a paper form. LiveCycle enables that and a lot more.
The keynote and the sneaks showed off how the designer/developer workflow is going to benefit from the new round of tools from Adobe. Flash and Photoshop are going to work easily with each other, Illustrator and Flex are going to enable unique looking Flex applications (something that is lacking right now) and Adobe is empowering video providers with technologies like Flash Video, Flash Media Server, After Effects and Premiere.
We saw a huge boost the mobile ecosystem with the announcement of the Verizon partnership and the announcement that Adobe is earmarking $100,000,000 dollars to invest in companies using Adobe technologies. Both of those are going to help expand the developer base and get more people to take a long hard look at the Engagement Platform.
Overall it was a great conference, and I’ll be digesting it more over on ZDNet and hashing through what all of the announcements mean.
[tags]max2006, apollo, flash, flex, livecycle[/tags]
Posted in Rich Internet Applications
October 27th, 2006 at 9:45 am
The number one feature I want to see in Apollo is the ability to invoke java jars on the client side. When I write desktop apps with either java or C#, most of the heavy lifting is done with the 3rd party libs. For flex to break into the desktop, it needs a lot of momentum from the community to provide useful 3rd party libraries for flex, but it takes time for this ecosystem to develop. In the meantime, the WPF developer already have native access to all the .NET libraries, putting Apollo developers in a bit of disadvantage. In my opinion, giving Apollo developers native access to jar libs would be one way to level the field.
October 27th, 2006 at 3:32 pm
That’s an interesting feature idea Zee. You should submit a request for it if you haven’t. Since Java is supposed to be cross platform, that would be more likely to be included than native Windows DLL support (which I’ve seen a lot of people requesting).
October 27th, 2006 at 4:17 pm
Or if it was a more general interface for plugins we could use all sorts of lanuages. I dont know Java all that well but I think a good point will be to open access to exisiting “3rd party libraries” then alot of the hard work is done…maybe a general wrapper to form a plugin around the library.
October 29th, 2006 at 9:30 pm
[...] In Ryan’s recent MAX update, he mentioned Adobe is putting up $100,000,000 in venture capital to fuel the Apollo echo system. I didn’t take it seriously until I saw this confirmation article on CNET. Although I still believe that reliance on venture capital is not healthy for startups, nevertheless, I think it would be a fun exercise to brainstorm for some cool Apollo ideas. I’m going to throw a few of mine up here. Feel free to leave a comment or follow up with your cool ideas [...]
October 29th, 2007 at 7:31 am
thank you for this document!! this is important for me!