MAX, Adobe’s big conference is taking place in Chicago this year September 30 – October 3rd. I’m always excited about MAX, but I think this one is going to be special. No one has said anything about this, but Apollo and Flex 3 are supposed to be released second half of 2007 and that lines up pretty well with MAX.

Via – http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mchotin/

[tags]Adobe, MAX, Apollo, Flex 3[/tags]

I’m just getting ready to wind down for the day, but I wanted to talk about how great it’s been. This was a fun event for a lot of reasons. There were definitely some bad speakers, but overall I think Adobe customers really shined. My favorites were Scrybe, Virtual Ubiquity and yourminis.

The other fun thing about today was Twitter. This was the first time I had ever seen a “Twitter” backchannel but it added a lot to the event. You got a real sense of what people in the room were thinking, but more importantly, you got instant feedback on what people NOT in the room were thinking. My Twitter takeaway was that James Governor is hilarious out loud. Cote is hilarious in general. I love those guys. They speaks their minds, makes intelligent points, and have fun doing it. James, if I’m ever out of work, I’m going to beg to be let into the monastery. Also, if you’re a vendor, hire RedMonk. It may be jarring, but it’s worthwhile.

Overall I think that Adobe pulled it off. The event got a lot of attention on Techmeme, and it brought together a good group. Not only did I get to meet AnneZ, I actually got to sit next to her (as my stomach rumbled through the event). People like Tim O’Reilly and Robert Scoble added unique voices that the RIA crowd doesn’t normally hear. In the end, I think Adobe showed why their customers are great and it ended up in a lot of good will for both groups.

[tags]Adobe Engage, Adobe, Scrybe, Virtual Ubiquity, yourminis, Twitter, Red Monk, Rich Internet Applications[/tags]

I saw this as I was going through news and thought it was worthy of a bump. Over on Metalink, Alexey ran a test on a bunch of RIA technologies to find out performance. I’m not sure how meaningful the results are, but as these technologies come together, more tests like these will be good for everyone.

[tags]WPF, WPF/e, Flex, jax[/tags]

I’m sitting in the Engage keynote by Kevin Lynch and when he started talking about Apollo, the questions from the audience really started ramping up. It’s very interesting to see people like Ben Galbraith from Ajaxian ask about being able to access native code in Apollo or Ryan Carson asking about the business opportunities.

A few things jumped out at me. No one is really sure what Apollo is going to bring. I think everyone gets the “web on the desktop” thing, but there’s some confusion about what that’s actually going to mean. Clearly that’s just going to take time, but I hope we see more killer apps that showcase exactly why the web on the desktop is a good thing. Security also seems to be a concern, but not as much as I would have thought. Ben seemed disappointed with the fact that Apollo won’t be able to talk to native applications. David Berlind, my colleague at ZDNet asked about how data is stored with Apollo, and it looks like we’re still far away from a database model. Right now it’s looking like XML storage and some semi-advanced caching. Robert asked about what the story is against Microsoft and how productive developers can be with Apollo versus .NET. It was an interesting question and Kevin reiterated that Adobe is a web-centric company. As the web evolves, so will Adobe. That’s a good place to be.

Update: Kevin just gave us a timeline. 1st half of this year: Apollo public labs release, Flex “Moxie” (I think this is Flex 3) public labs release, CS3. Second half: Apollo 1.0, Flex “Moxie”, “Phillo” 1.0 (Internet TV), Flash Media Server
[tags]Apollo, Engage, Adobe[/tags]

I’m just heading out the door to catch a plane to San Francisco for Engage. The event starts tomorrow so I’m hoping to hang out with people tonight. If you’re in the area, drop me an email, I’ll be trying to catch up as I wait for the plane.

As I mentioned earlier today, I’m expecting a lot of news and interesting discussion to come out of Engage. There are going to be some great people (as Chafic noted) there and it should be a fun couple of days. I’ll be updating the Flex and Apollo Twitter accounts as we hear things, so if you want to follow along, feel free.

[tags]Adobe, Engage, Flex, Apollo[/tags]

Neil posted a question on his blog about the roadmap for Flex and .NET. The official answer of course, is that you can invoke .NET web services using Flex and as a result, Flex “works” with .NET. But Flash remoting and Flex Data Services functionality is missing, though WebORB provides those features.

So what is the roadmap for Flex and .NET? I think Adobe’s in an awkward position. WebORB has done a fantastic job of building a Flex/.NET solution. Adobe has focused on the Java market. Right now marketing and engineering efforts are both targeting Java. There has been some success, but I don’t think FDS is taking off the way Adobe hoped it would. That makes it difficult for them to think about expanding .NET support because they’ve invested a lot of time in Java and that needs to pay off before they can chase other markets.

I think it boils down to the fact that right now, the .NET support they have is enough. .NET shops aren’t clamoring for Flex Data Services, though WebORB seems to do pretty well. At this point, FDS is a tough sell. I think it’s a revolutionary product, but it may be a bit ahead of its time and selling the benefits of FDS to companies takes time. Once Adobe establishes demand for Flex Data Services, they’ll be in a position to support more platforms. Ultimately I think that’s going to be in the form of buying WebORB. But right now Adobe needs to worry about getting FDS more mindshare in the enterprise. As that expands, so will Adobe’s support for other platforms.

[tags]Flex, .NET, WebORB, Adobe[/tags]

Walt from WPF Wonderland just sent me an email and let me know that Scoble found our Ignite Seattle videos. After watching it, I think it actually went better than I originally thought. I stumbled a few times and I was moving around the stage quite a bit, but I think I got most of the information in. It was a lot of fun to do, and I think the Ignite format is fantastic, so if you’re in the area for one of these things, you should drop by. Kurt Brockett of Identity Mine did a presentation on Windows Presentation Foundation that is worth a look, and they’re only 5 minutes, so if you see a video on the list that grabs you, chances are it will be worth your time. Big thanks to Brady and Bre for putting the event on and to Bryan Zug for taking the time to film all of these things!

Click To Play

[tags]Ignite Seattle, Rich Internet Applications, Ryan Stewart[/tags]

Rey Bango emailed me about this post over on Standard Web Standards. I saw it a lot in my feeds and glanced at it but sadly didn’t look into it with more detail (it’s been a long week). But after being pinged by Rey I took a look and I completely and utterly disagree.

He starts by listing a bunch of websites that drive traffic – Flickr, Digg, Del.icio.us, Bloglines, MySpace, Wikipedia, Technorati and YouTube; then goes on to say that only one of them uses Flash. Really? YouTube obviously uses Flash. But MySpace doesn’t use Flash? All of the people with MySpace aren’t using Flash to make their pages more interactive? You can’t make Flash badges with Flickr? Those creepy text-to-speech ads on Technorati aren’t Flash? (okay, that’s a bad example).

It really continues to amaze me the total misrepresentation of Flash. When you want to build rich, interactive, rich-media themed websites, you have to use Flash. Eventually, “WFP/E” is coming, but right now, it’s all Flash. And those kind of sites are on the rise. Hell, they’re the entire POINT of Web 2.0 in some cases.

Flash picks up where Ajax leaves off. Ajax has made people rethink what the web is capable of. But you can only get so excited about eliminating the page refresh before you start to wonder what else is out there. That’s when Flash enters the conversation. And a TON of Web 2.0 companies (and old web companies) have figured that out. Web 2.0′s pariah? More like Web 2.0′s savior.

[tags]Flash, Web 2.0[/tags]

In what may be the most unintentionally best kept secret of the year, Forest Key has a blog. Forest worked for a long time at Macromedia and is now the director of web and client user experience platform marketing for Microsoft. He’s been around the industry for a long time (as you can tell from this post) and his blog is a fun read.

He’s got a much more informal style that I enjoy, so I’m glad I was told about it. Looks like he’s planning to cover a lot of interesting UX topics as well as some things about Expression, WPF and WPF/E. Even if you’re not using Microsoft technologies, I think this one is worth a subscribe. He also has lots of cool pictures.

[tags]Forest Key, Expression, WPF, Microsoft, user experience[/tags]

If you haven’t seen this, it’s worth checking out. Lee Brimelow of Frog Design has put together examples of a Flash widget and a Flex widget running as a gadget on the Windows Vista Sidebar. Gadgets are just mini HTML/Ajax applications so Lee included the Flash Player from the browser in the mix and viola, a Flash gadget for Vista.

It opens up a ton of possibilities with expanding the richness of gadgets for the Sidebar. I would love to see someone like yourminis release some of their widgets as Sidebar gadgets. Maybe a Twitter widget

[tags]Lee Brimelow, Flash, Flex, Vista, Sidebar[/tags]