I haven’t actually seen any of the sneaks yet (I guess I don’t know the right people inside Adobe), so I’m going to be live blogging it. I’ve heard some really cool rumors though. The theme is Blues Brothers 
. My boss actually makes a pretty good blues brother.
Note about the sneaks: These are all things that Adobe isn’t necessarily committing to. They are fun features that our teams have been working on but shouldn’t be considered “announcements” for products or features.
First up:Karl Miller and Karl Soule – Communicating Visually with Visual Communicator. Visual Communicator is a new way to do video presentations. No timeline or editor. Seems like a lightweight video publishing tool. Neat green screen functionality built in. You can also add a script and various assets throughout the script. Looks like a really cool tool for Vodcasting. Allows export to Flash and do live streaming directly from the app. Right on. Very funny live demo. Everyone at MAX has copies of the app, so anyone can take it home and play with it.
Next: Pacifica - Pacifica *IS* a VoIP service. They are going to be enabling extended codes as well as point to point media. We are letting you brand the entire VoIP experience by yourselves and let you “keep” your users. You control everything, we’re just building the platform. We’re seeing an app “mini social networking”. It’s showing a call to a friend in the application. It uses the microphone and the Player to talk directly with his computer. This could be cool for bigger social networks. Here’s something that is awesome: They just made a phone call from the player to a cell phone in the audience. This is a really, really neat project.
Flash for Home – Looking at Flash on the “home screen” of mobile devices. I don’t think this is Flash Lite, it’s actually full Flash. You can customize your home screen on the phones. You can also get web data on your phone home page. Some talk about FlashCast, takes data and optimizes and pushes it to the phone. Example of the user interface based on weather data being delivered to the phone. Looking at Bill Perry’s blog (and the posts on the phone). It’s integrated with the device. Flash Home lets you get closer to the device. Doesn’t live in as much of a sandbox. He’s using a printed piece of paper to show the code – hilarious. Neat demo of the phone responding to caller ID locations.
Photoshop Express: Showing off the famous Photoshop Express. Manipulating images and rendering them in Flash. As he rolls over the thumbnails he can preview the effect and apply it. Very slick and I haven’t seen that in other editors. It looks a lot further along than I thought it was, and is pretty snappy. Just showed a blemish removal tool which is very cool. Full undo stack which you can view as thumbnails. It’s got a really good replace color feature that will be a big use. You can tell that this has benefited from Adobe’s image knowledge.
Working with Fireworks, AIR, and Flex. Currently you can drag components into Fireworks and they know what the components do, so it takes some MXML data with them. Now we’re talking about the new skinning abilities. You can double click on a component and skin it with an asset library. Nested symbols and states. Things like a scroll bar can be skinned on both the bar behind as well as the button element all using assets you’ve created in Fireworks. Showing off a preview mode in Fireworks that lets you directly view as an MXML app. Now playing with a “widget” on the desktop in AIR that you can customize the states of. Has the same “preview in AIR” that it had with MXML. Cool.
Creating online/Offline applications with AIR: Using ColdFusion and some of the database functionality as part of AIR. Adding an “offline” attribute to the ColdFusion grid component. CF will then generate the code to store it in AIR and synch with the server. Showing a “cfairpackage” application that lets you take your CF files and it will turn them into HTML/JavaScript and create the AIR app. The power of CF as a server is really interesting when you combine it with AIR.
Web 2 Print – Talking about Flex as a front end and InDesign CS3 server on the back end to bring web and print together. They’ve got a Flex application for a restaurant. Rich interface, with the ability to customize what the menu will look like. The Flex application is incorporating a live preview from InDesign that changes and updates based on what the user chooses in the Flex app. They’re uploading a PSD (Photoshop) file and showing it right in the InDesign preview. You can work with multiple previews and use assets/information from pre-created documents.
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