UnitZeroOne

Finally. Some time to write a proper update on the MAX conference. It's been great, and the conference was really worth going too. Got to meet alot of great people, and had some of the best sessions I've ever had. I'll just try and walk you through the first day and explain the FSH in the title.

So, Monday started out very early. I had little sleep because of the release of Flex Builder, and the opening of labs.macromedia.com. I just tend to be unable to stop then, so I went building the Fluid Dynamics 8.5 demo. Funny to make a port of a port. (the object tag is also correct now, so if you couldn't check it out before, try again) Tired, but happy with the work I did, I went to the first session of the day together with Martijn (you'd probably know him as the FLV Player guy...turns out he is more famous then he thought). We went to Advanced ActionScript 2.0 session. The first slide popped up on the screen, and although it was doing all the right topics, we both decided we were way beyond that. I'd recommend the session to any intermediate AS'er though. I'd also like to see some advanced advanced actionscript sessions somewhere sometime. I know it will put of the bigger part of the audience, but like to see it anyway.

We decided to quickly swap this session with the Iteration::2/Macromedia session on Flex Frameworks/Cairngorn. They did a very good session, and it clarified some small things I hadn't gotten before. Main material was their version of the FlexStore, the Cairngorn Store. The presentation room was packed, and they did a great job in explaining what they were doing with Cairngorn, aswell as a nice walkthrough the architecture.

Next session up was Next Generation Flash Player by AS guru/implementer Gary Grossman. I can't stress enough on how good this session was. Although alot of people probably expected a different kind of session, I am sure that the hardcore flashcoders in the room had really enjoyed this session. Gary went into the architecture and outlines of the new Flash players. He started with the 8 player, and how they changed garbage collection. I had read up on this on some blogs already, but the information was extensive, and very clear. From here on we went on to the new AVM, and we got a quite exact explanation of the inner workings of the flash player, and it's two headed avm (hence the code name Zaphod).
Things went really "hardcore code' from that moment on. Gary went into the working of the JIT Compiler, the runtime exceptions, Traits, and the Verifier in the 8.5 player. I got this session on video almost entirely, and I'm sure to watch it entirely again. Currently I don't have acces to firewire, this laptop doesn't have it. If I get home I'll try and compress the entire thing and get it up here if it's not going to cost me too much bandwidth. Maybe I'll torrent seed it otherwise. Gary ended the session with some pure runtime bytecode, and I think that's were it really went to far for the bigger part of the audience. It made me appreciate this session even more, since normally the averaging on level for the entire audience of a session pulls it to far down to make it really something new. Great session.

Now it was time for the Keynotes. Entering the ballroom was amazing. The sheer size of the conference in people became apparent when entering the room, and the room ended up being packed with more then 3000 people, before the sessions started. Keynotes started, and Ze Frank went on stage. This guy was really warming the audience up, and it was just pure fun, nothing more and nothing less. After this it was time for business. To be perfectly honest, I didn't take notes, and don't remember everyone, and exact orders.

Things I specifically remember:
Mike from the XD team showed us one of their visions. It was a cross device personal library of Music, Video and other media. It included p2p recommendation engines, mobile phone ticket ordering, a really nice UI for sorting data, etc. It was a nice vision, but for now still a bit far away. A feature to mention was the "filtering while you type", leading up too a nice backdrop showing the content selected. I know this was mainly a mockup, but I do have a serious comment on it. Why did they use blur filters on these large moving movieclips? You could see performance drop, and personally I do think this doesn't enhance the UI. Although it looks cool, it isn't worth the performance load, and the application hickups. I hope the guys from the XD team will take that in account, since performance is still an issue in Flash, and can and will generally give it a bad name with the over-usage of effects.

I think the SAP presentation really was the thing in there which pleasantly surprised me. Their Flex application builder really blew me away. Although I'm not really into the kind of business this was about, the application really looked slick, and very complex indeed. Some great work there. Generating MXML from other apps was just something which didn't occur to me as being that viable, but actually these guys did some really nice, and very complex work.

Sho's session was great, he just had some little problems at one moment, which made everyone a bit nervous. Most of the people there went hoping for him to get that fixed. Read his story on this... Great session anyway. In that perspective, Zorn & Flex 2 & Flex Enterprise Services have been the biggest thing at MAX 2005. Here. I said it. It was the BOMB. People have been getting pretty excited, and will probably go home with their enthousiasm, and let's hope everyone will get some people over and have a look at it. I'll know I will. Personally I am really happy with it. I can try and get some backend people to have a look at it, aswell as taking the java coders through AS3. No more : "Dude, where's my strong typing". (and alot more of those)

After the keynotes, we went to : Next Generation Actionscript. Like Gary's other session : this was brilliant. In-depth information about AS3 is always welcome, and this was more then good info on it. Same as with the Next-Gen player session, I'll try and get a video up soon, one way or another. Seeing the perfomance on the new AVM is awesome. The team is also cleaning the api up quite nicely. (just have to remember to do a import flash.util.trace;) More on AS3 later.

The rest of the day were some pretty basic sessions. I had a good time, but I don't think I need to be blogging on that, I want to get my hands on AS3 now, soon as possible.

For the evening we had the luck the Zorn & Flex teams invited us over to have some dinner. After getting almost totally lost in the empty streets of Anaheim, we reached our destination, and we could have some food. I suggest the team builds a mapping and routing application in Flex next time. The rest of the evening was great, but my personal highlight was Heidi's joke of the century :

"How do you call a Fish with no eyes? FSSSSHHHH!"

....

It actually did take me a second to get that one too, before not bursting into a laugh....from that moment it was downhill with the jokes, to that level it actually became funny again. I said I would blog this, so here you go. Anyway, the teams were really nice to us, and on top of that : delivering brilliant work. To add one more compliment to the conference organizers, and the Macromedians : You were all there, and people really had an opportunity to talk to you. That's great, and I think all attendee's were really happy in being able to talk to you guys & girls. Enough with the sweet talk now. More on all this later. [opens up flexbuilder 2]

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