UnitZeroOne

Well since I’ve come back from the MAX conference I haven’t had time to update my blog. Coming back from Anaheim there was alot of work waiting for me at the office. Still I promised a full report on MAX 2005, so this is the final chapter. Agreed, a bit late, but a promise is a promise.

Furthermore I wanted to keep you up to date on the video of Gary’s Sessions. It’s really coming, as soon as I get a small->small firewire cable. I had a look back on the material; the quality isn’t the best, but I’ll try and edit it into something decent.

Furthermore, I lost my Ipod (it broke just before) somewhere along the journey back….so…maybe time for a paypal button? Getting me a piece of cardboard, saying : “Will post sources for Ipod Video 60
GB” (I did some work on the 8.5 fluid dynamics demo code yesterday. It lacks some in structure, but for the rest it’s basically turned back into the Processing demo it was, with some flash code in there to make it work.

Anyway, first things first, so here’s the final max update.

Tuesday started out with trying to plan the day, and damn, that was hard, seeing alot of the sessions I would like to see simultaniously. Offcourse I could have avoided this by keeping to the schedule I had planned, but hearing more in depth what some of the sessions where about I swapped some off the sessions. In the end my focus of the day became the Flex sessions. Yes, I’m a Flash coder, and yes, I would like to keep on doing that. Doesn’t mean I can’t see myself doing Flash Code in advanced Flex projects. I’ve been very interrested in finding out standards for doing code in Flex. The Iteration 2 (I mean, Macromedia) guys got started on this a bit already Monday morning, but how will all this relate to Flex 2 ?
The days that I’ve been back here in the Netherlands I found myself playing around with both Flex as AS3 only projects. I really see alot of potential in Flex 2 in serving purpose for our clients RIA’s, which have been mainly Flash. I did a 9 month long project for one our client, and I think I could have saved myself alot of pain with Flex 2 (or Flex 1, for that matter). I’d like to see some good training on this subject, though.
I thought about going to see the 180 minutes Building You First Flex Application with Zorn session, but didn’t. Afterwards several people told me this was actually a great session. Foolish me.

I don’t recollect details on all the sessions, so I’ll just take you through the things I do remember of that day.

The General session was kind of theatrical this day. Good for some amusement, but maybe it’s a more “American thing”, generally I just like the info, and don’t really need the entertainment. (Although I must say, Eric Natzke’s session have been hugely entertaining in the past). The theme for “the show” was taken from one of the XD demo’s for Studio 8 : “Meet your Match”. For a minute I went all nerdy there and took a picture of the “secretary girl” on stage. Through this plot all speakers where presented, and it was somewhat amusing. Some heavy stabs to Microsoft in this session. In the Netherlands it has been forbidden by law for a long time to make take out at your competition in any promotional activitity, so I’m not used to this. My question would be if this is necessary? Do we flash developers need to be afraid? Is MM afraid ? Well, personally I don’t think the stabs where that necessary, although one of them was kind of funny. (”Anything with the word Sparkle in there can’t be really that expressive”, during the Adobe After Effects demo/sneak). Think the attending Microsoft people became kind of small during this presentation. Did they blow their covers because of this ?
Anyway to give some feedback on this : I would like to see more actual content, and less “show” next year.

To add a word on the whole Sparkle thing (like there haven’t been enough words on it). At the moment the Flash Player is the leading plugin to add this kind of interactivity to the user experience. There is a large group of people from different skills who know this technology extensively. There is a HUGE group of end users who have this technology installed and are able to view it. I’m not going to sum up all the plusses and minusses on the both techniques or comparing how much they are, or aren’t alike. I just don’t think there is any need to be “afraid” of this technology. I do think that during MAX there were too many words spent on this discussion. Yes, I’ll be watching this technology, like alot of us, but they are simply not there yet. I’ll just focus on the Flash Platform right now, and leave all speculations on Sparkle and M$ intentions with it for what they are. ‘nough said :-).

During this day I also made my Certification for Flash. I never found this necessary, but since I was there anyway, decided on doing it, going for the speed record, since I had a meeting half an hour later. At least one question in there got me by surprise; it was something about duplicateMovieClip(), which I haven’t used for about more then a year right now. If they would’ve supplied the interface for open answers, mine would be : “Don’t use it”. By the looks of AS3, I’m not the only one (MovieClip.clone() anyone?). Made it. (as did Martijn, in about the same timespan and with the best score of the day..congrats Martijn!). Even worse was our friend Michael van Leest, he won the best score twice (no, not the same).

One of the nicest things about MAX has been being able to meet all the MM people developing the tools which allow me to make money. After the Certification, I ran out to Hall A, because I was supposed to have a meeting with Paul Betlem. Paul is the senior director of Flash Player engineering, and had sent an email out to a group of developers, seeing if they would meet and talk about 8 and future products during MAX. Of course this is a great opportunity to ventilate your personal oppinion and get some direct feedback on it, so I was happy to be meeting with him. We had a half an hour chat about everything 8 and 8.5, and I got the chance to put some of my ideas in there. Before this turns in one big narcistic/ego post, I would like to explain my point one telling you this. The Senior Director of Flash Player engineering came out to meet me; just one of the developers out there. From a PR stance this is great, but the points a gave where actually taken seriously and I could give some serious input on what the next generation of our software should look like. Great. I like this road MM is going on (and yes, I realize they don’t have the time to talk to everyone all the time), and would also like to thank Paul again for his time.

The Sneak Peeks session was a highlight of the day. I missed some of it, but I came in during the Dreamweaver/AJAX session. It wasn’t aware of this path taken with Dreamweaver, and at first I went like : “why?”. The realtime coding demo on this was pretty solid. I don’t know how much of this is public, but I sure would like to play around with these features. The contribute sneak was pretty cool too. I wasn’t that familiar with this tool before, and don’t know if I will do this much with it, but it could be certainly handy for some people.

Next up was “Birds of a Feather” where we went to the Meet the Zorn team. The room was the most packed of all of them, maybe this was because of the drinks bar? Or was it because of the major buzz around this tool? Anyway, everyone there had a chance to meet the MM Zorn Team members, and have a nice informal chat with them.

The conference party was the same evening, held in a “suburb of Disneyland”. I’m not going to say more on it, let’s just say I wasn’t up in time for the first session the Next morning, which was incidentally Waldo’s session on Flex/Flash Intergration. Luckily he took the time and put the presentation and source files online here!

Wednesday had one highlight I have to mention; Christophe Coenraets session : “Next Generation Flex:Data Services” Wow. This was really one of the best sessions; Christophe showed us hands-on demo’s of Flex Enterprise services, sockets, etc. I am getting more info on all this for sure. It also gave me a good view on the added value of Flex Enterprise services, although there wasn’t a word on pricing yet.

I missed out on some of the sessions I wanted to see during this conference, but man, I came back with alot of info, and enthousiasm about the upcoming products. Things I have a special new/renewed liking in after MAX : Flex, Flashlite, AS3 (duhhh…). I’ll be focussing on these topics the coming time. Just doing day and night currently, wish I could just drop the day job, and go all in on these things. Well, not for me yet, but I’ll take every hour I got to spend on it and do it. Results to be posted on this blog. Let’s see where we are all at, at next years MAX conference.

So anyway, it’s the last post on this, but expect the video to be up soon.