FITC 06: Adobe Keynote Explains Merger Is A Win-Win
Presentation Title
The Adobe Keynote
Speaker(s)
Mike Downey (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/md);
Mike Chambers (http://weblogs.macromedia.com/mesh)
Sho Kuwamoto (http://kuwamoto.org)
Adobe mobile guy
Did I Stay For The Whole Thing?
Yes.
Reason For Attending
I attended this because I didn’t get a chance to attend the Adobe Q and A earlier in the morning.
Highlights
Watched a video of a bunch of people pop’n bottles saying Thank God for the Adobe and Macromedia merger. I was like scratching my head thinking why?
It’s my belief that buying out competition will give less choice to consumers. Furthermore, I am one of millions of content-consuming people who get annoyed when you inadvertently click on a PDF link where the Adobe PDF Reader consumes all my resources and time as it tries to load.
However being the selfish ActionScripter I am, I totally neglected to acknowledge that the merger has great merit for those content producers who use Adobe and Macromedia products on a daily basis.
One sample workflow was getting a chroma key’d video in After Effects into Flash. The green background in the video was replaced with an alpha channel and then it was exported to FLV. In Flash, the FLV is run against the stage which at runtime, the man is seamlessly imported into main movie which acted as a dynamic virtual set. If you have had experienced the hardships of doing things like this in the past, you cannot help but be in awe how easy it was to perform this task.
Future workflows hinted at the Keynote were Photoshop files maintaining their layer hierarchy and properties when imported into Flash. I think once that is ironed out, that would be pretty cool.
Another highlight was the FlashLite2 Mobile demo. Yes, the tools are very nice but they’re useless from a Canadian perspective because data services over cellular networks are not affordable to the masses. From what I understand, the biggest markets for mobile application and game development is in Japan and India because their carriers offer better deals on data.
Sho put on a quick Flex demo putting an dynamic Mp3 player together. The demo had a glitch in compiling the right swf. I was quick to forgive because we all understand it’s beta software. The MXML Mp3 player app was so simple that it’s easy to take for granted how much code is mid-level code (AS3) is abstracted away from the developer. I talked to him earlier in the morning between sessions and he was very friendly and approachable.
There was an Apollo demo but I wasn’t particularly blown away but that’s because it hasn’t hit Alpha. My first impression was that it looks like Flex running inside a 3rd-party Flash projector like ZINC or Northcode.
Constructive Criticisms
Nothing new I hadn’t heard about from mailing list and other sources. The photoshop workflow is very nice.
Would I See This Person Talk Again?
Highly likely as the work these guys do lay the foundation for what other developers and designers will do in the future.
Post Event Action
I would love to sit down and play with After Effects but I can only do so much. Studying the Flex API on the morning and evening train commute has taken precedence. Flash mobile in Canada has been nothing but a disappointment. For now, I’m just gonna put my hands on my hips and wait for this mobile app explosion to happen on Rogers, Bell, and Telus.
FITC 06: See other reviews
