Vivisecting Media

Adobe Max: General Session and notes…

(posted on day 2 due to lack of connection)

I am at Adobe MAX 2007 being held in Chicago and it was kicked off with the General Session hosted by Kevin Lynch. As with previous MAX’s the general session is part sneak peek and part highlights of the new technologies/applications that Adobe and their customers are creating.

I am not going to focus too much on the general session, but more post notes about the sessions that I am attending. I do want to mention a few things I learned at the general session but for now I be posting information I gleam from the sessions…

One of the cooler things I did see at the general session was a peek at the new Flash Player version 10, aka “Astro”. Two features they are focusing on are text managment/manipulation and effects. The new text features have much more granular control of text objects and full support for right to left languages. This is a huge update because one of the hardest things to work with in the Flash Player is textual content. In some of the projects I have worked on the solution was often to not let Flash handle the text and move the control back to the browser for displaying complex layout.

The other great thing about Astro is that they are rolling out a new language to allow custom filters and effects that can be applied to the Flash content. These filters are similar to the existing filters such as blur, drop shadow, etc. The language used is the same that drives AfterEffects effects and this will allow for much more high performance effects that are small and lightweight.

Internet stability has been spotty so I will try and post as I get steady connections. There may be multiple posts at a time depending on when and where my connections actually talk with the network.