Fraser Crosbie – Calgary Flash & Flex Developer

I just got back to Calgary from Max this morning. This was my first Max and I really enjoyed it. The “marriage” of Adobe and Macromedia seems to have produced some good looking children. Macromedia’s applications now have an Adobe feel to them and even Photoshop is sporting some new menu looks.

Copy and paste between Adobe’s programs is great. There was an example of copying a Photoshop image into Dreamweaver. Dreamweaver opens up an optimize for web window in which you can specify the compresion and file path for the pasted image. Dreamweaver then creates the href tag to the saved location. PSDs can be imported into Flash preserving the folders and layers. Flash gives the user an option to save layers as movieclips and also allows for maintaining the edibility of text fields. Blend modes also convert to Flash’s native format, so more adjustments can be made. The transition of files from design to development is about to get much easier. Fireworks is also very impressive. It is now a great way for designers to layout Flex applications using component “templates” that are incuded right in the software. These templates support 9 scale just like the Flex components do. The designer can build a slideshow of the application using invisible buttons that target selected slides. This slideshow can be output into HTML and sent to a client for review. After the application is design is signed off, Fireworks exports is in MXML. This is going to save so much time for developers. Now, the work only has to be done once. That seems to be the main goal of this whole Adobe and Macromedia merger. Make more money by making the software everyone already uses work together seamlessly. I will soon be able to get right into coding without wasting a bunch of time mimicking flats. I’m stoked!

I attended all of the Apollo talks and am very excited about about it. I always wanted to learn a desktop application development language so that I had the knowledge to build offline apps. Now I dont have to waste the time learning a new language when I can just use my existing knowledge in ActionScript, XML, CSS, HTML and JavaScript to build cross platform software. Apollo installs into the users system just like any other application would. In windows it provides the user with icons in the taskbar, start menu, add remove programs window and an icon on the desktop. The same deal with Mac. Linux will be supported in the near future as well. You can use system chrome or completly customize the look. The Flash Player now supports an HTML renderer. This render is the same one that Safari uses. You can modify the bitmap data that the render produces just like it was a movieclip. You can scale it, rotate it, blur it, etc. and it still refreshes in this state. Now the sky is the limit! More info can be found on MXNA in the Apollo smart category and at www.adobe.com/go/apollo. There are some images of Apollo on Flickr.

There was some good entertainment at Max including the Blue Man Group, Ben Forta in a Scorpion costume, a couple of great pool side parties at the Venetian and The Palms, and some clubbing at Rain nightclub. I had never been to a Vegas nightclub before and it really put anything we have in Calgary to shame. The dance floor was surrounded by a moat of fog and had flame throwers mounted above it. The couches where made of water beds. Private rooms surrounded the higher levels of the club. I do think Adobe should have brought down some of the Playboy Playmates to help even out the male to female ratio on the dance-floor.

All in all, I had an excellent time. Las Vegas was a great place to hold the Max convention and I will definitely go again.