Adobe MAX 2007: Day 2

October 2nd, 2007 by Anil | Posted in Adobe, Developer && Designer |

Hello again from MAX!

Well this morning is going well so far. It is about 9:45 right now. I am posting while attending a course on ColdFusion 8.

Today we had a great keynote and sneak peeks session.

Today’s keynote showcased new tools being developed by Adobe. The strongest I felt out of the bunch being Thermo. Thermo is to Flex Designer as Photoshop is to Photographer, that is how I look at it. Thermo allows a designer to create comps for a RIA, and easily port those graphics to Flex. I emphasize “easily” because it truly was that easy. They showed a comp where they simply selected graphics, ran it through a simple conversion tool within Thermo, and created ActionScript. For example, in the comp was a rectangle that was intended to be a search field. They selected it and converted it to a text input field. And that’s it. Thermo looks at the selected item, and created a text input field, written in ActionScript using the selected graphics to skin the text input. It took all but a few seconds. It was really amazing to watch.

I didn’t stay for the entire sneak peaks session, but the one that drew some interest for me was “Flash Home”, or that’s what I remember it being called. It was a new technology that allows people to skin the UI on their cell phone the way they want and the ability to use an ActionScript API to interact with the phone, i.e. going through through your contacts, changing/animating your home screen, adding custom functionality, etc…

I need to go over my schedule and I’ll post some highlights from the sessions I attended as well. Stay tuned…