Max 2006 Flickr Group
Another Max - Over
Max 2006 is over so I guess that means that its time to take a look back over the last couple of days.
One thought that was going through my head this evening was how much this conference confirmed my feelings that web development is getting more exciting and doing anything but standing still. There was so much excitement at this conference around new ideas and directions such as Apollo, Flex and integration of PDF and Flash technologies.
Second, Adobe needs to lighten up a little bit. The 2006 version of Max had a much more corporate feel to it, and it didn’t feel right. There were a few more suits and ties this year that I remember from the past. There were fewer freebies to be had. There were more disclaimers before discussions. Adobe tried to play cool by providing all the pop and candy we wanted, but I don’t think anybody’s love was getting bought. It may sound stupid, but sending everybody out of the conference with an Adobe jacket or other strongly branded item would have helped solidify a little loyalty.
Third, the conference needs to either focus on coders (not my choice) or expand and bring the whole design community together (awesome!). The Max signs all said “The 2006 Adobe Conference” and yet, except for PDF jockeys, the traditional Adobe user would not have found much for them at this conference. Go BIG! Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator should all be covered and celebrated. Do sessions on Premier and After Effects. Become THE creative conference. It would be amazing and certainly the event of the year.
These are some pretty basic ideas and certainly not the most important things I’m taking from this conference – just things on my mind right now. Tomorrow we travel back to the great plains. I’m pretty excited to see my family and begin trying some of the things that I’ve learned here.
Apollo Uses WebKit!
I attended a session today covering the use of HTML and Javascript with Adobe’s upcoming Apollo product. Among many other things, Apollo will allow web applications to be deployed as desktop applications. For this to happen, Apollo must have its own HTML rendering engine. To my great surprise, that chosen HTML renderer is WebKit (the same used in Apple’s Safari). Want to make a web application apollo-ready? Design for Safari. Cool.
Blue Man Group Opens Conference
The Blue Man Group opened this year's MAX conference. Fun to watch, but sure seemed like a commercial for their nightly show here at the venetian. $99 a ticket?! Ha ha ha...
MAX Day One
I’m out in Las Vegas this week with some co-workers attending the Adobe MAX conference. It’s a little different this year as it is the first year since Adobe’s acquisition of Macromedia (whose conference it was before). Here’s what I’ve taken from today:
- Adobe is providing an unlimited amount of PDF kool-aid. I don't think that many have much against the format itself, but most everyone I know and talk with groan when we think about the Acrobat player.
- Flex is where we are going. Flex has really matured over the last two years and its time to take it seriously. ColdFusion developers are in a perfect position to fly with it.
- THE MAC VERSION OF THE FLEX BUILDER IS NOW AVAILABLE AS A BETA!! I have it installed and can't wait to start working with it.
- Apollo will be everywhere. We don't all write applications to run in browsers because we just can't get enough of Firefox, Safari and Opera. Apollo will allow us to liberate our applications from browsers and turn them into desktop applications.
- Flash may be what saves makes PDF bearable. Today's release of the document reader beta from Adobe demonstrates an application that is only a couple of megabytes, yet allows one to select and read PDF files. Its about time that Adobe realize that people don't want to install a 30M file just to read PDFs.
powered by performancing firefox
Link Dump
ColdFusion and MySQL 5.1
I nuked my MacBook last week and this morning reinstalled ColdFusion using these instructions that I found earlier. I also installed the latest MySQL 5.1 which required some extra work detailed here.
technorati tags:coldfusion, mysql
Firefox 2 RC 3 Available
Link Dump
links for 2006-10-13
-
When the big thing on the web now is corporate blogs (and I LOVE them), where are Apple's? I personally find Adobe's, Microsofts and others' blogs the most informative places to learn about what's going on. It seems to me that Apple could say and communic
-
Eudora has long been dead in my opinion. I still see people use it from time to time, but generally by those that are either resistent to change or just stubborn. The email client landscape on the Macintosh isn't anything spectacular, but there are much b
-
This is really an amazing initiative and I'm glad that Gates didn't convince investors that $100 computers were a stupid idea. They may not fly well in the U.S., but internet access is internet access (sort of), however the thought of Wikipedia becoming
links for 2006-10-12
links for 2006-10-11
links for 2006-10-09
-
I don't understand dot com finances. How can anything like this be worth 1.65 Billion dollars? I realize that it is stock, but the fact that Google can spend that much is just ridiculous too. It's like play money.
links for 2006-10-06
-
These drilldown animations done in Adobe Flex are amazing and the source code is available to see how they were done.
-
Ars Techica details a new beta service from Google allows visitors to search through source code.
-
Nice, Free Icons!
-
This is a cool web application that lets you feed it a series of DIV names (for a proposed web page) and it kicks back the HTML shell including the an embedded css style sheet with the requested DIVs.
-
This is a great firefox/flock add-on that I found today. It tells firefox to reload a page's css every second. This allows you to have a page you are currently designing up in a browser window while you are coding in another. Every time you commit changes
Acrobat 8 Webinar
If you haven’t seen a demonstration yet of Acrobat 8 and Acrobat Connect, you can catch one here (done of course with Acrobat Connect - formerly Breeze).
Songbird
Have you seen songbird? It’s an open-source application that looks a lot like iTunes. I’ve always thought it was an iTunes knockoff to give all those poor folks on Linux something to feel included with. This screencast on the songbird site showed me and will show you that while it looks like iTunes it is much different and if you like audio files on the internet, may deserve a place on your computer.
technorati tags:songbird
links for 2006-10-05
-
Everyone's using content mangement systems but is anyone effectively managing their content?
Flash Player Does Full-Screen Video
A newly available flash plugin supports full-screen video. You can download the plugin here, then try out some samples here. It looks great and is very welcome on the Macintosh where full-screen video is hard to come by. Quicktime doesn’t support running embedded movies as full screen. Real does, but few use it anymore and DivX also supports it but again is rarely utilitzed. Prepare to see it everywhere.
technorati tags:flash
Contribute 4
Contribute 4 has been released by Adobe. I was pretty surprised as Macromedia NEVER released a product without announcing them almost a month in advance. I have downloaded it and am using it right now to create this blog posting. That’s a new feature in Contribute 4! Don’t get too excited thoughâ??this is the most painful posting experience I have ever had. So painful in fact that I’m going to stop right here. I’ll use it some more today and write something more informative about it later.
One Blog
On this blog, you will find increasing amounts of ‘religious’ news. I didn’t just find anybody, but have become the webmaster of my congregation’s web site. Since this blog serves as the center of the content I put online, it is unavoidable that content I collect for this relatively new site to arrive here.
Because I am also the webmaster for a public school and this blog is aggregated on a page there, there could be issues. Therefore, I will put everything that is non-religious into a new ‘non-religious’ category. This category has it’s own rss feed and will be the one that I point distrct resources to. Those that prefer the top-level feed will begin seeing much of this new information.
Since this post is a part of that non-religious feed, I have avoided names and links here. You can visit my web site for links to other sites that I’m involved with.
Links... again
I’ve added my links back to my blog. I’ve posted about this a few times and I’m sure that no one cares, but I want my thought process to be here. I have long had my del.icio.us links displayed on my blog, but I have gone back and forth on including them in the blog postings.
It’s easier to say why I think that this is sometimes a bad idea. First, if you have a bad system, as I have had from time to time, you can end up with a lot of empty posts if you aren’t creating del.icio.us links every day. Second, if you aren’t posting but are linking, it still seems to be kind of goofy to have a blog that’s nothing but links (still preferrable to no blog at all in my opinion).
So, why put them in? Most of you reading my blog are reading it via a news aggregator of some sort, meaning that you are never actually visiting my site. So if I find a fantastic site and link to it, even those that are reading my blog every day do not find out about it because its not being included as a post. Also, not including them creates extra work. When I find something on the internet worth noting, I have to decide whether to create a post, a link or both. It is much easier if I just create the link and then let del.icio.us post the link at the end of the day.
So, that’s the story. I’m using del.icio.us to manage my bookmarks. I’m using the blog poster built into del.icio.us to create the postings and every day at 5pm a post will be created with things that I have linked to that day.
Thoughts, ideas? Drop them in the comments…
links for 2006-10-04
-
A social networking newbie? Want to get up to speed? This article will give you the history, the present and show you where it maybe going.
-
Interesting article in Tuesdayâ??s USA Today about how â??Todayâ??s Young â??Digital Nativesâ?? Canâ??t Live, or Study, Without Technology.â? The focus was on Ball State U. in Indiana, the most wired campus in the country. It gives a lot of examples of h
-
Our degenerate neighbors to the south seem to be getting on the ball with Podcasting, although a commenter on the linked page notes that the whole thing is locked behind blackboard which makes me wonder if it is a podcast at all. Audio files without a RSS
-
I've fallen off of the wiki wagon but need to get back on. This is a pretty comprehensive list of wiki applications available.
MacForge
NECC Workshop Submission
Today is the deadline for presentation submissions for the National Educational Computing Conference occuring in Atlanta next summer. I got mine in last night. I proposed a three hour workshop covering the creation of web pages using web standards (xhtml, css, xml, etc.). I’m not real hopeful as it sounds dull and I was tired when I wrote the submission so I may have not sold the idea real well. Sometime in December I’ll learn whether I’m in.