Adobe MAX 2011 was one of the most amazing events yet, certainly a personal favourite of mine and very well received by the over 5000 attendees.  This year we changed the event “pitch” considerably, from what was a standard product launch and partner expose, to a more focused and customer solution focused vision.

Nowhere was this more clear than in our keynote sessions across the first two days.  I noticed on Twitter that many of you were confused about the change from the norm, “Why is Flash not mentioned every 10 seconds” etc.  There are good reasons, let’s distill the event a little.

Everyone at the event, and to some extent at home, saw one of the most incredible performances on stage on day one.  Arriving at the venue we were all presented with a concrete backdrop, no Adobe or MAX logos – nothing.  We began the show with a Violinist on stage, followed by two amazing dancers who evolved into the backdrop to become part of a stunning display of digital art, animation, lighting and music.  During their performance the stage deconstructed, much to the surprise of everyone, while the dancers appeared to reconnect with one another and ultimately the audience.

A couple of MAX attendees recorded this video of the keynote, “I knew that wall was fake!”.  Of course the wall was a total of five 300 feet tall screens that wrapped around the entire theater, the projectors pushing 300 million pixels per second, that’s why it looked so real. The eagle-eyed among you will note that the spotlights on the walls, and therefore the dancers shadows, were not real either.

So in short, if you feel that you were short-changed because we didn’t talk about Flex or Flash enough, then it’s quite likely that you didn’t realize that Fonts, Digital Publishing, Analytics and Measurement and Web standards are also key to the success of our customers and therefore Adobe.

I hope that goes some way to explaining things.

You can catch the full keynote here.

This year I’ll be missing Adobe MAX in person, heading to Ireland tomorrow for a family wedding, so it has been an interesting experience to watch from afar.  I guess the most obvious thing to point out is that “I can” – that is, watch it from afar.

The keynote this year is being approached differently, it’s all about solutions.  You’ll notice that ‘devices’ don’t have a predictable section of their own, instead they are presented together across a set of five innovation vectors, Web Development, Video, Digital Publishing, Enterprise Applications, and Gaming.  The dynamic has shifted from technologies to solutions, as presented by Kevin Lynch and guests Martha Stewart, Mark Goldberg of EPIX, Joe Simon of Condé Nast, Mike Lazaridis of RIM and David Nuescheler of Day Software (soon to be an Adobe company).

The conference this year is powered by Akamai and distributed using Flash Player to desktop computers, mobile phones and tablets and all major browsers.  In addition, this years MAX is also streamed using Peer-2-Peer technology, found in Flash Player 10.1 – which is now available on 74% of desktop computers and just 3 months after launch.

These changes sum up our ongoing strategy to enable the creation of applications that are fit for purpose, expressive and multi-screen.  As part of this we re-organized our teams at Adobe, folding the Flash Platform business unit into the Creative Suite Business Unit.  Together our new group is called CIBU – Creative & Interactive Solutions.

Web Development

Earlier in the year at Google IO we showed a new HTML5 extension for Dreamweaver CS5, created to enable the production of web properties across screens.  Within this new HTML5 pack we have added support for CSS3 and media-queries that allow your web pages to be easily transposed to different screen sizes.  Simply run the Adobe Updater to get started.

Kevin also showed a new prototype, codename “Edge” that is effectively Flash Catalyst for HTML and uses the popular JQuery JavaScript library.  Using Edge you will be able to create HTML5 applications and sites with animations and media, drastically shortening the development time for web properties, widgets, and not to forget, great prototypes that run across screens.  I can’t wait to start creating AIR applications and mobile websites with Edge, it’s going to be huge.

Finally, with our recent acquisition of Omniture we also showed NetAverages, an amazing product that forms part of the suite of applications including analytics, optimizations, conversion and acquisition tools.  With NetAverages you can now gain access to a wealth of data around HTML5 support, devices, platforms and various technologies – all of which is presented in a stunning Flex interface.  Statistic are gleaned anonymously from a large range of the worlds most popular websites.

Digital Publishing

This year we’ve seen the introduction of the Tablet form factor, which is a great leap forward for the publishing industry – enabling a new distribution and monetization model for the publishing industry.  As part of this great work we’re going to ramp up our contributions to webkit, delivering improvement in layout control – including precision text wrapping around shape/images and enhancements for dynamic rendering of content for different form factors.

Today, almost all major publishing houses use Adobe InDesign to create their print pieces and deliver these to consumers at news stands.  So it makes a lot of sense for this workflow to be enhanced to encompass the packaging and delivery of Digital Publications.  We’re calling this solution the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, a set of tools, deployment and SiteCatalyst reporting services that make it incredibly easy to target these new devices in a sustainable way.

Publishers create “stacks”, which are essentially articles/pages/ads in InDesign CS5 in portrait/landscape/both and publish these individually.  Each stack can include interactive elements, buttons, links, scrollable frames and slideshows to enable rich experiences and drive innovation in their digital pieces.  In addition, you can also use the Interactive Overlay Creator to produce 360° views, panoramas, image pans, audio, video, and web views.  Web view is very similar to StageWebView, described in my previous blog posts

Video and audio are added very easily and use the H.264 format in addition to standard mp3 formats.  You can integrate audio as part of the experience, maybe clicking sounds or swoosh effects – although I hope you can be more imaginative!  Each interactive element has associated parameters to enable you to control the interaction for the user, such as looped slideshows, handling swipe events, fading, hightlights, transition timing and delays.

Finally, you can use the Adobe Digital Content Bundler to take the stacks and create an issue of your publication by simply adding each of the publication content folders and stacks.  Publications can then be viewed in a generic viewer application and later deployed in a custom viewer for each publication.

From a publishers perspective, managing the technologies, deployments and interactions is pivotal to success in this new multi-screen world.  With the Digital Publishing Suite, content creators can spend more time driving their content and brand – instead of worrying about the ever increasing costs of reaching their users across devices.

Enterprise Applications

For the Enterprise we are now focused on “Customer Experience Management”, a new set of solutions that are targeted directly to enhancing the productivity and experiences for our largest customers.

At MAX we announced the availability of Flex 4.5 “Hero”, the latest version of Flex that has been highly optimized to enable the creation of mobile applications for Android, Blackberry and of course desktop computers.  This new framework includes additional mobile components and skins to speed up the production of multi-screen apps and deliver new experiences on devices.

Flash Builder Burrito / Flash Catalyst Panini

Attendees received a DVD with a new version of Flash Builder, with some amazing new features for creating mobile applications.  These include device debugging for Android (inc. USB support), integrated Android SDK tools and simulation for a host of supported devices.  Flash Builder Burrito ships with Flex 4.5 embedded and you can download the trial here.  Among the many new features are improved coding features, performance improvements and much improved support for working with Flash Catalyst Panini.

The Catalyst team have also been hard at work improving the workflows for designers and developers using Flex.  With “Panini”, the team have focused on delivering the first steps towards full round tripping between Photoshop and Illustrator and Burrito.  The results are looking great, enabling resizable applications and components, custom skins, code generation improvements and improvements for animation control and styles.  You can download the trial of Panini here.

Day Software

Earlier this year we announced that we are to acquire Day Software, a Swiss company with offices in Boston.  Day are a global leader in content management with customers like Audi, Nissan, Volkswagen, MTV, Virgin Media and McDonalds.  David Nuescheler was on hand to show CQ5, an amazing solution for managing content in multiple languages and for multiple screens.  Customers can simply drag and drop assets and pages, type content directly into the pages and leverage approval and localization workflows directly from the tooling.  I can’t wait to see more of our new EMEA team

Video

Flash is now enabling the playback of 120 Billion megabytes of video every month, an astounding number that presents huge challenges for the Flash Player team.  Today Flash supports numerous formats, resolutions and audio codecs being mixed together and delivered using DRM, encrypted streams, the open RTMP and it’s variants.  In the latest player we also support playback over HTTP and RTMFP for P2P distribution of large events, thus driving the industry forward.

So what’s so big about video on a TV?  – Well, what we actually showed is DRM protected and encrypted video running across the internet in HD format to a television.  We’ve all sat at home watching video on our computers with 30″+ televisions in front of us, it’s just annoying.  Today we showed that EPIX can leverage the Omniture analytics suite and industry approved Token based DRM (Flash Access) to present high-value content from the studios directly into the home.  This signifies an industry change, for the first time you can deliver video across screens, whilst protecting it, measuring it, and enabling users to gain access to a full web of video currently missing from the living room.

At MAX we announced two things, Flash and AIR for TV and a new way to display video – StageVideo.  StageVideo enables the use of hardware decoders, much like VLC does today, and this results in huge improvements in the CPU usage – but with limitations.

The API enables video to playback on a graphics plane, delivered straight to hardware, as opposed to being pipelined back into the Flash Player.  Because of this, videos rendered with this API cannot support transparency and objects will not render behind the video.  Flash content, such as overlays for video controls are rendered on top of the video in a separate graphics plane.  In fact, on TV this will be the defacto rendering method and all video objects will render this way.

Moving forward, all devices using the Flash runtime will have access to this new API set.  The Blackberry Playbook is the first tablet to implement this support to deliver an incredible video experience on their hardware, demonstrated for the first time at Adobe MAX.

AIR applications can now be built for TV using AIR2.5, the applications runtime deployed for Android and desktop platforms.  These applications are typically video based, although we do see some great opportunities for gaming and social connectivity moving forward.

Flash Player and AIR on TV are supported on Samsung TVs and Blueray Players, Google TV and BBC Youview hardware.

Gaming

The most exciting piece from the keynote today was probably the advancements in gaming and 3D support planned for an upcoming Flash Player release.  On the top of the tick list is game controller support, the ability to simply plugin your USB joypad or steering wheel and start playing games!  I’m so excited about it

Needless to say, gaming on the web is set for a omplete overhaul, with 3D capabilities that use leverage GPU hardware and rendering millions of triangles per second.  What’s more incredible is that the demo below uses 0% CPU, and if our current stats hold true, we can get this out to 3/4 of the online world in three months after launch.

Check it out…

We receive literally millions of requests at our Adobe.com pages from iPhone OS users looking for a Flash Player download.

Given our support from the top 19/20 OEMs across multiple device platforms we thought it prudent to provide “more info” to those poor iPhone users that got stuck with a limited browsing experience.

Hope you like it

So you heard it right, we have brought the Flash Platform to the iPhone OS for applications.  In fact some of the applications are already on the Apple AppStore for you to download

We thought it was fun to put them up in secret and working with a very very small set of developers, and our engineering teams I think we’ve really proven that Flash can run effectively on the iPhone without changes.

The applications are:

• Just Letters
• Finger Paint
• Red Hood
• Chroma Circuit
• FickleBlox
• That Roach Game
• Trading Stuff
• South Park Avatar Creator

Enabling the Flash Platform to run on the iPhone has been a really tough task, and one that results in some limitations.  Though you have told us that this is a top priority for your mobile projects, and so we’ve worked for over a year to build this solution.

For developers the new tooling will be made available with the Flash Professional tool, which will also be in pre-release later this year. So today you can begin your work on mobile devices targeting Flash Player 10, or Adobe AIR 2.0 Apis in time.

One caveat of this Ahead of Time compilation method is that we can only use AS3 code.  AOT compilation means that we have no interpreter on the device, as per Apple’s restriction.  Without the interpreter you won’t be able to load SWFs unless they were packaged with your application, boo Apple

This new tool set and a subset of apis from Adobe AIR will have all manner of features enabled, along with the hardware acceleration, battery, memory and rendering performance increases that we have worked on in Flash Player 10.1.

Some typical iPhone features that are not supported are:
• Photo selection from file system
• Contact selection from the address book
• Camera
• Cut/copy/paste
• Accessory support
• In app purchase support
• Peer to peer
• Maps
• iPod library access
• Compass
• Push notifications
• Audio recording
• Video recording
• Parental controls

Of course because of the huge amount of work involved, and lack of public API access from Apple we have to drop a few Flash features too.

• Embedded HTML content
• RTMPE (this was our call)
• H.264 Video (you can use URLRequest)
• Dynamically loading SWFs (containing AS3 code)
• PixelBender

So what about Flex?  Well here at Adobe MAX we’ll have a session specifically around Adobe Flex Mobile Framework, codename “Slider”.  We expect that in time we’ll enable this version of the framework to run effectively on the iPhone.  You’ll be using the same tools, Apis and core framework elements.

Although there would be nothing technically stopping you from using Flex, you would suffer huge performance penalties, and have to re-write the components for mobile and device interactions.

Go and get started then today!

Some key announcements around our work with Qualcomm and NVIDIA with Flash Player 10.1, the version number for our new desktop and mobile runtime.  Some would argue (and I’m sure some did) that if .1 means only incremental changes then we should have called it Flash 11!  The work that has gone into this runtime, we have doubled the number of supported platforms including Symbian, Android, Palm, Windows Mobile, Linux, Windows and Mac OS.

It’s a huge investment made possible by the incredible talent that is Adobe’s Flash Engineering team.  Let’s see the Silverlight team rock something like that out!

One of the biggest challenges has been performance for constrained devices.  GPU acceleration and optimizations by ARM, Intel and our OEM partners have enabled us to create a better player, one that uses less RAM, less battery and renders faster on constrained devices.

Don’t you just love the Open Screen Project??

• Qualcomm SnapDragon
• NVIDIA Tegra/GeForce/ION

A big round of applause for our engineering teams!

• Youtube
• Google Maps
• Site Search
• Web Search
• Chrome / OS

So you see Flash is everywhere at Google and we’ve been working together for years to build upon this relationship.  Google joining the Open Screen Project may seem like a matter of course given our demo’s last year and given their investments in the Flash Platform.

In the past few months we’ve seen stellar device launches from HTC and Motorola using Android.  Those of you with beady eyes will also have spotted others from Sony Ericsson and “others” coming down the pipe soon.

I want ALL of them, but might stick to the Hero for now.

Oh, in case they’re watching.  Dear HTC, please fix the SSL certificates for Exchange email eh?

Google Team, welcome to the Open Screen Project

Over the past few years we have seen RIM devices expand out of the business user category to become a consumer platform.  Many of my friends now use the Curve for Facebook, messaging and surfing the web and they really love their phones.

That’s my guage on success:

1. Do my friends own them?
2. Does my mum know what a Blackberry is?

For developers the Blackberry platform currently provides a Java API and framework for easy application development.  There’s no arguing that the Java runtime has enabled some great applications, and as the App World expands we’ve seen some nice content start to come in.

Our OEM engagements seem much more rounded with RIM joining, a more complete story if you will.

]]> http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/10/05/rim-and-the-open-screen-project/feed/ 2 http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/10/02/max-2009-david-blaine-joins-my-session-with-bill-perry/ http://www.flashmobileblog.com/2009/10/02/max-2009-david-blaine-joins-my-session-with-bill-perry/#comments Fri, 02 Oct 2009 00:54:22 +0000 Mark Doherty http://www.flashmobileblog.com/?p=638

I tried and tried to get Britney following from last years Karaoke mobile application, alas Nokia have beat me to it with the Magical Legend David Blaine!

This week I have spent time in our offices in San Francisco getting caught up on our huge amount of announcements and activities around Adobe MAX.  At MAX this year in LA we’ll be showcasing our progress on Flash Player for mobile and devices.  I love surprises, and in fact I have purposefully avoided seeing some of the demos and devices, there’s nothing worse than someone saying “wait this next bit is huuuge!!!”.

Though some surprises coming out of the event I can’t ignore, and those of you that have worked with me in the past couple of weeks will be rattling in your chairs with anticipation!  You know who you are ;-0

Of course we have a multitude of sessions related to the MAX announcements regarding the Flash Platform doubling it’s platform support.  Here are those sessions that I consider to be highlights of the show, or if I were going to MAX!

• Flash Lite: Developing and Distributing Mobile Applications
• Building Mobile Applications with Flash Professional (Updated)
• From Big Screen to Browser, Desktop, and Mobile Device with Adobe Flash CS4
• Multi-touch and the Flash Platform
• Bootcamp: Multiscreen Streaming Video
• Preview: Flex for Mobile Devices
• Designing and Developing for the Multiscreen Web
• Tackling Memory and Performance in Flash, Flex, and Adobe AIR
• Designing Applications for Desktops and Mobile Devices (Updated)
• Open Screen Project: What It Is and Why You Should Care (Updated)
• Design Considerations for Contextually Aware Solutions
• Bootcamp: Multiscreen Development
• Adobe Wave: Increasing the Use of your Websites and Applications
• Mobile Application Development with Nokia Web Runtime
• Building World-Class Multimedia Applications on Nokia Devices
• Open Screen Project Fund: Fueling the Future of Flash Experiences
• Mobile Application Development with Nokia Web Runtime

If you’re not coming then I suggest you hook yourself up with the MAX Companion, a Twitter application from the XD team here at Adobe.  If you use an alternative client for Twitter then follow me @markadoherty and I’ll try to keep up as best I can.

So last year we coined the term “multi-screen”, it was used to describe applications that ran on desktop-mobile-TV and the web.  What we learnt is that this is confusing, and for some it alluded to write-once run anywhere.  Over the past months we’ve started to fine tune this idea and build a picture of how applications are experienced, and therefore designed to run on different platforms.  It turns out that screen resolution or by platform design isn’t enough because users have different intentions for each, so “Contextual apps” describes a model where the user, the platform and their location, time etc all play a part in the development of a product.

Context isn’t just about Flash, after all most Flash experiences are within the browser which is a context.  Above you can see the varying interfaces and interaction models used by the New York Times company across platforms, everything from the desktop to mobile, paper to wap and passive to interactive contexts.  Each of these applications is built using the same back-end services and content, but with varying business models.  It’s important to recognize when Advertising is a better business model than subscription, after all, payments are contextual too.

Fanbase is an example that you are probably all familiar with by now from Atlantic Records and AgencyNet.  The desktop application is a fully fledged experience including notifications, chat, audio, video and pictures.  Yet in the mobile and TV versions some of these features were removed because they aren’t relevant for those contexts.  In the Digital Home you are probably more interested in listening to music and watching video, it’s about understanding the passive nature of the big screen.  In fact Fanbase on the desktop also has a button to change the interface into a widgetized view, reflecting the use case where a user wants to work/browse whilst connecting with their favourite artist and fans.

Even the installation is contextual, reflecting not only the application served for installation, but the HTML page used to reach to that consumer.

Here’s a sneak from our Open Screen Project Funded apps from unknown vector. uvlayer is an application that allows a user to manage their favourite content in the cloud.  As a user you can store your photos, favourite videos on youtube and share your content across social media sites.  The mobile version takes the context of the hardware into account, you see mobile phones are about reactive browsing and messaging.  Increasingly however they are about taking photos and videos and using Nokia’s Platform Services this application is capable of uploading images and videos taken on your mobile phone.

Using Flash 10, AIR and Flash Lite 3.1 the team at uvlayer have successfully implemented an incredibly rich experience that runs across platforms, whilst really holding to the context of the application and the user.

You can see some new videos from the Open Screen Project funded contextual applications over at the new Youtube channel.

As always feel free to drop any questions in the comments box..