Adobe Max: Day 1 Keynote
POSTED IN Adobe Max, Conferences, News | TAGS : Adobe Max, air for android, Air for TV, Blackberry Playbook, Christy Wyatt, David Nuescheler, Flash 3D, GalaxyTab, Game controller, Google TV, kevin lynch, keynote, lab49, Marc Goldberg, Martha Stewart, Mike Lazaridis, Motorola, Photoshop Mobile October 25, 2010
Currently sitting down in the massive Nokia auditorium for the opening keynote. Some good techno music playing by a DJ using a flash DJ’ing tool, a man on the stage is doing some live-coding on a keyboard with no visible keys and another is painting using a large multitouch screen.
And we’re off; Kevin Lynch (CTO) just came out on stage to talk about technology and processing power of computers and mobile. He’s doing a presentation about the future of mobile and all it’s aspects (battery power, processing power, and wireless bandwidth).
He’s talking about multi-screen development because of the way the technology is trending towards different devices and how Adobe is going to help us do that by offering tools, services and technologies to streamline the process.
He’s now centering his speech around content (websites, publishing, video, enterprise and games). He’s dreamweaver us tools that will help us create content that will scale and shift between all kinds of resolution by switching out CSS layouts (HTML5). This is for the CS5 version and the update is already available to us to use. He’s now showing a demo of how to switch the layout. Seems very easy to do, you just have to mention which css layout you want to have for the different devices, and you can see all the different layouts at the same time to see how your code is changing your work. Very nice.
Furthermore, he’s showing another new feature which is motion. With HTML5, you can have fairly complex animations and dreamweaver is there to help you to do that. It looks a bit like a Flash timeline, but made for HTML5. When you finish the motion, it generates jQuery code that plays in all devices. This will definitely help designers be able to create very visually pleasing websites and experiences without the need of any developer to create the animation code. This will definitely reduce time to market to create websites.
Moving on to digital publishing now. He’s mentioning that every magazine have a different experience and how Adobe is going to help take that experience and put it online. They’re working with Martha Stewart Living magazine to create an interactive experience on tablets. To show this off, Martha Stewart herself is on stage with a tablet and going through her magazine with Kevin. The experience is very, very smooth; she’s showing off a lot of food and if you press on it, it shows the inside of whatever it is. This is making me hungry. It’s also very impressive and immersive. A massive leap for the technology and publishing in general.
Kevin is now showing off Wired’s magazine. He’s showing a lot of different interactivity in the magazine like the videos and such. And now Joe Simon, CTO of Condé Nast which is showing all the different magazines that they own and how they’re taking advantage of fixed layout or adaptive layout for their publishing using Adobe.
Kevin just got out a GalaxyTab and showed off Reader’s Digest magazine and a new technology they’re working on called ‘Arbitrary Shift’. They have an article with lots of text and an image in the middle. Kevin just pressed on the image and moved it around the article, and the text automatically shifted all around the image in some fairly complex shaped. Very cool. It is in beta and will be available soon.
And now Video publishing. They’ve brought up graphs showing that video streaming using Flash is definitely on the uprise. He’s mentioning that just last month, 128 petabytes of video was delivered using Flash Player. Year over year, the use of Flash for video has increased by at least 100%. He goes on to mention that version 10.1 has gotten the fastest adoption rate of all earlier versions.
Kevin just made himself comfortable in a chair and is now showing off Google TV. He’s showing a demo of streaming flash video by showing an episode of Boardwalk Empire in full 1080p. He’s then switched away from Google TV and showing off an Air for TV application called Epix which runs directly on the TV. And with that, Kevin is announcing that they’re releasing Air for TV to manufacturers now and we can start coding right away using Air 2.5 SDK.
Marc Goldberg, CTO of Epix, just came out on stage to show off his application. He’s showing a full HD Star Trek moving on his Droid Pro using Air for Android, but the codebase for this is almost the same as the one of the TV. A neat feature that he was trying to show off (but failed) is that while you watch on your phone, you can pause and continue watching on your TV where you left off on your mobile. Good idea to say the least.
Marc is gone and now Kevin is showing off Air for Android application. He was showing a Photoshop for mobile application. One of the biggest features of Photoshop CS5 is content fill, and they’ve brought this feature on mobile among other things. Very easy and quick way to edit your photos on your mobile if you see fit before sharing it to Facebook or Flickr.
Now enterprise. Kevin brought out David Nuescheler, CEO of Day. He’s showing off a content management system called CQ5 that they’re building with Adobe for enterprise customers. The whole thing was created using HTML5 and CSS; the experience is very nice and intuitive. It also controls all the different layouts and displays them on an emulator for all your favorite mobile devices. One of the better CMS that I’ve ever seen that’s for sure, but I’m sure this will be costing a fair bit. No mention on pricing.
While Kevin was showing off a very nice medical application on a Blackberry Playbook, he mentioned that it was built using Flex 4.5, which is now available today in Beta format. The application was fairly impressive and responsive. And now to show off the Playbook, Mike Lazaridis, Co-CEO of RIM, is out on stage.
I have to say, the experience in the Playbook is very smooth and very similar to the Palm OS. Mike is mentioning that Air is integrated into the Playbook OS. He’s showing off apps left and right made with Air, and showing a video rendering in Air and then brings up the Playbook “cards” and the video is still playing at the same time. Very cool. He’s now going on YouTube straight up and has Flash Player 10.1 built it from the get-go. The video is very smooth. Mike has just announced that they just released the Playbook SDK for Air so that we can take advantage to Playbook specific hardware. I have to say, I’m impressed with RIM.
Mike’s gone and now it’s time go delve into gaming. Kevin is showing a game that’s coming out soon with the Green Hornet movie. It’s using the same code for web and mobile. If it’s on a desktop, you use your keyboard to play, but if on your mobile the controls are overlaid on your screen. He also showed a space shooting game that’s played on mobile and he was showing off the responsiveness. One neat little feature is that the space game took the accelerometer to play and at one point mentioned to turn your phone and the spacecraft would turn in the game. Very nice.
“The future of gaming” says Kevin, and I’d have to agree. Game controller support is coming to Flash Player. He just showed off a meteor game where he was playing with the keyboard, but right in the middle of it just switched to an Xbox controller and continued playing. After this, he brings up a racing game where you see a car rendered in 3D and Kevin asks the audience how much CPU do we think it takes. He shows the task manager to show 0%. This is all rendered directly on the GPU, fully accelerated 3D, on all devices. He then shows off him driving using a Logitech driving wheel and having a smooth 3D rendered game on the web. Wow. Huge game changer.
Christy Wyatt from Motorola just came on the stage to say that they’ve been working with Adobe for a long time to get Flash Player on Mobile. She also just announced that we all get a free Droid 2. Sweet!
That’s all for the keynote. Will be blogging some more of the other events/sessions.
1 COMMENT
I was pretty impressed with RIM as well. I was curious about the what environment RIM was using on their device and I’m pretty surprised with their commitment to the AIR platform. I think this is going to be great exposure for the platform as well as create new opportunities for flex developers. I did stop by the RIM booth to talk to their team about development and it is very easy to get started. All you need is the SDK and a PlayBook Virtual Machine (which they had running in vmware player) and you are ready to go. It compiles straight from Flash Builder and is installed on the device for testing. I didn’t go into detail about breakpoints/debugging but I believe that functionality exists as well.
I was really excited about the gaming portion. About a week ago Alternativa Platform changed their pricing model from $1000 and up (depending on project) to making their 3D engine free. I’ve been impressed with their engine for a while but the closed model around using their solution kept me away. In the keynote we watched their driving application using their unreleased version 8 running with molehill (codename for new flash 3D) keeping processing on the CPU at 0-1% by using hardware acceleration and the GPU. I got the chance to talk to their CTO in the community area and they seem to be on great path with their solution as well as their development of backend gaming server.